OVER FIFTEEN MILLION Russians and German soldiers perished on the Eastern Front because of Adolf Hitler’s insistence on attacking the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin’s naiveté about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and his own initial paralysis in June and July of 1941. Without Hitler’s manic commitment to go eastward, perhaps even diehard Nazi generals would not have been able to convince their colleagues of the wisdom of Operation Barbarossa. And without Stalin’s well-known paranoia, the Soviet General Staff might have believed credible reports of Nazi deployments near the borders of Russia all through the spring of 1941 and made the necessary defensive adjustments.
A single supreme mind in war, whether good or evil, can lead to millions of deaths incurred or avoided, in a way unrivaled by scores of subordinate generals and admirals. Italy and Great Britain were roughly similar in population in 1940. But had a Winston Churchill led Italy and a Benito Mussolini Great Britain, the wartime fates of both countries might have been quite different. The decisions of Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier not to confront Hitler over the Anschluss or Czechoslovakia made more likely a European war in 1939 that would eventually lead to the deaths of sixty million over the next six years.
President Harry Truman’s determination to use the atomic bomb probably precluded the need for a far more costly invasion of Japan, and by abruptly ending the Pacific war limited somewhat Stalin’s ambitions in postwar Asia. Mussolini himself was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Italians, Ethiopians, and Libyans in his fantasy attempts to create a new Roman Empire in North Africa with entirely inadequate forces. It is hard to imagine either Italian royalty or the General Staff deploying and supplying almost a million Italian soldiers in the Balkans and North Africa in 1940–1941.
Before the twentieth century, the great captains like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Frederick the Great, or Napoleon doubled as heads of state and senior commanders in the field. But with greater complexity in military affairs after the nineteenth century, even in dictatorial societies like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, rarely did supreme military commanders, albeit sporting gold-braided hats and chests of medals, lead their troops into battle. Technological progress, especially the phone, telegraph, and radio, made it unnecessary that Hitler, in the leadership style of Frederick the Great on a horse, would invade Poland atop a Panzerkampfwagen Mark II scanning the front. Nor would Mussolini, who otherwise liked to ride horses, like a modern-day Caesar trot through the snows of Albania. A head of state wearing a uniform in World War II did not translate into leading from the front, or knowing much of anything about tactics and strategy—or even earning all the gaudy medals on his chest.1
Sometimes wartime leaders are judged as beneficiaries of their political systems in the manner that the Duke of Wellington gained advantage by answering to a parliamentary government and Napoleon did not. Yet often an Epaminondas the Theban, Saladin, or Kemal Ataturk succeeded or failed on his own exceptional merits and trumped the system that created him. Material and strategic resources often determine the fate of leaders. Give Hitler the industrial infrastructure of 1942 Detroit, or the raw manpower of the Soviet Union, and he might have fared better. For all of Hannibal’s genius, Carthage drew on fewer assets than did the military of Republican Rome, which in the Second Punic War could survive the blunders of its many incompetent generals, such as Flaminius, Sempronius, and Varro.2
Collective and shared ideas, not the individual men who champion them per se, are supposed to matter more in democracies, which supposedly create strategies by group consensus. Churchill, however, saved Great Britain in 1940, when probably few other democratic leaders could have, only to be unceremoniously voted out of office in July 1945, well before the close of World War II in the Pacific. At that moment, however, a dozen or so politicians easily could have completed Britain’s successful efforts against Japan. Apparently, in extremis a man like Churchill was irreplaceable, at better times not so much. In democratic societies, few wish to concede that in times of crises there are rare and irreplaceable leaders of the caliber of a Themistocles or Pericles who alone tower over committees and coalitions of anonymous experts and politicians that are still competent enough to preserve what the singular leader has bequeathed them. An everyman Truman could take the place of a Roosevelt after April 1945 without disruption in the long-held Allied plan of action. Yet Truman probably lacked the eloquence and political skills (and machinations) to have readied America for war in 1940. Had Hitler or Mussolini died in 1942, Germany and Italy might well have found a leader who sought—and obtained—a negotiated surrender.3
Since antiquity, democracies have at least had the advantage of incorporating a broader participation in decision-making that can aid even a dynamic leader. A Churchill or a Roosevelt knowingly accepted that they had to be more sensitive to the public perceptions of success or failure, and that they had to deal with a number of brilliant advisors and rivals who were not shy in pointing out their shortcomings. In other words, they had to earn political legitimacy and always faced the audit of a fairly free government and press—and a host of rivals who wanted their jobs. That reality meant that once controversial policies were announced—the primacy of the European front over the Pacific or the demand for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers—it was hard for the people to complain later that their elected representatives acted without consent of the governed.
The upsides of keeping leaders honest and open to advice and criticism were sometimes offset by the downsides of a fickle majority, subject to demagoguery and sudden bursts of moblike exuberance or outrage. Such democratic volatility was first and best recorded by the historian Thucydides during the debates over Athenian intervention in Mytilene, Melos, and Syracuse. The aristocratic historian noted that before and during the first years of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian Pericles almost alone had successfully managed the strategic decision-making of radically democratic Athens, precisely because his personal clout allowed him extraordinary latitude that was rare in most volatile democracies: “Whenever he saw them [the Athenian dêmos] unseasonably and insolently elated,” Thucydides tells us, “he would with a word reduce them to alarm; on the other hand, if they fell victims to a panic, he could at once restore them to confidence. In short, what was nominally a democracy was becoming in his hands government by the first citizen.” Perhaps Thucydides was right that during existential conflicts like World War II democracies run by a single, powerful, though legitimate leader become the most effective war-makers.
In a few hours after Pearl Harbor an American electorate that had resisted many of Roosevelt’s efforts to mobilize for war was suddenly demanding almost instant operations against the Japanese—with little memory of their own prior equally fervent isolationism. In response, Roosevelt increasingly began to rule, even more so than when engineering the New Deal, as “first citizen,” with a range of executive powers not normally associated with democracies but reminiscent of the extraordinary and occasionally extra-constitutional powers of President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War.4
From 1939 to 1940 non-democratic dictators like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin—as well as Hideki Tojo from October 1941 to July 1944—posed as adept strategists without much need for subordinates to second-guess their genius. Their Machiavellian diplomacy and preemptive attacks—without regard to public audit or legislative veto—were judged only by their results and so were initially considered by Germans, Italians, Russians, and Japanese to have enhanced their respective national interests at little cost. Dictatorship was the apparent wave of the future. For short, surprise border wars against the weak, strongmen often did not need to mobilize their entire economies or to craft a long-term agenda to win huge sacrifices from a wartime public.
In contrast, the soon-to-be-extinct Western European democracies, the appeasing Great Britain, and the isolationist United States had all been confused and stymied by the rise of these single-minded dictators, Hitler in particular. The future Axis powers, as well as the Soviet Union, appeared resolute, determined, and calculating under the leadership of popular strongmen. Yet by early 1943, the very opposite had proven true. The dozens of bickering strategists who surrounded Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt seemed essential. Even the relatively unrestrained media of wartime America and Britain, and the requirement to articulate war aims in public speeches to Congress and Parliament, helped to audit military practices. In matters of total war and mass mobilizations, the need to court voters seemed to have given the surviving democratic powers innate advantages over unstable and increasingly isolated Axis leaders cocooned in their bunkers and fortresses, and fearing the wrath of their own people as much as the enemy.5
Mussolini and Hitler, despite absolute rule, failed fully to mobilize the Italian and German wartime economies until late 1942 or even later; Churchill and Roosevelt, who operated under a system of checks and balances, quickly put their nations on a war footing. The authoritarians worried of the public consequences from shared sacrifice; the democrats assumed a blank check to demand them, confident in the self-initiative and individual self-reliance of democratic culture. Hitler understandably rarely spoke to the German people after Stalingrad. Of the six major World War II leaders, only the Axis heads of state Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo faced wartime assassination plots, many of them originating from their own militaries. Field Marshal, and soon-to-be-relieved commander of Army Group South, Erich von Manstein summed up how isolated his Führer had become: “Hitler… thought he could see things much better from behind his desk than the commanders at the front. He ignored the fact that much of what was marked on his far-too-detailed situation maps was obviously out of date. From that distance, moreover, he could not possibly judge what would be the proper and necessary action to take on the spot.”6
An unpopular Mussolini was deposed after the successful Allied invasion of Sicily. After the loss of Saipan, Tojo was forced to resign as prime minister in July 1944, with a number of officers contemplating his assassination. The age-old problem with dictatorships, aside from the limited input from advisors and experts, was that the public could always tacitly and implicitly withdraw its support as news from the front grew ominous. Even—or rather especially—under autocracies, the people never feel accountable for their prior ecstatic allegiance to dangerous strongmen. They are never on record as formally approving risky national policies through free and transparent elections of such extremists in the first place.
Even autocrat Joseph Stalin, in his forced flip-flop from Axis sympathizer to Big Three ally, discovered that the more military authority he delegated and the more flexible his command, the more the Red Army was likely to avoid the catastrophic disasters of the sort that had followed his top-down dictates between 1941 and 1942. The more successful he became in the eyes of his countrymen, so too might his failures be blamed on semi-autonomous subordinates. The stature of Marshal Georgy Zhukov rose with Stalin even as the reputations of Field Marshals Guderian, Manstein, and Rommel waned in Hitler’s eyes.7
Democracies vent palace dissent. Adversaries sought to dethrone Churchill or Roosevelt by leaks to the press, votes of no confidence in Parliament, or attacks in Congress, or by running for office in 1944 or 1945. But to rid Germany of a dangerous Hitler or free Italy from Mussolini often seemed to require a gun or bomb—a fact well known to dictators.
Finally, the presence of two democracies allowed the Allied Big Three to function in a way the authoritarian nations of the Axis could not. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia could partner for only twenty-two months between August 1939 and June 1941 because each side logically suspected that the other would renounce its prior agreements. For a disparate alliance to succeed, it is advantageous that at least some leaders within it have obtained government office legitimately and thus learned methods of holding power other than through brute force and prevarication. Stalin, for all his objections, privately accepted that he could trust Churchill and Roosevelt in a way that he, Mussolini, and Tojo never could Hitler. There really is no honor among unelected thieves.8
Fights were common among generals and planners, and they often included the Supreme Allied Command. Roosevelt and Churchill advanced hare-brained schemes, but they listened to the objections against them. In contrast to the bickering of Allied politicians and generals, the Germans, from the man in the street to the chiefs of the German Staff, never quite knew what nation Hitler would attack next or for what reason—only that it would be dangerous to second-guess even the most foolish of the Führer’s directives. The same absence of discussion was almost as true of both Italy and Japan. In neither Rome nor Tokyo had there been clearly announced war aims to the public, not just because such states were closed societies, but also because almost all their military commanders themselves were not quite sure what Mussolini and Tojo and his advisors were intending, and usually dared not ask.9
Such praise of wartime consensual government is not to suggest that brilliant supreme leaders do not emerge from dictatorships, whether Alexander the Great or Napoleon. Philip II of Macedon exhibited brilliant military leadership lacking in the fickle and unprepared democratic Greek city-states. The ruthlessness and iron will of Joseph Stalin in large part explained the USSR’s ability to surmount the difficulties in late 1942 of finishing the relocation of entire industries beyond the Urals, or to endure the losses at both Leningrad and Stalingrad without declaring either an open city, forsaking any further defensive efforts. And there were plenty of mediocre elected leaders such as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain or former French prime minister and later head of the Vichy government Pierre Laval who brought their democracies to near ruin. Constitutional leadership does not guarantee victory—as the Czechs, Danes, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, and French learned in 1939–1940—much less does it ensure that a pedestrian parliamentarian can be expected to trump a brilliant autocrat.
Natural talent and the personal experience of a leader, regardless of particular political system, mattered as well. Adolf Hitler knew a great deal about the nature of infantry combat, as did Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill; all three supreme commanders had fought in the front lines during World War I. For a while, Hitler’s singular constitution bore up under responsibilities that would have killed most younger men. He clearly had uncanny psychological instincts about what drove men of power like himself and how to manipulate them accordingly. Yet Hitler, who possessed enormous powers of recall and concentration, lacked formal knowledge of or even a natural instinct for grand strategy. The similarly wounded noncommissioned veteran Mussolini was likewise ignorant of how to correlate Italy’s strategic ends with its practical means. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in contrast, had also served in high administrative positions of government—as first lord of the Admiralty, assistant secretary of the Navy, and people’s commissar for defence, respectively—and far better understood military strategy, financing and budgets, the politics behind defense appropriations, and how to create large staffs of advisors. It is often said that only veterans can wisely adjudicate war policy or possess the moral right to do so. But that notion is as accurate or inaccurate as assuming that only working farmers should be allowed to establish food policies, or that experienced Wall Street investors can be best trusted to set national fiscal agendas.10
Hitler and Mussolini could serially offer stirring patriotic speeches. But as absolutists they felt no need to offer detail or to explain ambiguity within their policies, and thus their success as communicators hinged entirely on the perceived positive pulse of the battlefield. Even the most eloquent propaganda cannot turn a disaster like Stalingrad into a heroic last stand to defend the homeland such as Thermopylae, or reinvent the bloodless Nazi walkthrough into Denmark into a Napoleonic masterpiece such as the French victory against the odds at Austerlitz. As the Wehrmacht steamrolled into Western Europe, Hitler’s rants mesmerized millions. When the Russians and Anglo-Americans were closing in on Germany, the Führer simply gave up public speaking in a way Allied leaders never did during the dark days after the fall of Singapore and the Philippines. When in late 1944 a German private on leave saw his bombed-out Munich home, he wrote in his diary: “Who is to blame for all this? The English? The Americans? Or the Nazis? Had a Hitler not come, there would have been no war. If the Nazis had not talked so big, or put on such a show, or done so much saber-rattling, we would have peace with those who are our enemies today.” Mussolini could never convincingly explain to Italians why he had declared war on the United States or invaded the Balkans. Perhaps he did not know himself.11
Except for a few weeks during the British Blitz and the initial German aerial attack on Moscow, Allied leaders were usually able to work and meet with their staff free of fear. In contrast, Hitler spent most of the war after 1941 underground or barricaded in bunkers at the Wolfsschanze, Berghof, and Führerbunker in Nuremberg, East Prussia, Bavaria, and Berlin, cut off from most of his civilian government and in virtual isolation, even when hundreds of miles separated him from the front. Historian Gerhard Weinberg noted: “Even the Hitler of 1943 is no longer the Hitler of 1940. He no longer fights easily with good fortune at his side, but now does battle only doggedly against his fate.”
An Axis leader had good reason to fear his public. Mussolini was in danger of being bombed from early May 1943 onward; the Japanese leadership, from autumn 1944 and especially after March 1945. Assassination was a more immediate danger for Axis strongmen; it had been a staple of Japanese political life in the decade before the war. Mussolini survived several attempts; Hitler perhaps ten potentially serious plots in a decade in public life. Fear of assassination, the chance of being bombed, the approach of enemy armies—these were all threats that after 1941 faced the Axis leaders alone.12
BY MID-1939, AT relatively little military, political, or economic cost, and without recourse to war, Hitler had succeeded in his original aim of returning Germany to its preeminent position of 1914. By June 1940, Nazi Germany had achieved most of the objectives once envisioned by the Kaiser’s Germany, should it have won World War I, and yet more still. Even under the tenets of the supposed Septemberprogramm of defeating and occupying France and Belgium, the Kaiser had never quite dreamed of absorbing all of Western Europe, while assuming the remaining neutral nations were partisans of the German Reich. Imperial Germany before 1918 may have dreamed of incorporating all lands with sizable populations of German speakers. But Adolf Hitler, for all his cheap talk of avenging the injustices of Versailles, went further in envisioning German-speaking lands cleansed of their native inhabitants, and in annexing territories that had nothing to do with the postwar settlements of 1919–1920.13
Yet a year after winning Western Europe, with German popular opinion enthralled by his successful high-risk gambles, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, with an unbeaten Great Britain still at his rear and a hostile arsenal of democracy in America beginning to rearm. Such foolhardiness after such skillful brinkmanship and war making would lead to the loss of all that his cunning and instincts had won prior to 1939. And even if the generals had genuinely opposed the invasion and vehemently advanced their counterarguments, their opposition would likely have been ignored. As General Warlimont noted of his colleagues at OKW: “The highest military circles—and this applies not merely to the senior officers of the Wehrmacht—apparently shared Hitler’s view that the campaign against Russia would probably go quickly. This did not alter the fact that in basic strategic questions such as these the Operations Staff was in no position to express any different views since it had come to consider itself merely as the military working staff of Hitler.”14
It is disturbing to think that eventually Hitler might have gotten away with holding on to his gains prior to September 1, 1939, or even possibly before June 1941, had he canceled Operation Barbarossa, avoided war with America, and made major concessions to Great Britain that even Churchill might not have been in a position to refuse. After all, Hitler had fooled a generation of European leaders and talked his way into achieving the rebuilding of the Wehrmacht (“the German people wants no war”), the plebiscite in the Saarland (“I have repeatedly assured the French that when once the Saar question is settled, no further territorial difference will exist between us”), the militarization of the Rhineland (“Germany has no further claims to make from France, nor will she make any”), the Anschluss with Austria (“a work of peace”), the destruction of Czechoslovakia (“the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe”), and the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union (“Germany never again to enter into conflict with Russia”)—all without cost in blood and treasure. Had Hitler stopped there without invading Poland, the Allies might well have conceded to a huge German-speaking empire, one larger and more influential than at any time since the birth of the German state.15
Clearly, seizing power and creating a German dictatorship of Nazi yes-men did not offer the preparation and savvy essential to winning a global war, at least in comparison with the alternative experience of forming coalitions and alliances to win elected office. After Hitler began World War II in September 1939, he had no blueprint to end the war-making power of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, whose defeats were in varying ways critical to his ideological agendas. The problem was not just that the Wehrmacht and the German economy at the outbreak of the war were without the resources to finalize Hitler’s dreams in a global war. Hitler also could never achieve the material means for such grandiose ends, given that he lacked the shrewdness to coax or successfully coerce others, both allies and millions of Europeans under occupation, in helping him to complete them. In lieu of logic and realism, Hitler always ventured into fantasy, citing miracle weapons on the horizon, pontificating about Lebensraum without any sensible information on agricultural policy and production, weighing in on racial and cultural fault lines without any appreciation of Russian or American history and traditions, blinded by anti-Semitic hatred without appreciation of centuries of Jewish landmark contributions to European culture and science. Hitler’s chief flaw as a strategist was that he used wild emotion to push his own daydreams, only to retreat to logic to refute sound objections to his policies, reminding us of Thucydides’s ancient warning that “it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.”16
After the heady victory in France, Nazi planners assumed that the war would be over shortly. As a result, they either alienated the Western Europeans under their control or began outright looting of the occupied countries. And if the Nazis sought to increase production of munitions from foreign resources it was often through the inefficient means of stealing infrastructure and shipping workers back into Germany, rather than by recalibrating and utilizing existing labor and factories in situ. Few European munitions plants were taken over and efficiently utilized for the Third Reich, even in the sometimes clumsy manner of appropriating the Czech Skoda Works. Hitler’s obsession with the Jews was as militarily unsound as it was savage. His partnerships with neutrals like Sweden or Spain were predicated only on the degree to which he appeared formidable and dangerous. Napoleon’s pessimism about so-called friends (“the Allies we gain by victory, will turn against us upon the bare whisper of our defeat”) was relevant to Hitler’s—and to all dictators’—dilemmas.17
All warlords commit mistakes. But not all of them err fatally as did Hitler, especially if they allow some audit and criticism. Even Alexander the Great assented to turn back from going farther into India. After the disaster in the Teutoburg Wald, Augustus finally agreed not to try to annex Germany and its environs north of the Rhine and Danube. A wily Franco was smart enough not to rush into war during the Axis euphoria of July 1940, or rather lucky enough that when he did plan on entering the war, Hitler’s own greed and chauvinism dulled his enthusiasm.18
Hitler guessed rightly that the loser of World War I would be willing to run far more postwar risks than would the complacent winners. His bluster that national cohesion would turn around the hopeless conditions of 1918 resonated with the German people. Especially attractive to the public was Hitler’s central thesis that Jews, the intelligentsia, and communists, not German greed in absorbing western Russia while shorting the Western Front—along with needlessly provoking an isolationist America—had forfeited the victory after the defeat of Tsarist Russia. These were cynical insights critical in obtaining power in Germany and carving off slices of borderlands for a Greater Germany, but they were of no value in waging a global war against enemies superior in manpower, resources, and leadership skills, and who did not care much for the intricacies of European politics and rivalries.19
Hitler’s first—and in some ways, least appreciated—strategic miscalculation was the 1939 invasion of Poland. The problem was not that the Wehrmacht could not easily divide up Poland with the late arrival of the Soviet Union, but that Hitler failed to grasp that his Polish War ensured a likely fight with the English-speaking Western democracies—and quite soon, with the British Royal Navy and Royal Air Force—that he had no way adequately to finance and to supply, and thus no way to end, as well as creating a common border with the Soviet Union. Yet after the stunning surrender of Paris on June 14, 1940, Hitler’s strategically flawed ideas were seen as no more unsound than was the unorthodox attack through the Ardennes that had crushed France in less than two months. In these pre–Operation Barbarossa halcyon days, he was lauded by General Keitel, head of OKH, as “the greatest warlord of all time.” Yet if Britain could not be invaded or coerced into submission, then any attack on the Soviet Union that did not result in near instant victory spelled an eventual two-front war against huge industrial powers of the sort Hitler had promised to avoid. For a leader who had vowed to learn from and rectify the verdict of World War I, an amnesiac Hitler instead seemed to be trumping the same errors that had ruined Imperial Germany.20
Without a moral sense, Hitler assumed that those weaker than himself were ethical only in word as a substitute for strength in deed. For someone who bragged about willpower and the unconquerable spirit, Hitler counted only on the power of things, not of ideas and human emotions. As his noted biographer Hugh Trevor-Roper once put it, “he was a complete and rigid materialist, without sympathy or even tolerance for those immaterial hopes or fear of imaginations or illusions which, however absurdly, cast a faint ennobling gleam on the actions of mankind.”21
Hitler also suffered from the symptoms of the autodidact: superficial knowledge without depth or audit, energized by a forceful character dulled by a lack of subtlety. While his armies were stalling in Russia, Hitler’s midday and evening table talk ranged from the quality of honey bees to the best depth of cement for autobahns, always punctuated by conspiratorial interjections of anti-Semitism, contempt for Slavic peoples, crackpot views on art, and obsessions with his own health. Oddly, on some scattered topics—the vulnerability of New York skyscrapers to aerial attacks, the nutritional value of uncooked vegetables, or the eventual popularity of what would become the Volkswagen Bug—Hitler was occasionally strangely prescient.22
In truth, Hitler knew little of war beyond blitzing weaker neighbors. Concerning Hitler’s halting decisions in both North Africa and the Soviet Union, General Warlimont at OKW noted as early as mid-1942 that “he proved incapable of taking even the most urgent decisions in good time.” Hitler, who had neither fought on the Eastern Front nor visited Russia, completely misread the Eastern lessons of World War I: that even conquest and occupation sapped critical resources from German efforts elsewhere. After Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, a shocked General Alfred Jodl called his subordinate Warlimont, and in amazement announced, “you have heard that the Fuhrer has just declared war on America?” Warlimont, equally befuddled, replied of the staff’s shock, “yes, and we could not be more surprised.”23
Hitler’s reasoning, such as it was, seemed aimed mostly at placating Admirals Raeder and Doenitz of the Kriegsmarine who swore they could starve Britain by wrecking US convoys as they left ports on the East Coast—and then provided too few submarines and almost no surface ships to do it. He should have remembered that a quarter century earlier the Kaiser was likewise both flummoxed by US tacit support for France and Britain, and Germany’s inability to do much about it, leading to the folly of the so-called Zimmerman Telegram in bizarre hopes of prompting some sort of formal Mexican attack across the US border.24
Hitler also figured that his newfound enemies would freelance and treat each other as duplicitously as he had the other Axis powers. When he announced to the Japanese ambassador General Hiroshi Oshima in January 1942, right after Pearl Harbor and more than half a year after the invasion of Russia, “never before in history have two such mighty military powers so far separated from each other—Japan and Germany—stood together in war,” he still had not yet invited the Japanese to attack the Soviets in the East, ostensibly intent on hoarding his envisioned Russian spoils.25
Gaining Italy as an ally in 1940 while surrendering the Soviet Union as a partner in 1941, and turning a neutral United States into an enemy were poor trade-offs. Armchair strategists have offered all sorts of alternative scenarios to Operation Barbarossa that might have prolonged or permanently deadlocked the war. The most sensible counterfactual would have been a concentration of Hitler’s four-million man, pan–European Axis army either on an invasion of Great Britain, or, more feasibly, directing a huge expedition into North Africa and the Middle East that might have cut off many of Britain’s options, saved Mussolini’s Italy, made the Mediterranean an Axis lake, linked strategy with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean—and initially avoided war with both the USSR and the United States. Later both Nazi strategists and top-ranking generals seemed to acknowledge such a lost opportunity.26
Operationally, Hitler habitually thought that as a rare rationalist he alone detected some underappreciated economic advantage to be tapped or, quite irrationally, a particular, though hidden to most, avenue of revenge to be pursued that excused departure from sound strategic doctrine. Consequently, he serially turned setbacks into catastrophes, from Stalingrad to the Battle of the Bulge. The Battle of Britain was lost—to the degree that it was ever winnable—when the Luftwaffe quit concentrating on British airfields, radar stations, and aircraft factories and chose to firebomb London as supposed payback for the ineffective British attack on Berlin. The Ardennes offensive of late 1944 had no chance of strategic success, but it did ensure that there would be insufficient German reserves at the Rhine. The common theme in all of these disasters was again Hitler’s unwillingness to look empirically at rapidly changing conditions on the ground, instead preferring to envision a perpetual world of 1940, in which ideologically driven Nazi soldiers were unstoppable.27
Hitler at moments seemed aware of his own failings, manifested in self-doubt. To Albert Speer, Hitler confessed shortly before his death that he had always known that Hermann Goering was a drug addict, corrupt, and a delusional sybarite, but apparently he had been too timid to confront Goering, given his earlier key service to the Nazi cause, even as the latter’s buffoonery cost tens of thousands of Luftwaffe air crewmen their lives. At the height of the Wehrmacht’s reputation in October 1940, and after marathon deliberations, Hitler could still neither cajole nor force a recalcitrant General Francisco Franco to enter the war or even to allow transit for German troops through Spanish territory.28
Hitler had largely been free of major maladies between September 1939 and July 1944, and up to that point was still hale enough. Close associates had seen no evidence of mental exhaustion or serious illness that should have been obvious even prior to mid-1944. A few months later Hitler certainly was a sick man, jaundiced, visibly suffering from coronary disease, plagued by an array of psychosomatic maladies as well as the possible onset of Parkinson’s disease, surrounded by quack doctors, and searching for fantastic medical cures in the identical manner that he sought absurd nostrums for his ill-omened war. The failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, certainly marked a downturn. Goering claimed that Hitler after July “trembled on his left side, and his mind was not clear enough to understand the real situation of Germany.”29
Germany’s tragedy was that Hitler was not incapacitated far earlier in the 1930s. His ministers had long since been ignored; the General Staff was isolated. Finally, Hitler surrounded himself only with a group of mediocrities and sycophants—Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler, Goering, Jodl, Keitel, von Ribbentrop—whose rubber-stamped directives the military sought to ignore without gaining Hitler’s ire. Typically, diehard pro-Nazi generals like Walter Model, Sepp Dietrich, and Ferdinand Schörner were not fired or executed. The most capable ones, such as Rommel, Manstein, and von Rundstedt were eventually bought off, sacked, or retired, and occasionally haphazardly reused, but never to their full potentials. Had OKW been staffed continuously by a Manstein or von Rundstedt, in conjunction with an OKH of von Bock, von Leeb, or Kesselring, with a supreme commander who followed their advice, Nazi Germany’s military efforts might have lasted until 1946 or later.
Before the war, Hitler had never visited America, Britain, or Russia, the major countries he would declare war on. He had no direct knowledge of much of anything more than a few hundred miles from his birthplace. Smarting from a sense of class and cultural inferiority, he gleaned from self-directed study just enough ammunition to hate cosmopolitans such as aristocrats, scholars, the intelligentsia, and captains of industry, and so never really integrated enough of them into his strategic circle. In contrast, Churchill and Roosevelt—who felt comfortable and confident among the privileged classes, both in their admiration and suspicion of them—knew Europe firsthand. Both had traveled in Germany and had visited each other’s country. Their knowledge of national character was based on experience and analysis rather than deduced from popular prejudices. In critical areas such as assessing operations in terms of geography, terrain, and climate and weather, they were reasonable. Hitler and Mussolini, in contrast, lived and died by their reliance on maps. Neither had seen an American factory or farm, a British industrial city—or a Russian road in spring or city in midwinter.30
MUSSOLINI WAS BY far the longest reigning of the three Axis leaders. He exercised the powers of prime minister for nearly twenty-three years, at first constitutionally and then within three years illegally. The simple fact that he seized power well before the Iberian dictators, the Japanese militarists, and the Nazis did, apparently won Mussolini inordinate prestige in the eyes of Hitler and of some Western elites. Hitler waxed on about Mussolini even as Italy neared collapse: “I hold the Duce in the highest esteem, because I regard him as an incomparable statesman. On the ruins of a ravished Italy he has succeeded in building a new State which is a rallying point for the whole of his people.”31
The vast abyss between global fascism’s aims and its means to achieve them are best illustrated in Mussolini’s erratic wartime leadership. His grand talk of “spazio vitale” (“living space,” or Lebensraum) for supposedly ethnically and culturally superior Italians throughout the central Mediterranean proved a disaster, lacking even the inclusive pretexts of the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Italian racialism precluded most attempts at winning hearts and minds in occupied territories. Enthused about neocolonial expansion, the weak Mussolini convinced himself that he had the force, manpower, and economic resources to resettle Italians on thousands of square miles of land from the Adriatic to the Horn of Africa, and to keep them safe in the face of indigenous opposition. His idea of an Italian Mediterranean was every bit as fantastical as the Greek irredentist Megalê Idea (“Great Idea”) of a modern Aegean Hellenism spanning from Istanbul to Alexandria. On the eve of the war, Mussolini had declared that “Italy is therefore in truth a prisoner of the Mediterranean, and the more populous and prosperous Italy becomes, the more its imprisonment will gall.… The bars of this prison are Corsica, Tunis, Malta, Cyprus. The sentinels of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez. Corsica is a pistol pointed at the heart of Italy. Tunisia at Sicily; while Malta and Cyprus constitute a threat to all our positions in the eastern and western Mediterranean.” But when Italy did go to war, it had no realistic plans of seizing the bars of Malta and Cyprus, much less the sentinels at Gibraltar and Suez.32
Italy’s war abilities were at best narrowly confined to attacking weak and often preindustrial people—in Europe, those of the Balkans, and in Africa, Ethiopians, Somalis, and Libyans—with no assurance of being able to consistently defeat them or permanently control their territories. Mussolini’s army was equipped like a pre–World War I military aimed at border defense, which explained why it enjoyed little success as an expeditionary force in France in 1940, in North Africa in 1940–1943, or on the Eastern Front in 1941–1945. The technologically impressive Italian fleet and air arms were Potemkin forces, not backed by adequate fuel reserves, and rarely upgraded or resupplied when they suffered wartime losses and maintenance shortcomings—facts known to Mussolini. Mussolini’s parasitical war aims became grandiose immediately following the German defeat of France and the British destruction of the French Mediterranean fleet. He abruptly entered the war, assuming that the aerial mastery of Britain would be a mere footnote to the humiliation of France and Western Europe.33
Italy originally both welcomed and feared any German entry into the Middle East in force along a North African trajectory, anticipating dividing up spoils but fearing that there would be few left for the junior partner. Unfortunately for Italy, Britain survived, along with its four great Mediterranean bases at Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, and Alexandria. Then Germany invaded the Soviet Union and declared war on the United States, drawing off some of the Third Reich’s potential strength from the Mediterranean. That Mussolini knew little if anything in advance about the invasion of the Soviet Union or the German declaration of war against the United States reflects the Oz-like world in which he lived.34
Mussolini never foresaw how vast numbers of tanks, ships, and planes were necessary for victory, or how economies would have to be fundamentally reordered to produce them. He did not fully mobilize the Italian economy for war, correctly believing that had he done so, only a constant stream of victories would have kept the strapped populace compliant. Instead he blustered about millions of Italian bayonets and how fascism was a force multiplier of war, while being completely dependent on the statecraft and resources of Adolf Hitler.
Mussolini almost always ignored the often-sound advice of his close advisors, most importantly his under secretary for war production, Carlo Favagrossa, who warned him that Italy would not be ready to fight a modern war until at least 1942 or beyond. Prewar Italy had produced less than 10 percent of the coal, oil, steel, and iron of Great Britain, the smallest economy of the three major Allied powers. Italy’s large army was not motorized, had little air support, few quality tanks, and scant logistical sustainability. Tankette was an English diminutive largely in currency to describe Italian Panzer forces. Prewar Italy had the fewest vehicles per thousand people of any of the major European powers. The military was largely analogous to the small nineteenth-century British colonial army, but without the latter’s skill, organization, discipline, and supporting fleet.35
To the degree that the Italian campaign of 1943–1945 tied down Allied forces, it was almost entirely due to the Wehrmacht’s fighting on Italian soil. Largely because of Mussolini’s strategic incompetence—most prominently, Italy’s bungled invasion of Greece on October 28, 1940—Italy proved as much a liability to Germany in World War II as it once had been a valuable Allied power in World War I. Mussolini’s ambitions soon hinged on hope that Franco’s Spain would enter the war, that Russia would quit the war, and that the loss of the French fleet and Britain’s responsibilities in the Pacific would give him an opening to bully the Mediterranean. The one possible Italian-inspired strategy—a joint attack in 1940 on British-held Egypt from both East Africa and Libya, in conjunction with the assault of the Regia Marina on the British fleet at Alexandria—was quickly tabled. Mussolini was the least qualified of all the major World War II leaders to conduct war, which was a tragedy for Italy, given that it had the fewest resources to wage it.36
For nearly two decades Mussolini had established a modus vivendi of sorts with Italy’s former allies, the Western democracies, without directly prompting a war with any of them throughout a series of crises from Abyssinia to the Spanish Civil War. Yet all of his experience counted for nothing when Hitler whistled. The always prescient General Quirino Armellino saw through Mussolini’s impulsive blunders the minute that he attacked France to draw Italy into the war: “An incredible, terrible situation, which could end by submerging us all entirely. If the history of this is ever done, our successors will see the card that we are playing and judge us harshly.”37
Like Stalin and Hitler, but quite unlike Churchill and Roosevelt, Mussolini grew up among the resentments of the lower middle classes, envisioning national fascism, to the degree that it had any coherence, as a meritocratic means of allowing real talent to emerge. He was attracted to what he saw as the ideological absolutism of the seminary. Mussolini soon rebelled against familial efforts at (a largely free) in-depth Christian education, although, again like the autocrats Hitler and Stalin, he seriously considered a pathway to the priesthood.
Mussolini also similarly manifested his sense of social and cultural inferiority in harangues against the capitalists and elites, while erratically dabbling among various socialist movements and rubbing shoulders with the industrialists and plutocrats. His genius at domestic politics, again comparable to that of Hitler and Stalin, was in appreciating the power of propaganda, especially ideologically driven journalism, and the opportunities for mass manipulation, given the general social chaos unleashed by the aftermath of World War I and the economic downturn of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Truth and falsity were not the touchstones of the new journalism; mass dissemination and sensationalism were.38
Like Stalin and Hitler, as a veteran of war Mussolini saw raw violence not just as a necessary but also as a welcome tool of political advancement, both at home and abroad, although again to be applied against weak countries without anticipation that stronger ones might intervene. It was uncanny how, also like Stalin and Hitler, Mussolini believed his meteoric rise through the cauldron of revolutionary politics to become head of state meant that he had the commensurate ability to do the same on the world stage. But whereas Stalin was saved by huge reserves of manpower and industrial output, two strong and largely forgiving allies, and by mid-1942 his private recognition of the limitations of his own military insight, Mussolini had no such resources, foreign salvation, or inner introspection. And the result was that his own megalomania and naiveté about the world beyond Italy’s borders ensured the destruction of his own country in his third decade of rule.39
GENERAL HIDEKI TOJO came to power in Japan in October 1941 after a long career in the Japanese army. He emerged as part of a centrist faction that had somewhat reluctantly concluded that war with the United States was preferable to either being harangued into negotiating away Japanese gains in China or renewing the once-failed 1939 war with the Soviet Union. Yet, the sometime bureaucratic clerk Tojo never alone wielded quite the same degree of absolute political and military control that Hitler or Mussolini enjoyed. Unlike his partners, he lacked the charisma or desire to forge an independent fascistic movement centered around his own person.
Equally important, the military in Japan was the impetus behind the government, rather than a parallel, co-opted, or subordinate force, or eventually even a countervailing influence as was sometimes true in the later years of Nazi Germany. There was almost no chance that any Japanese army officers would revolt or try to topple their own military leadership—Italian or German style—to end the war. Perhaps the very opposite was true: fanatics might assassinate even war-hardened fascists who considered peace when the war effort was doomed.
The zeal of Tojo’s Japan trumped that even of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Japanese emperor also played a far more determinative role in the war effort than did either King George VI of Great Britain or King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. Both of the latter monarchs may have been far more visible than Emperor Hirohito, but they did not pick the supreme commander in the fashion that Hirohito had exercised in appointing Tojo, and they did not sign off on major operations. Neither could have stopped Winston Churchill or Benito Mussolini from going to war in the way that Hirohito might have prevented Tojo.40
Tojo, previously a second-rate staff officer, offered bureaucratic and organizational dependability. He knew little of war outside the Japanese experience in China, and even there had had limited combat experience. Unlike top-ranking generals, admirals, and diplomats like Tadamichi Kuribayashi (who organized the dogged defense of Iwo Jima), Yosuke Matsuoka (prewar foreign minister), or Isoroku Yamamoto (commander of the Combined Fleet), he had never traveled to the West. As a traditional army man, Tojo was not familiar with the new potentialities of naval air operations or strategic bombing. His infantry instincts told him to stay focused on China, without a clue how to win or get out. He wanted to avoid further war with the much more powerful and better-equipped Soviet Union, loosely partner with Hitler and Mussolini, and hope that the United States would recant in its efforts to force Japan to give up colonial conquests and would cease its trade embargoes. When the latter hopes all failed and the Imperial Japanese Navy insisted that they could not absorb orphaned European colonies without attacking the Philippines, Malaya, and Hawaii, Tojo also advocated war with the United States and approved the navy’s plan of a Pearl Harbor strike, hoping that a crippled and demoralized United States would focus on Europe and not fight a total war against a distant Asian foe.41
Tojo enjoyed the briefest tenure of all World War II supreme leaders at less than three years. Like Mussolini, he lost control (on July 18, 1944) amid military catastrophes—in the Marianas and Burma—and left supreme office well before the war ended. Unlike the case of Mussolini, his departure did not mean any commensurate loss of martial fervor on the part of the Japanese military. Tojo was a reflection of, not a catalyst for, fascist militarism.42
Tojo’s sin was supposed incompetence in waging war, not support for starting it, an assessment that was still echoed six decades later by his granddaughter, the fringe fascist politician Yuko Tojo (e.g., “If there was one mistake, however, it was the fact that we [Imperial Japan] lost”). Aside from being executed for war crimes, Tojo is now often remembered for approving the second most ill-conceived attack of the twentieth century—the December 7, 1941, surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor—followed by almost immediate assaults on British Singapore and the American-held Philippines. That he had earlier opposed just such radical military adventures, was initially skeptical about war with the British and Americans, was doubtful of the grand claims of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and did not embrace Nazi hatred of the Jews are all mostly forgotten.
Tojo was apparently unaware or did not care that there was no historical record of any American administration either losing or quitting a war—not the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, or World War I—much less one that Americans had not started. Pearl Harbor ensured Japan a two-front conflict. That fact in and of itself spelled failure in a fashion eerily analogous to the disastrous Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union just six months prior. The ongoing conflict in China meant that the Imperial Japanese Army would never marshal the resources to contest a recouped Anglo-American effort in the Pacific and Burma, even had it been assured of continual air and naval superiority. The Japanese might have thought they protected themselves with their nonaggression pacts (informally in September 1939, and formally by mid-April 1941) with the equally conniving Russians after being bruised by them in 1939, freeing the army to focus on China and the Pacific while turning the navy toward the West. Yet all the Russian deal accomplished was to preclude the specter of a three-front war while ensuring a two-front conflict.
Perhaps what prompted the folly of turning against America and Britain was that Japan’s huge investment in naval power in general, and in carrier air forces in particular, had brought Japan little advantage thus far in a plodding land campaign in China against a variety of enemies. For better or worse, the Pacific was properly the theater for which the costly Japanese prewar investment in air and naval power (which had alone achieved parity with the West) was best suited.43
Pearl Harbor was also supposed to have bought time for the Japanese or to have shocked and awed the United States into negotiations or to have kept the Americans too distant from Japanese sea-lanes to disrupt their new maritime empire. But a paltry two waves of Japanese planes did no damage to the US carriers, Pacific fuel reserves, or the viability of Pearl Harbor port facilities; two days more of attacks with an additional five or six carrier air missions might have. Even the timing of Pearl Harbor was ill conceived, occurring just when the Wehrmacht was proving a spent force outside Moscow. It would have been far better for the Japanese had the Americans acted on their intelligence and sent out their old battleships to preempt the Japanese carrier fleet in the Pacific, and thus lost them in the high seas along with all their crews and officers. In another perverse counterfactual, the trauma of Pearl Harbor thrust the most gifted of American naval leaders, Admirals Ernest King and Chester Nimitz, into supreme naval command in a way that might not have happened without such a wound. Tojo seemed to have no real knowledge of either the tactical limitations of the Pearl Harbor operation or its long-term strategic ramifications.44
Like the American Confederacy, whose martial spirit and tactical know-how never translated into a coherent strategy for defeating a far larger and richer opponent, Japan’s well-trained and well-led army could win an initial series of land battles from Malaysia to the Philippines. But Tojo’s Japan could not find a way to injure the more formidable British and American economies, a lapse that contradicted all the classical rules of successful preemptive or preventative war of diminishing the likelihood of effective payback. When Tojo and others spoke grandly about racial superiority in classical fascist style, they did not quite appreciate that their racist chauvinism only made it easier for the Allies to focus their own publics’ enmity, in both political and racial terms, against the Japanese. Again, that fury would manifest itself in catastrophic ways for the Japanese in the Pacific island campaigns, the firebombing of Japanese cities, and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If any of those retributions were fueled by reciprocal racism, it proved hard for abject racists to appeal for sympathy on the basis of suffering what they so often had inflicted on others.45
Tojo suffered from the same delusions of grandeur that would eventually doom Hitler and Mussolini. A superficially impressive military that had run roughshod over militarily backward neighbors—Chinese coastal provinces playing the same role for Japan as Poland, Denmark, and Abyssinia did for Germany and Italy—deluded the Japanese officers into thinking Imperial Japan was comparable to the forces of larger industrial democracies. Roosevelt had doubts about the survival of European colonialism in Asia after the end of Hitler. Had Tojo detoured around British and American Pacific territory, the onus would have been on Churchill and Roosevelt to start a Pacific war to reestablish Western colonialism at a time when both were focused on Europe. An expansive Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that had left British and American possessions in Asia alone might have at least offered opportunities for years of haggling and horse-trading. To the degree he exercised the ability to implement policies contrary to the will of the emperor and other military advisors, apparently at no time did Tojo ponder that an American nation that had built bombers with a radius of almost a thousand miles as early as 1937 surely might be able to create even larger ones with commensurately larger payloads and ranges by 1944 or 1945.
It is hard to determine the degree of General Tojo’s culpability for both starting and losing wars with the United States and Great Britain, given that before Pearl Harbor he was never as fervently prowar as some others in the Supreme War Council, among them the heads of the respective branches of the Imperial Japanese military and the foreign ministry. Tojo, who was hanged for war crimes by the Allies on November 12, 1948, certainly did not act in contradiction to Emperor Hirohito’s wishes. Nor was it ever clear exactly what Tojo’s original strategy was behind his war with Great Britain and the United States—to the extent that such a bureaucrat thought deeply about geostrategic issues—given that success hinged on circumstances beyond Japanese control. The weakness of the United States in 1941 was its small and ill-equipped army. Its strength was a powerful and growing navy, its war colleges and officer-training programs that could ensure a professional admiralty, and a strategic Army Air Force specializing in long-range bombing missions. Japan chose a war against America’s strengths.
NO SUPREME LEADER of World War II entered office with worse prospects than had Winston Churchill on May 10, 1940. Unlike Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Tojo who in 1939–1941 led ascendant nations in victory, or Franklin Roosevelt, whose homeland was never in existential danger, Churchill came into office as prime minister on the day Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries and amid the immediate specter of sustained area bombing of London. Also unlike Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini, Churchill inherited another leader’s war that was not only begun but also nearly lost. And unlike Stalin, Roosevelt, and Hitler, Churchill would be removed from office by his own people before the war ended, leaving the prime ministry on July 26, 1945, while conflict still raged in the Pacific.
By June 22, 1940, Churchill’s Britain was the only major power actively opposing Nazi Germany, Italy, and their de facto ally the Soviet Union, and it was soon targeted for incendiary attack. Britain’s position was worse than that of the beleaguered Romans after Cannae or the Athenians on the eve of Salamis, as it was vastly outnumbered, with most of its allies vanquished, and few others willing to come into the fray. Many of the British elite—including the former king, Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, and the defeatist former prime minister David Lloyd George (1916–1922)—were onetime closet admirers of Hitler (“the greatest living German” in Lloyd George’s estimation), at least when he was on the ascendency, and they may have privately dreamed of the careerist advantages of accepting some version of Hitler’s vague offers of armistice between the two nations.
Without a formal wartime alliance with the United States, and with his European partners all defeated, Churchill nevertheless insisted on continuing the war without negotiations with the Axis powers. On the eve of the Blitz, Megan Lloyd George, daughter of the prime minister of Britain during World War I, gave Churchill a backhanded compliment that illustrated the contempt of the British elite when she complained of him: “What always appealed to him most was war. He studied the wars of the past and contemplated the wars of the future. He always imagined himself a military leader, destroying armies, sweeping through Europe, overthrowing his enemies, or putting them to flight. Military terms were always on his lips, and his head was forever full of military plans and projects. I am sure that today he is wholly absorbed and intoxicated by the war.”46
Well before Churchill became Britain’s supreme leader, he had alone of almost all prominent British leaders believed in the possibility of stalemating Nazi Germany, even in the bleak initial months of the war. The most resolute group of British politicians and statesmen who, presciently and often quite alone, opposed appeasement of Hitler—Leo Amery, Duff Cooper, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and a few others—was naturally drawn to and energized by Churchill. Upon becoming prime minister, he did not punish the appeasers such as Chamberlain, Attlee, and to an extent Halifax, but instead, to the degree he could during the war, sought to tap—or to appear to tap—their talents.
As prime minister, Churchill focused on the absolute defeat of the Axis powers and the preservation of the British Empire through the ordeal of war. He was aware of the limitations on his own power well apart from the nature of parliamentary government, arising in part from the lasting effects on the British psyche of the prior disasters of fighting in France in World War I, the eroding stature of the British Empire, and the dilemma that Britain had to fight a three-front war against the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, but without the resources of its partner-in-arms, the United States. Churchill also was sensitive to his own unpopularity among many in the British political class, of his unapologetic aristocratic heritage in an age of social welfare, and of the shadow that still hung over his advocacy for the Gallipoli campaign of World War I, in which a bold plan to knock Turkey out of the war ended in catastrophe and the loss of nearly two hundred thousand British, Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), and Allied casualties.
Churchill’s policy after Pearl Harbor hinged on winning the wartime partnership of America to fight a full-fledged two-front war, waged by equals, despite their vast manpower and material asymmetries. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Churchill reviewed his visions in almost mystical terms to the US Congress:
Prodigious hammer-strokes have been needed to bring us together again, or, if you will allow me to use other language, I will say that he must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honour to be the faithful servants. It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice, and in peace.47
Churchill, under whom Britain and its essential empire reached staggering levels of military production, still lacked the wherewithal at the disposal of both Stalin and Roosevelt. Like the visionary emperor Justinian, who likewise sought to preserve his empire and thus dispatched small contingents of Byzantine expeditionary forces all over the Mediterranean world, Churchill sought to accomplish by alliances, finesse, and caginess what he might not with raw power. At one time or another he boldly ordered British forces into the Arctic Sea, East Africa, the Balkans, Crete, Greece, Malaysia, Burma, and much of North Africa, while landing troops in Italy and France. Being everywhere at once, in addition to understandably cautious generalship, explains why the overmatched British suffered occasionally humiliating defeats at Crete, Dunkirk, Singapore, and Tobruk. As unlikely as Churchill’s aims might at one time have seemed to most of the British leadership, Churchill was confident in achieving them. Like the Athenian statesman Themistocles, he had rare foresight—pronoia—a realistic appraisal of how the assets of Germany and Britain would eventually match up in England’s favor, especially given Britain’s historic invulnerability to invasion and its air and naval reach.48
Churchill believed that the British, at least if invaded, would fight fiercely in a way the French and other Western Europeans had not. They were islanders accustomed to going it alone, and they had the benefit of seeing the dire consequences of German occupation on the continent. Churchill knew the sea was a far better barrier to blitzkrieg than had been the Ardennes. He was now under no illusions that, whatever Hitler’s rhetoric, negotiations would mean little other than the end of Great Britain and her empire altogether. Churchill made clear to the British public that a faint-hearted defense was tantamount to suicide. Like French prime minister (1917–1920) Georges Clemenceau, from whose speeches Churchill seems to have been inspired, he kept his head when all around were losing theirs.49
Churchill was convinced that Britain could even help to prompt two radical changes in the complexion of the European war. British resoluteness might help force an exasperated Hitler to move eastward against his onetime ally the Soviet Union. Likewise, if Britain survived the Blitz and thwarted an invasion, at some point the United States, impressed by British resilience, was likely to enter either a European or Pacific war, or both, thus creating an Allied triad whose resources and manpower would in time destroy the Axis. In short, Churchill’s British strategy was to take advantage of Axis inferiority in bombers and ships to survive until either Russia or America brought in the manpower to confront the German army head on. In most ways, the war largely unfolded as he dreamed.50
That Churchill, a conservative imperialist, flattered and miraculously won over Roosevelt, an anti-imperialist progressive, and Stalin, a genocidal totalitarian, is often underappreciated. Such efforts were also couched in irony, given that Churchill, the colonialist, knew best that his Soviet and American allies would increasingly nose Britain out, as their powers grew and the Axis threat waned. Yet for all his genius, Churchill never quite came to accept that the logic of the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations, and the alliance with Joseph Stalin in various ways would shortly dismantle the British Empire. The war had unleashed enormous pent-up populist passions and transnational ideological movements, and in its aftermath there would be little likelihood of the British Empire making an argument to retain at least some of its colonies on the basis of its supposed prewar civilizing mission.51
Britain’s strategic and operational mistakes, in which Churchill played a leading role, were many. An advocate of naval air power, he nonetheless sent British capital ships to Singapore without their accustomed accompanying air support and despite the Royal Navy’s own prior carrier success against Italian battleships. The losses of the Repulse and Prince of Wales near Singapore were due in part, despite warnings, to his own impulsiveness and misplaced confidence in Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, who did not believe in the lethality of naval air power and so pressed ahead when the new carrier HMS Indomitable was damaged in the Caribbean and could not join the flotilla.
Perhaps Churchill’s two greatest blunders predictably involved the diversions of limited resources: first, not forcing Bomber Command to turn over more long-range bombers earlier to antisubmarine efforts; second, the diversion of forces from ongoing success in North Africa to the doomed cause in Greece (March 1941) at precisely the time when the British might have destroyed the entire Italian presence in North Africa and closed out the theater. He bought promises from Bomber Command of victory largely from the air until the last year of the war, and yet early on could not force upon it the use of longer-range Spitfires with drop tanks as escort fighters. He championed marginal operations in the eastern Aegean that even had they worked offered few strategic avenues to shortening the war. He signed off on the foolhardy Market-Garden gamble. He allowed Montgomery to offend almost every high-ranking American officer he came into contact with after June 1944, as well as many of his own high-ranking air and naval officers. His idea of a soft underbelly of Europe did not factor in Italian weather, geography, Allied inexperience, or General Mark Clark as the supreme American and then supreme Allied commander in Italy. Churchill allowed Stalin a free hand in most of Eastern Europe, ostensibly as the price of saving Greece and Turkey.52
Usually these lapses shared a common theme of trying to inflict peripheral damage on the Third Reich and Japan in too many places without incurring British losses, and with constant attention to the effect of operations on Britain’s postwar empire. Such errors were not lasting in their consequences to the Allied cause, given the resources of Russia and America—a fact perhaps well understood by Churchill. For all his fussiness with day-to-day operations, Churchill for the most part did not cross his generals. And he rarely sought to overrule his chiefs of staff—among them the likes of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Alfred Dudley Pound—especially after receiving candid advice from senior advisors like General John Dill, General Hastings Ismay, and South African general and statesman Jan Smuts. None of these capable advisors was a yes-man, at least of the sort that Hitler had surrounded himself with, and all had combat experience from either World War I or Britain’s colonial wars. The early stunning transformation of the British economy to produce war materiel on par with the Third Reich was mostly due to Churchill’s confidence in his ability to harmonize private entrepreneurs like Lord Beaverbrook with trade union bosses like Ernest Bevin.53
In the major Allied decisions of the war, Churchill was often prescient. He understood immediately the need to support the Soviet resistance to Operation Barbarossa, in the pragmatic sense that no other power other than the USSR might do so much harm to the four-million-man-strong Axis land forces. His controversial decisions, on the advice of his generals and admirals, to keep back a large reserve of RAF squadrons from France in June 1940 and to cripple the Vichy French fleet were necessary steps that most leaders would have avoided. He rightly convinced the Americans to concentrate on Europe, where they had not been attacked, and to place secondary emphasis in the Pacific, where they and Britain had been.
Churchill was wise to oppose the premature American idea of opening the so-called second front by a cross-Channel invasion in late 1942 or 1943, when the Allies were not ready for such a major amphibious operation. He rightly stood up to Stalin and argued that strategic bombing, and the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, Italy, the Battle of the Atlantic, and the Pacific theater were all “second fronts” that alleviated Wehrmacht pressure on the Russians. He may have been right to oppose Operation Anvil (later codenamed Operation Dragoon), the invasion of southern France in August 1944, that drew off resources from the Italian theater and made major amphibious landings in northern Italy unlikely. In the closing weeks of the war, Churchill, unlike the Americans, understood that the possession of territory, more than Stalin’s assurances, would adjudicate the fate of Europe for the next half century.54
In other fundamental ways, Churchill proved the most effective wartime leader of both the Allied and Axis powers. Far better than Franklin Roosevelt, he understood the full ramifications of supporting the Soviets in their catastrophic war with Hitler on the Eastern Front, most notably that there would be a high postwar price to be paid for any partnership with Stalinist Russia. As opposed to FDR, when Churchill offered concessions, it was usually through a rational calculus of costs versus benefits in light of the growing power of the Red Army and what it might mean for the postwar world. As early as 1944, he had feared that the Soviets might pose the same threats to a free Europe that Germany had in the past. In all these areas, he was proven right.55
Churchill’s oratory came to symbolize the entire Allied cause. Britain until May 11, 1940, had no resonant voice. Later Roosevelt proved an effective orator, aided by excellent writers, but his forte was domestic politics, and often his soaring rhetoric was laced with naiveté. In contrast, Churchill invoked concrete history, taught the world why Hitler was a singular evil unlike any in civilization’s immediate past, and was able to place both victory and defeat in Periclean contexts that encouraged the Allies neither to be fooled that early impressive tactical victories equaled final victory nor to succumb to defeatism after terrible setbacks.56
Finally, Churchill possessed the greatest moral courage of any leader of World War II, especially in the rawest, most physical sense. He was the only Allied leader to have served in the trenches of World War I, after seeing service in Britain’s colonial wars, and had gained practical experience of combat. Stalin rarely left Moscow. When he did, he insisted that summits were to be proximate to Russia, whether at Tehran or Yalta. Roosevelt by 1943 was increasingly incapacitated. Churchill usually visited Roosevelt, not vice versa. He went to Moscow, not Stalin to London. Whether sick with pneumonia or battling coronary disease, he insisted on visiting the front lines, often through contested air and sea space. In January 1943, Colonel Hans von Luck, who was leading Panzer units disengaging from Tripoli in the face of the British advance, noticed through his binoculars an odd figure on the battlefield:
More sensationally, Churchill appeared to be with him [General Bernard Montgomery], wearing a safari helmet. I was too far to open fire with our weapons; 88 mm guns and artillery were not available. I, at once, sent a radio message to [General Alfred] Gause: “Churchill and Monty believed located at great distance, no action possible.”… Later, I heard that it could well have been Churchill, who, on his way to Casablanca, had stopped off to see Monty and his troops. However that may be, we never saw Hitler in this theater of war, or even senior officers of the High Command of the Wehrmacht [the OKW].57
Britain was to fight much longer than in World War I (roughly 70 versus 51 months) on two distant fronts against a much more formidable coalition of enemies. Yet it suffered far fewer deaths (approximately 450,000 versus nearly one million fatalities) in achieving a far more lasting victory than in 1918. This was an extraordinary achievement, given that Britain had a continental army far smaller than those of either Germany, Russia, or the United States. Although Churchill may have despaired frequently—after the fall of France when an inglorious defeat seemed likely, the ignominious surrenders at Singapore and Tobruk, and in negotiations about the postwar world with undemocratic Joseph Stalin creating facts on the ground throughout Eastern Europe—he was the first Allied leader to see a way to beat Hitler and the only one to fight him from the beginning to the end.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, ON the other hand, approached the war as if it were another political contest to enter and win what, until December 1941, had been seen as someone else’s distant conflict. He began mobilizing a mostly unarmed and skeptical United States, particularly its navy, long before the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, when the public was against intervention abroad. That political feat allowed the rearming nation to go on the permanent offensive as early as late 1942, and through existing Lend-Lease programs to help ensure that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union continued the war. Roosevelt may also have understood that gearing up for war had provided the economic stimulus that he had so often been unable to create through the New Deal. In that way he began to promote military rearmament as vigorously as he had once opposed it, even as his advisors warned that assistance to Britain and France would deplete US war supplies, and that more forward deployment of still-weak prewar American air and naval forces in the Pacific would make scarce resources vulnerable to attack rather than creating deterrence against the Japanese.
Japan rightly feared that many of the capital ships that might soon doom it were already at berth in US shipyards when it attacked the existing Pacific Fleet on December 7, 1941. Oddly, that anxiety of an inevitably superior American fleet by the mid-1940s may have spurred Japan to act preemptively in 1941 rather than to negotiate from future weakness. Without Roosevelt, there would not have been modest military spending in a stubborn Depression. The Democratic Party, dating back to William Jennings Bryan, had its own isolationists. In the midst of the Depression they argued that money expended on military readiness abroad came at the expense of domestic investments at home. And a large military only encouraged unnecessary adventurism incompatible with the mostly noncolonial traditions of the United States.
Most of the Republican Party of the 1930s was even more unapologetically isolationist. After World War I it had argued against any more Wilsonian engagement. Most Republicans, who may have initially supported occupation of Imperial Germany after its defeat, were still convinced that interventions abroad had led to larger government at home. Then there were the inevitable deficits that would require higher taxes such as those in the recent past that had funded a war to end wars, but that had ultimately failed to ensure a European peace. Onetime interventionist Theodore Roosevelt had earlier summed up the Republican disgust of engagement with the post-Versailles world: “I do not believe in keeping our men on the other side to patrol the Rhine, or police Russia, or interfere in Central Europe or the Balkan Peninsula.”58
FDR saw the challenge of maneuvering the country away from isolationism as comparable to his earlier selling of the New Deal to a skeptical political class and desperate Depression-era public. In a December 1943 press conference, Roosevelt in an ostensibly damning admission explained how he thought he had superseded the New Deal with a wartime economy: “Old Doctor New Deal didn’t know ‘nothing’ about legs and arms.… So he got his partner, who was an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Win-the-War, to take care of this fellow.… And the result is that the patient is back on his feet.”
Roosevelt was good at politics, the more Machiavellian the better. He genuinely believed that an unprecedented third—and eventually fourth—presidential term was critical to the war, especially for maintaining the rapport that he had established with the leadership of Britain and the Soviet Union. Well before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt sent a number of envoys—among them William “Wild Bill” Donovan (“Coordinator of Information”), Harry Hopkins (New Dealer and presidential advisor), and Sumner Welles (Undersecretary of State)—to reassure the British that the United States was gearing up for an inevitable rendezvous with the Axis. To forge political consensus, Roosevelt had also enlisted the support of internationalist Republicans such as Wendell Willkie to tour Britain, and then to explain the need for engagement to the American people, especially Roosevelt’s natural opponents. He brought into his administration senior Republican politicos and wise men like Frank Knox (Secretary of the Navy, 1940–1944) and Henry Stimson (Secretary of War, 1940–1945) to avoid the charge that the Democratic Party was leading the country to war, or that during the conflict liberals were making strategic decisions on the basis of partisan considerations, while turning a blind eye to Soviet communist aggrandizement. Nonetheless, ever the politician, Roosevelt pressured the military for an early landing in North Africa, if not in time for the 1942 midterm elections, then at least in the first full year of the war to involve the American people in the European front, and to convince the Navy’s leadership that its assets were needed in a Europe-first strategy.59
For all the big-government intrusion of the New Deal into the free market, Roosevelt still did not insist on a planned or command war economy. Instead, he outsourced military preparations and production to private enterprise in loose partnerships with government bureaucracies. The War Production Board may have appeared as a wartime version of another New Deal agency, but Roosevelt was canny enough to staff it with proven captains of industry—T. S. Fitch (Washington Steel), William Murphy (Campbell Soup), Donald Nelson (Sears, Roebuck), Faustin Solon (Owens-Illinois Glass), and Charles Wilson (General Electric)—to ensure it unleashed private enterprise. In choosing William S. Knudsen, former president of General Motors, as chairman of the Office of Production Management and, after January 1942, the director of production in the Office of the Under Secretary of War, Roosevelt selected one of the most gifted industrialists, planners—and capitalists—in American history.60
Roosevelt lacked the historical vision of Winston Churchill. But he possessed a superior political savvy in domestic matters. He had an uncanny intuition of what the American people would tolerate, and how to push programs and objectives through guile, deception, and stealth that they would not have otherwise embraced if fully apprised. Whereas Churchill was defeated and left office before the final victory over Japan, even an enfeebled Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term.61
Roosevelt did not make decisions in the unilateral fashion of Hitler or Mussolini. Nor was he as engaged as Churchill in altering the operational pulse of the battlefield. Instead, his style was to solicit advice, create commissions and boards, and brainstorm with advisors by teasing out contrary positions, playing devil’s advocate, and at times misleading his own advisors about his ultimate decision that could overrule even the consensus of his Joint Chiefs.
New Dealer advisor Harry Hopkins, chronically ill and often incapacitated, moved into the White House to help frame strategic questions in terms of winning the war and being acceptable to the public. General George Marshall and Admiral William Leahy of the Joint Chiefs probably offered as much advice privately as they did officially. Many members of the New Deal “Brain Trust” continued their advisory roles during the war, such as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, as well as formal executives like James Byrnes (Office of War Mobilization), Cordell Hull (Secretary of State), and Henry Morgenthau (Secretary of the Treasury). None of these men was a great strategic thinker; all were loyal, intimate with the president, and good planners.
The most controversial American decisions in the war, both good and terrible—the allegiance to the so-called Plan Dog strategic aim of 1940 to concentrate on Europe first; the understandable choice not to attempt to reinforce the Philippines in 1942; the cruel but necessary effort to conduct a costly strategic bombing campaign in Europe and unrestricted fire raids against Japan; the insistence on a second front through an amphibious landing in western France; the necessary insistence on unconditional surrender of the Axis powers; as well as a host of unfortunate strategic moves and policies (the needless and unconstitutional move to intern Japanese resident nationals and Japanese-American citizens, the naive effort to become not just an ally but a full partner of Stalin’s Russia, or the costly retaking of the Philippines)—were largely Roosevelt’s own, but ostensibly either arrived at through general consensus of the War and State Departments, or at least supported by the majority of key wartime advisors in various departments and on committees.62
Roosevelt did not influence the appointments of generals in the field in the manner of any of the Axis leaders or perhaps even his own allies Churchill and Stalin. He outsourced most of the key operational decisions to his senior advisors, who crafted the first Joint Chiefs of Staff: Generals Arnold and Marshall, and Admirals King and Leahy. The four, nominally equally representative of air, land, and sea power under the auspices of Leahy, mostly on their own made such decisions about which generals were appointed, transferred, or fired, with notable exceptions such as Roosevelt’s decision to save and keep manageable the politically connected General MacArthur as supreme Pacific commander (and thus out of domestic politics) or quite unfairly to have fired the prescient Admiral James O. Richardson, expert on the Japanese Navy, who had warned about moving the unprepared Pacific Fleet to an exposed Pearl Harbor berth.
Such delegation was largely more successful than the alternative practiced by both the Axis and other allies, and usually led to the selection of superb field commanders. When it did not—a holdover showboat commander like Lieutenant General Lloyd Fredendall or an incompetent Major General John Lucas—the lapse did not reflect on Roosevelt’s leadership. More interestingly, Roosevelt delighted in audacious commanders whose temperament and language could hardly be termed liberal. He made the necessary allowances for the talented but crusty Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King and kept him on after retirement age, indirectly supported the retention of George S. Patton after the infamous slapping incidents, and liked to hear of the aggressiveness (and even occasional recklessness) of admirals like Bill Halsey.63
A more hands-on commander in chief, appointing and firing generals as Lincoln did in managing Union strategy in the Civil War, might have raised greater skepticism about the costs versus benefits of early daylight and unescorted strategic bombing. He could have cross-examined the conduct of the Italian campaign, the Arnhem effort, or the preliminary plans to invade Okinawa. Yet Roosevelt’s strength was his early intuition that Europe’s early border wars between September 1939 and May 1941 presaged an existential struggle between democracy and an evil European fascism of a sort not seen before. Even in the mid-1930s, he rightly assumed that compromise with Hitler was impossible, something universally obvious in hindsight but not so clear to most of Roosevelt’s European and American contemporaries other than the realist Winston Churchill. Perhaps, the president’s tragic lapse was that he did not bring the same degree of deep distrust to an equally murderous Soviet totalitarianism. In its postwar planning, the United States sometimes went well beyond the realpolitik of encouraging and enabling Soviet resistance to the Wehrmacht to a naive belief that “Uncle Joe” was a reasonable man and his style of Soviet communism a mere rough sort of socialism that might become a possible future compliant partner of the British and American democracies.64
Had Roosevelt been as suspicious of Stalin’s murderous gulag and expansionary plans as he was sometimes of Churchill’s effort to preserve Britain’s colonial possessions, the United States might have been better prepared for the Cold War that was already beginning by 1944. It is hard to know the extent to which Roosevelt’s naiveté imperiled the alliance or led to the foundations of the Cold War, but there is no doubt that he was not only naive but vain about what he thought was his ability to manipulate an even wilier Stalin. He once inanely wrote Churchill in early 1942: “I know you will not mind me being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”65
The bottom line for FDR as a wartime leader is unambiguous. Under him, American planners charted out two spheres of responsibility against Japan: the Pacific Islands and their trajectories to Tokyo would be the focus of the United States, while Burma and the Indian Ocean area would be the greater colonial concerns of Britain. If the two allies would seek parallel paths to defeating Japan, in Europe their planning would be nearly uniform. Roosevelt assured the jittery British that they would no longer face Hitler alone, while in the Pacific, America would seek its own pathways toward Tokyo and not quibble with the British over their imperial interests but on occasion supply them ample troops and air power to fight in Burma.66
If Roosevelt lacked the street-fighting ability and experience of the lower-class Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, he nonetheless knew what it was to suffer physically. He was politically ruthless without being immoral, amid a cataclysmic war in which both his enemies and his ally Joseph Stalin were politically ruthless and homicidal. When America’s numerous wartime strategic, economic, and operational successes are weighed against its much rarer lapses, Franklin Delano Roosevelt deserves great credit as a force multiplier of American industry and its twelve-million-man armed forces.
IF A WARTIME leader is to be judged solely on the amoral basis of promoting his country’s short-term national interests, such as surviving a surprise attack of four million Axis troops, Joseph Stalin stands above all the rest. For the first three years of World War II (1939–1942), however, Stalin was often the stereotypical paranoid, parochial, and bloodthirsty communist apparatchik. Although Stalin had tripled the size of the Red Army in just the four years between 1937 and 1941, it was shorted over sixty thousand high-ranking officers, given his savage purges of 1937–1939 that sent some of his best commanders to the firing squad and mostly exiled the rest. The newly enrolled four hundred thousand officers of the Red Army that first met the Germans in June 1941 were, for the most part, without much more than two years’ experience.
Stalin had also foolishly pushed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, apparently clueless that Hitler would break it at his convenience. His idea that capitalist states would exhaust themselves in endless wars in Western Europe to the benefit of the Soviet Union displayed a deep misunderstanding of the strength of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, and of the central message of Mein Kampf, best summed up by Hitler’s adage that “German victory [was] incompatible with Russian ideology.” Stalin’s effort to annex slices of southern Finland almost ended in disaster. He was criminally negligent in ignoring intelligence warnings about the impending Operation Barbarossa, again failing to grasp that Hitler’s destructive ideology was ultimately pointed eastward. He seemed to have experienced some sort of incapacity for the first two weeks of the German invasion and did not appear to the public until July 3, 1941. For the first three months of the German invasion, his no-retreat orders doomed over two million Russians, who were taken prisoner in huge encirclements and, for the most part, never accounted for. After stunning defensive successes at Moscow in December 1941 and Stalingrad in February 1943, Stalin ordered precipitous counteroffensives that often proved near catastrophic.67
Stalin’s self-interested duplicities needlessly ensured a falling out with his own allies before the war’s conclusion. His shrill and disingenuous demands for a second front ignored the fact that the Soviet Union had been Hitler’s de facto ally and that there existed a second front of British expeditionary forces trying to help France in 1940 and when Germany bombed a lonely Britain months later. Unlike Britain, Stalin had only joined the antifascist side of the war when his fascist partner double-crossed him. Stalin envisioned the Allied alliance as a war only against the invaders of the Soviet Union, and delegated effort against Italy and the Japanese to the British and Americans.
It is impossible to underestimate Stalin’s ingratitude. He was an amnesiac to the fact that the new Soviet Union under the terms of the March 1918 Brest-Litovsk Treaty with victorious Imperial Germany had lost nearly a quarter of its territory, and won much of it back nearly nine months later due only to the Western Allies’ victory and insistence at Versailles that German-occupied territory be restored to its owners. Stalin gave little credit to the Allied effort in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy; the strategic bombing of the Third Reich; the Anglo-American war against the Japanese; Lend-Lease; and the naval war against the Axis, all of which predated the second front that opened on June 6, 1944.
Stalin’s pouts and accusations were serial, and he often begged off conferences with his two Allied partners. Because Stalin had occasionally dreamed of (and concluded) various separate accommodations with Hitler, he was inevitably accusing Churchill and Roosevelt of just such duplicity. The irony of his rule was that his own responsibility for the deaths of millions of Russians in the collectivizations and purges of the 1920s and 1930s had hardened him psychologically for the mass death visited upon his people by the Wehrmacht. No wonder the murderous Hitler admired him most of the Allied Big Three.68
Stalin was of little or no direct help to the Allied European and Pacific strategic bombing campaigns. He made it almost impossible to continue fueling Allied bombers on turnaround stops in the Ukraine, and interned B-29 crews downed in Soviet territory. Ostensibly, Stalin triangulated out of fears of breaking accords with the Japanese and thus losing his safe transit lines of Lend-Lease materiel across the Pacific from the American West Coast, and more pragmatically hoped to gain an edge in the postwar era, such as by reverse engineering detained B-29s. He ensured that the Russian people did not know the full extent of British and American help to Russia and their contributions to winning the war. The Soviet massacre of over twenty thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest was Hitlerian; so was Stalin’s contrived delay before Warsaw to allow the Wehrmacht to kill off his future Polish anticommunist rivals. His vision of a postwar communist Eastern Europe often trumped strategies for defeating the Wehrmacht in 1944–1945.69
All that said, it is hard to imagine any other wartime leader, with the possible exception of Churchill, who could have lost nearly 20–30 percent of his territory to enemy occupation, much of his industrial production, with over a quarter of his population destroyed or occupied, and yet in little over a year so reorganized his vastly reduced nation that it outproduced Nazi Germany in critical areas like tanks and planes. The wholesale transfer of Soviet industry far to the east of Moscow still staggers the imagination. So do the harsh conditions under which Soviet workers vastly outproduced their pan-European counterparts—a continuation of the increase in Soviet war production centered in the Urals that was already under way in the late 1930s.
When the Third Reich peaked and then ebbed in early 1943, there was no possibility of recovery analogous to the Russian rebound after the disasters of 1941–1942. Stalin’s tenacity convinced even some of the German General Staff that the loss of European Russia and the chief cities of the Soviet Union would not de facto mean the end of the Soviet ability to wage war.70
More mysterious, the Soviet command economy produced not only vast amounts of munitions and weaponry, but also high-quality tanks, artillery, rockets, and fighter-bombers. Capitalism encouraged individual genius to produce unmatched technology in a way impossible in authoritarian societies and command economies. But during World War II, Stalin’s Russia had so borrowed, stolen, or invented new weapons and processes of industrial production that its later armies were often the best equipped of the war.71
At war’s end in September 1945, Churchill had been humiliated by being voted out of office. Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini were dead; Tojo, discredited, bereft of supreme power, and fated to meet the gallows. In contrast to them all, the old dictator Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in recorded history, was thriving and would live on another eight years to threaten the two allies that had helped save him.
The Soviets would carve out a buffer zone in Eastern Europe before occupying their share of conquered Germany. Stalin rightly figured that the Allies would value the Russian destruction of the German army far more than they would worry about his own past genocides, his opportunistic armistice with Japan, or his apparent unwillingness to abide by promises of free elections in lands that the Red Army occupied. If Stalin’s strategy was by needs one-dimensional, it also proved apt, relying on Allied material aid, various second fronts opening in the West, and an exclusive Anglo-American effort against the Japanese.
CHURCHILL, ROOSEVELT, AND Stalin were sophisticated strategic thinkers who knew why they went to war, where to fight it, and how to end it. In contrast, Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo started wars without a realistic appreciation of the resources of their enemies, or of how they might impair the Allied ability to produce material and raise manpower—much less of how they were to close out such theaters to their own advantage. Basic questions of ensuring ample means for vaulted strategic ends were ignored by an Axis command blinded by ideology and impatient with the details of what it took to create effective militaries to fight on a global scale. Given Axis material inferiority on land, at sea, and in the air, Allied leaders needed only to be competent rather than inspired. That most Allied leaders—and, as discussed in the next chapter, generals and admirals as well—proved as good as or better than their German, Italian, and Japanese counterparts meant that a war largely predetermined by production and manpower could be won even more rapidly by skill and insight.