Preface

THE MORE THAN three dozen missions carried out by my father, William F. Hanson, in a B-29 bomber over Japan, were a world apart from his cousin’s experience. Victor Hanson’s war ended in a fatal May 19, 1945, rendezvous with a Nambu machine gun nest on the crest of Sugar Loaf Hill with the 6th Marine Division on Okinawa. Both fought in a way foreign to their other cousin, Robert Hanson, who worked as a logistician in Iran, ferrying American military freight to the Russians.1

All three Hansons experienced different wars from that of my maternal cousin Richard Davis. He “rolled” across France as part of Patton’s Third Army. Dick’s war in turn was unlike that of another maternal cousin, Beldon Cather. As a boy I remember an occasionally feverish Beldon on the farm as a lifelong semi-invalid, suffering neurological disabilities from serial bouts with dengue fever contracted while fighting in the Pacific. Beldon did not battle in the same manner or against the same enemies or in the same places as his brother Holt, killed while serving in combat with an artillery battalion of the Seventh Army in November 1944, and buried in France at the Epinal American Cemetery.

World War II sent the youth of American, British, German, Japanese, Italian, and Russian families across the globe in odd alliances against each other. They battled in the air, at sea, and on the ground for all sorts of expressed reasons, employing machines that were often new and fighting in ways still not fully understood, and against a variety of enemies. When the veterans of my family shared stories about their service at holiday gatherings in the early 1960s, we eavesdroppers listened to their descriptions of exotic locales and situations, wondering whether they had even fought in the same war.

They insisted that they were kindred soldiers in a shared struggle against a common evil with a variety of faces. How fighting different enemies, alongside disparate allies, in greatly different ways across the globe coalesced into one war is a paradox—and the subject of this book. Its aim is to explain why a single conflict encompassed global fighting in ways not true of most prior wars, fought in limited locales between predictable enemies and through familiar methods.

I TITLE THIS book The Second World Wars for two reasons. One, no supposedly single conflict was ever before fought in so many diverse landscapes on premises that often seemed unrelated. And, two, never had a war been fought in so many different ways—to the extent that a rocket attack on London or jungle fighting in Burma or armor strikes in Libya seemed to belong to entirely different wars.

World War II, however, began traditionally enough in 1939–1940 in Europe as a series of border conflicts exclusively between European powers, including Britain. As is true of much of European history, aggressive states attacked their perceived weaker neighbors, usually through surprise and in reliance on greater preparation and armament. By the end of 1940, what had so far seemed to be familiar European infighting had achieved a Caesarian or Napoleonic scale. But by the end of 1941, something quite cataclysmic followed: all the smaller conflicts compounded unexpectedly into a total, global war, in which the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan were soon materially outmatched, strategically unprepared, and likely to lose in catastrophic fashion. Advances in Western technology and industrialization, when married with both totalitarian zealotry and fully mobilized democratic states, also ensured that the expanded war would become lethal in a way never before seen.2

Three unexpected events explain why the border fights that had begun periodically—and sometimes ended and started again—between 1939 and 1941 were no longer seen as a series of separate wars but had coalesced and became redefined as part of what we now know as World War II in the United States, or as the Second World War in the Anglosphere. First, Germany without warning invaded its partner, the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941). Second, in addition to its long war with China, Japan took on new enemies by conducting surprise attacks on the Pacific and Asian bases of Great Britain and the United States (December 7–8, 1941). Third, both Germany and Italy then declared war against the Americans (December 11, 1941).

Only these unforeseen developments in the single year of 1941 recalibrated prior regional conflicts in Europe and Asia into a continuous and now interconnected global war that drew three new powerful participants—Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States—into the two formidable alliances, with a vast array of aircraft carriers, sophisticated planes, artillery pieces, and vehicles. The new worldwide fight was rebranded as one of Germany, Italy, and Japan against Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China—with smaller and weaker allied states on both sides. Thus the holistic idea of a Second World War was born.3

Despite the wartime propagandas that followed, there were few common fault lines of religion, race, or geography to make sense of this confusing conflict—much less common methods of conducting the fighting. Being victims of Axis aggression, most often through unprovoked attacks, was about the only common bond that held the Allies together, a tripartite alliance that initially hinged on retaliating against Adolf Hitler and that thus dissipated months after his death almost as quickly as it had been formed.

THIS BOOK DOES not follow a strict chronological sequence. Nor does it offer a comprehensive narrative history of all the diverse theaters and campaigns of the war. Rather, it focuses on particular battles emblematic of the larger themes of how the respective belligerents made wise and foolish choices about why, how, and where to fight the war. It is not, then, an operational history of the war that provides detailed accounts of day-by-day fighting, advances, and retreats.

Instead, the book’s chapters analyze the diverse methods and effectiveness of combat—the role of civilians, industry, air power, navies, infantry, armor, siegecraft, and military leadership—to assess how these different investments and strategies led one side to win and the other to lose, and how the war’s diverse theaters, belligerents, and ways of fighting came eventually to define a single war.

A general theme also transcends the chapters: the once ascendant Axis powers were completely ill-prepared—politically, economically, and militarily—to win the global war they had blundered into during 1941. Simply killing the far greater number of soldiers and civilians over the next four years—the vast majority of them Russians, Eastern Europeans, and Chinese—never equated to destroying their enemies’ ability to make war.

I THANK MANY for help in completing this book. The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, has offered continued support since my appointment in 2003, especially from John Raisian, director emeritus, and the current director, Thomas Gilligan. I have learned a great deal on war and peace from my colleagues at Hoover, especially Peter Berkowitz, Peter Robinson, Shelby Steele, and Thomas Sowell. Eric Thomas Wakin, head of archives at Hoover, along with his staff, generously helped with assembling photographs from the trove of World War II material at Hoover. I thank Bill Nelson for drafting the maps. David Berkey, a research fellow in classics and military history at Hoover, has proven an invaluable research assistant, and I owe him considerable gratitude for his help in editing the manuscript, finding obscure books and periodicals, and bringing to my attention both facts and ideas that I otherwise would have missed. My assistant, Megan Ring, also offered timely organizational help, especially in matters of editing and bibliography.

Martin Anderson and his wife, the late Illie Anderson, generously supported my tenure as the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at Hoover. Each September I have spent my vacation teaching for a month as the Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where over the past decade I sought to draw out my colleagues about World War II, especially President Larry Arnn and Professors Tom Connor, Mark Kalthoff, and Paul Rahe. I also thank colleague Al Phillip of Hillsdale, who has partnered with me in leading annual military history tours of Europe over the last ten years, and helped to arrange visits to many of the major World War II battlefields and cities of conflict in war-torn Europe.

My friend of over thirty years, Professor Bruce Thornton, gave me his characteristic insight about the war and literature of the 1930s. My former editor at Encounter Books, Peter Collier, kindly read a rough draft of the manuscript, and I have profited greatly from his accustomed good sense and astute editorial advice—as well as from Professor Williamson Murray, whose vast knowledge of World War II is unmatched, and who generously offered a number of insightful suggestions, saving me from a number of wrong notions. Neither is responsible for any errors that have remained. Roger and Susan Hertog have been staunch supporters, and for over a decade I have valued Roger’s sound judgment on foreign affairs and security issues, past and present.

Lara Heimert, publisher of Basic Books, inspired me to write on World War II. Otherwise, I might never have undertaken this book. I thank Roger Labrie, a senior editor at Basic; Karl Yambert, my copyeditor; and Lara, for carefully editing the manuscript and helping me to clarify my thoughts and approaches. My literary agents of three decades Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu of Writers’ Representatives, along with Lara, encouraged me to think about writing a different history of World War II; once again I am indebted to Glen and Lynn for their expertise and my link with the publishing world from the distance of rural California.

My son Bill Hanson and daughter Pauli Steinback as usual offered steady encouragement and support, especially during the sudden and shared loss of our dear Susannah, daughter and sister, whose love of the past was matched by her constant enthusiasm and advice to persevere in the present, and whose weekly calls about the progress of this book helped me to finish it. I was so fortunate to have had the love and friendship of such a kind and gentle person, even for so brief a time.

Throughout the two years of writing and research, my wife and friend, Jennifer, offered her steady guidance and good sense—and lots of ideas when walking battlefields, whether on Omaha Beach, at Bastogne, or across Sicily.

I finish this book in my sixty-third year in the farmhouse of my great-great grandmother, Lucy Anna Davis. My own more recent memories of all who have lived here before me—grandparents Rees and Georgia Davis, parents Pauline and William Hanson, siblings Alfred and Nels Hanson, and cousins Maren and Rees Nielsen—and their shared love of the land have always made it a perfect place in which to write, remember, and commemorate. It was here as a small boy that I first learned to appreciate the terrible sacrifices of World War II from the dining-room discussions of family, agrarians, neighbors, and veterans who believed that their various Second World Wars were tragic and hellish—but still worth fighting even in such faraway and often deadly places.

VDH

Selma, California

August 2017