World War II was the most destructive enterprise in human history. It is sobering to consider that more resources, material, and human lives (as many as 75 million to 100 million dead) were expended on World War II than on any other human activity. This conflict was so all-encompassing that few side wars took place simultaneously, the Russo-Finnish War of 1939–1940 being one of the exceptions.
The debate over the origins of World War I had become something of a cottage industry among historians in the 1920s and 1930s. The question rarely arises over World War II except on the narrow issue of whether U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Whatever their grievances (certainly minor in comparison to the misery they inflicted on their victims), Germany and Japan are almost universally considered the aggressors of World War II.
World War II is historically unique in that it represents if not necessarily a crusade a conflict of good against evil. More than 70 years after the end of this war, no mainstream or serious historians defend Nazi Germany’s policies. Perhaps more surprisingly, there are also few if any scholars who would do likewise for militaristic Japan. In practically all previous conflicts, historians find sufficient blame to give all belligerents a share. For example, no prominent historian takes seriously the Versailles provision that Germany was somehow completely responsible for the outbreak of World War. German führer Adolf Hitler and his followers have thus retained mythic status as personifications of pure evil, something not seen since the Wars of Religion of 17th-century Europe.
The starting date of World War II, however, is disputed. Some have gone as far back as the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931. Others date its outbreak to the opening of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. But these were conflicts between two Asian powers, hardly global war.
The more traditional and accepted date for the start of World War II is September 1, 1939, with the quick but not quite blitzkrieg (lightning warfare) German invasion of Poland. This action brought France and Great Britain into the conflict on September 3 in accordance with their guarantees to Poland. (The Soviet Union’s invasion of eastern Poland on September 17 provoked no similar reaction.)
The Germans learned from their Polish campaign and mounted a true blitzkrieg offensive against the Low Countries and France, commencing on May 10, 1940. In blitzkrieg, the tactical airpower of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) knocked out command and communications posts as integrated armor division pincers drove deep into enemy territory, bypassing opposition strongpoints. When all went well, the pincers encircled the slow-moving enemy. Contrary to legend, the armored forces were simply the spearheads; the bulk of the German Army was composed of foot soldiers and horses. Further, the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force combined had more and usually better tanks than the Germans, and those nations’ forces were not too seriously inferior in the air.
The sluggish Allies were simply outmaneuvered, losing France in six weeks, to the astonishment of the “experts.” France remains the only major industrial democracy ever to be conquered, and that after a single campaign. It was also the only more or less motorized nation to suffer such a fate; many French refugees fled the rapidly advancing Germans in their private cars. The Germans found that the French Routes Nationales, designed to enable French forces to reach the frontiers, could also be used in the opposite direction by an invader. The Germans themselves relearned this military truth on their autobahns in 1945.
Germany suffered its first defeat of the war when its air offensive against Great Britain, the world’s first great air campaign, was thwarted in the Battle of Britain. The margin of victory was small, for there was little to choose between the Royal Air Force’s Hurricane and Spitfire fighters and the Luftwaffe’s Bf-109 or between the contenders’ pilots. The main advantages of the Royal Air Force in this battle were radar and the geographic fact that its pilots and their warplanes were shot down over Britain; German pilots and aircraft in a similar predicament were out of action for the duration and also had farther to fly from their bases. But Great Britain’s greatest advantage throughout this stage of the war was its prime minister, Winston Churchill, who gave stirring voice and substance to Allied defiance of Hitler.
Nonetheless, by the spring of 1941 Nazi Germany had conquered or dominated all of the European continent with but few exceptions. Greece, which had beaten back an inept Italian offensive, finally capitulated to the German Balkan blitzkrieg in the spring of that year. At the same time the Battle of the Atlantic raged, with German submarines seeking to starve out Britain.
Nazi Germany then turned on its erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, in Operation BARBAROSSA, the greatest military campaign of all time, in order to fulfill Hitler’s enduring vision of crushing “Judeo-Bolshevism.” (How far Hitler’s ambitions of conquest ranged beyond the Russian East is still a matter of dispute.) If he had any introspective moments then, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin must have wished that he still possessed the legions of first-rate officers he had shot or slowly destroyed in the Gulag in the wake of his bloody purge of 1937. Stalin’s own inept generalship played a major role in the early Soviet defeats, and German forces drove almost to within sight of the Kremlin’s towers in December 1941 before being beaten back.
Early that same month war erupted in the Pacific, and the conflict then became truly a world war, with Japan’s coordinated combined attacks on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and British, Dutch, and American imperial possessions. With the Soviet Union holding out precariously and the United States now a belligerent, the Axis had lost the war, even though at the time few recognized that fact. America’s “Great Debate” as to whether and to what extent to aid Britain vanished in a national outpouring of collective wrath.
Pearl Harbor was bad enough, with 2,280 Americans dead, four battleships sunk, and the remaining four battleships damaged; much worse was to follow. As with the Germans in France, more professional Japanese forces surprised and outfought their opponents by land, sea, and air. Almost before they knew it, British and Dutch forces in Asia, superior in numbers alone, had been routed in one of the most successful combined-arms campaigns in history. (The French had already yielded control of their colony of Indochina, whose rice and raw materials were flowing to Japan, while the Japanese military had the use of its naval and air bases until the end of the war.) The course of the Malayan-Singapore campaign was typical. British land forces scarcely even delayed the Japanese army, Japanese fighters cleared the skies of British aircraft, and Japanese naval bombers flying from land bases quickly sank the new battleship Prince of Wales and the elderly battle cruiser Repulse. This disaster made it obvious that the aircraft carrier was the capital ship of the day. Singapore, the linchpin of imperial European power in Asia, surrendered ignominiously on February 16, 1942.
The British hardly made a better fight of it in Burma before having to evacuate that colony. Only the Americans managed to delay the Japanese seriously, holding out on the Bataan Peninsula and then at the Corregidor fortifications until May. The end of imperialism, at least in Asia, can be dated to the capitulation of Singapore, as Asians witnessed other Asians with superior technology and professionalism completely defeating Europeans and Americans.
And yet on Pearl Harbor’s very “Day of Infamy,” Japan had lost the war. Its forces had missed the American aircraft carriers as well as the oil tank farms and the machine shop complex. The Japanese killed many Americans, destroyed mostly obsolete aircraft, and sank a handful of elderly battleships, but they outraged Americans, who were determined to avenge the attack so that Japan would receive no mercy in the relentless land, sea, and air war that the United States was now to wage against it. More significant, American industrial and manpower resources vastly surpassed those that Japan could bring to bear in a protracted conflict.
And yet oddly, in view of its own ruthless conduct of warfare and occupation, Japan was the only major belligerent to hold limited aims in World War II. Japan basically wanted the Western “colonial” powers out of the Pacific, to be replaced, of course, by its own Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (a euphemism for “Asia for the Japanese”). No unconditional surrender demands ever issued from Tokyo. To Japan’s own people, of course, the war was presented as a struggle to the death against the arrogant “Anglo-Saxon imperialists.”
Three days after the Pearl Harbor attack, Hitler decided to declare war on the United States, a blunder fully as deadly as his invasion of the Soviet Union and even less explicable. But the Nazi dictator, on the basis of his customary “insights,” dismissed the American soldier as worthless and the industrial power of the United States as vastly overrated. This decision meant that the United States could not focus exclusively on Japan.
The tide would not begin to turn until the drawn-out naval-air clash in the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 7–8, 1942), the first naval battle in which neither side’s surface ships ever came within sight of each other. The following month the U.S. Navy avenged Pearl Harbor at the Battle of Midway (June 3–6), sinking no fewer than four invaluable Japanese carriers, again without the surface ships involved ever sighting each other. The loss of hundreds of superbly trained combat-experienced naval aviators and their highly trained maintenance crews was as great a blow to Japan as the actual sinking of its carriers. The Americans could make up their own losses far more easily than the Japanese, who did not deviate from their high prewar standards until the last months of the war.
Although considered a sideshow by the Soviets, the North African campaign was of the utmost strategic importance and until mid-1943 the only continental land campaign that the Western Allies were strong enough to mount. Had North Africa, including Egypt, fallen to the Axis (as almost occurred several times), the Suez Canal could not have been held, and German forces could have gone through the Middle East, mobilizing Arab nationalism, threatening the area’s vast oil fields, and even menacing the embattled Soviet Union itself. Not until the British commander in North Africa General Bernard Montgomery amassed a massive superiority in armor was German general Erwin Rommel defeated at El Alamein in October 1942 and slowly pushed back toward Tunisia. American and British landings in Rommel’s rear, in Algeria and Morocco, were successful, but the raw American troops received a bloody nose at Kasserine Pass. The vastly outnumbered North African Axis forces did not capitulate until May 1943.
Four months earlier the German Sixth Army had surrendered at Stalingrad, marking the resurgence of the Soviet armies. One should nonetheless remember that the distance between Casablanca and Cape Bon is much the same as that from Brest-Litovsk to Stalingrad, and more Axis troops surrendered at “Tunisgrad” than at Stalingrad. (One major difference was that almost all Axis prisoners of the Western Allies survived their imprisonment, while fewer than 1 in 10 of those taken at Stalingrad returned.)
By this time, U.S. production was supplying not only its own military needs but also those of most of its allies and on a scale moreover that by comparison to all other armed forces (except possibly the Canadians) was simply lavish. Everything from the canned meat product Spam to Sherman tanks and from aluminum ingots to finished aircraft crossed the oceans to the British Isles, the Soviet Union, the Free French, the Nationalist Chinese, the Fighting Poles, and so forth. To this day Russians refer to any multidrive truck as a studebork (Studebaker), a result of the tens of thousands of such vehicles shipped to the Soviet Union.
Moreover, quantity was not produced at the cost of quality. Although some of America’s allies might have felt some reservations toward Spam, the army trucks, the boots, the small arms, and the uniforms were unsurpassed. British soldiers noted with some envy that American enlisted men wore the same type of uniform material as did British officers. The very ships that transported the bulk of this war material, the famous mass-produced Liberty Ships (“Rolled out by the mile, chopped off by the yard”), could still be found on the world’s oceanic trade routes decades after they were originally scheduled to be scrapped.
After the North African campaign ended in 1943, the Allies drove the Axis forces from Sicily and then in September 1943 began the interminable Italian Campaign. It is perhaps indicative of the frustrating nature of the war in Italy that the lethargic Allies allowed it to begin with the escape of most Axis forces from Sicily to the peninsula. The Germans were still better at this sort of thing. Winston Churchill to the contrary, Italy was no “soft underbelly”; the Germans conducted well-organized retreats from one mountainous fortified line to the next. The Italian Campaign was occasionally justified for tying down many German troops; it tied down far more Allied forces, British, American, Free French, Free Poles, Brazilians, Canadians, Indians, British and French African colonials among them. German forces in Italy ultimately surrendered in late April 1945, only about a week before Germany itself capitulated.
The military forces of World War II’s belligerents, as might be expected in so historically widespread a conflict, varied wildly. The French Army in 1939, considered by “experts” the world’s best, was actually a slow-moving mass, often supplied with very good equipment and led by aged commanders who had “learned the lessons” of World War I. No other such powerful army was so completely defeated in so short a period of time. The French Air Force and the French Navy likewise had some excellent equipment and more progressive commanders than did the army, but France fell before they could have any great impact on the course of battle.
The German Army, by general agreement, was superb, so much so that some authorities would venture that the Germans traditionally have “a genius for war.” Obviously, Germany’s greatest and traditional failing has been denigration of the fighting ability of its opponents. But on the ground at the operational and tactical levels, the combination of realistic training, strict discipline, and flexible command made the German Army probably World War II’s most formidable foe.
One need only look at a map of Europe from 1939 to 1945 and calculate Germany’s enemies compared to its own resources. The Luftwaffe had superbly trained pilots, although their quality fell off drastically as the war turned against Germany. German fighters were easily the equal of any in the world, but surprisingly, given that Hitler’s earlier ambitions seemingly demanded a “Ural bomber,” the Luftwaffe never put a heavy four-engine bomber into production. Germany led the world in aerodynamics, putting into squadron service the world’s first jet fighter (Me-262), with swept wings, and even a jet reconnaissance bomber. German jet engines lagged somewhat behind those of the British. The Luftwaffe also fielded the Me-163 rocket-powered interceptor, but this craft was as great a menace to its own pilots as to the enemy.
The German Navy boasted some superb surface vessels, such as the battleship Bismarck, but Hitler found the sea alien, and he largely neglected Germany’s surface fleet. Submarines were an entirely different matter. U-boat “wolf packs” decimated Allied North Atlantic shipping, and the Battle of the Atlantic was the only campaign that the eupeptic Churchill claimed cost him sleep. German U-boats ravaged the American Atlantic coast, in the first months of 1942 ranging into Chesapeake Bay to take advantage of inexcusable American naval unpreparedness. As in World War I, convoy was the principal answer to the German U-boat, a lesson that had to be learned the hard way in both conflicts.
The British Army, on the whole, put in a mediocre performance in World War II. As with the French, although to a lesser degree, the British feared a repetition of the slaughter on the World War I Western Front, and, except for elite units, rarely showed much dash or initiative. Montgomery, the war’s most famous British general, consistently refused to advance until he had great superiority in men and material over his enemy. The British Expeditionary Force fought well and hard in France in 1940 but afterward moved sluggishly. By far the worst performance of the British Army was in Malaya-Singapore in the opening months of the war.
For all of their commando tradition, moreover, the British undertook few guerrilla actions in any of their lost colonies. Churchill was moved to wonder why the sons of the men who had fought so well in World War I on the Somme, with such heavy losses, suffered so badly by comparison to the Americans still holding out on Bataan. As late as 1943, the Japanese easily repulsed a sluggish British offensive in the Burma Arakan.
This situation changed drastically when General William Slim took command of the beaten, depressed Anglo-Indian forces in Burma. His was the only sizable Allied force not to outnumber the Japanese, yet he inflicted the worst land defeat in its history on Japan and destroyed the Japanese forces in Burma. Unlike so many Allied generals, he led from the front in the worst climate of any battle front. Slim managed to switch his army’s composition from jungle fighters to armored cavalry. His only tangible advantage over the enemy was his absolute control of the air, and with this he conducted the greatest air supply operation of the war. Although the modest Slim, of lower-middle-class background, achieved the highest rank in the British Army and then became one of Australia’s most successful governor-generals, he is almost forgotten today. Yet considering his accomplishments, with limited resources and in different conditions, William Slim should be considered the finest ground commander of World War II.
The Royal Navy suffered from a preponderance of battleship admirals at the opening of the war, most notably Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, convinced that “well-handled” capital ships could fight off aerial attacks. He was proved emphatically and fatally wrong when Japanese torpedo bombers rather swiftly dispatched his Prince of Wales and Repulse on the third day of war in the Pacific. The Royal Navy also labored under the handicap that not until 1937 did it win control of the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) from the RAF, which had little use for naval aviation and starved the FAA of funds and attention through the interwar years. Although the Royal Navy’s carriers were fine ships and their armored flight decks gave them a protection that the U.S. Navy envied, albeit at the cost of smaller aircraft capacity, Fleet Air Arm aircraft were so obsolete that the service had to turn to U.S. models. Even so, the FAA made history on November 11, 1940, when its obsolete Fairy Swordfish torpedo bombers sank three Italian battleships in Taranto Harbor, a feat that the Japanese observed carefully but the Americans did not.
British battleships and carriers kept the vital lifeline through the Mediterranean–Suez Canal open through the darkest days of the war and, together with the Americans and Canadians, defeated the German submarine menace in the North Atlantic. Significant surface actions of the Royal Navy included the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941 by an armada of Royal Navy battleships, cruisers, carriers, and warplanes and the destruction in December 1943 of the pocket battleship Scharnhorst by the modern battleship Duke of York.
The Soviet Army almost received its deathblow in the first months of the German invasion. Caught off balance and shorn of its best commanders by Stalin’s maniacal purges, their successors Stalin’s obedient creatures, it suffered heavier losses than any other army in history. Yet spurred by the bestiality of the German war of enslavement and racial extermination and by Stalin’s newfound pragmatism, the Red Army was able to spring back and, at enormous cost at the hands of the more professional Germans, fight its way to Berlin.
The Red Air Force developed into one of the most effective tactical airpowers of the war. (The Soviets constructed few heavy bombers.) The Sturmovik was certainly one of the best ground-attack aircraft of the time. The Red Navy, in contrast, apparently did little to affect the course of the war; its main triumph may have been in early 1945 when its submarines sank several large German passenger ships crammed with refugees from the east in the frigid Baltic in early 1945, the worst maritime disasters in history.
The United States emerged from World War II as the only nation since the time of the Romans to be a dominant power on land and sea, not to mention in the air. In 1945 the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy could have defeated any combination of enemies, and only the Russian Army could have seriously challenged the Americans on land. In 1939 the U.S. Army was about the size of that of Romania; by 1945 it had grown to some 12 million men and women.
World War II in the Pacific was the great epic of the U.S. Navy. From the ruin of Pearl Harbor, that service fought its way across the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean to Tokyo Bay and eventually had the satisfaction of watching the Japanese surrender on board a U.S. Navy battleship in that harbor. Immediately after Pearl Harbor it was obvious that the aircraft carrier was the ideal capital ship for this war, and the United States virtually mass-produced such warships in the Essex class. The U.S. Navy had much to learn from its enemy especially in night-fighting techniques, as demonstrated in the Battle of Savo Island (August 9, 1942), when Japanese cruisers sank one Australian and three U.S. cruisers in the worst sea defeat in U.S. naval history.
By the end of the war, though, almost all of Japan’s battleships and carriers had been sunk, most by naval airpower. U.S. Navy submarines succeeded where the German Navy had failed in two world wars, as U.S. unrestricted submarine warfare strangled the Japanese home islands, bringing near starvation. Equally impressive, the U.S. Navy in the Pacific originated the long-range sea train, providing U.S. sailors with practically all their needs while thousands of miles from the nearest continental American supply base.
The U.S. Marine Corps was a unique military force. Alone among the marine units of the belligerents, it had its own air and armor arms under its own tactical control. U.S. marines were the spearhead that stormed the Japanese-held islands of the Pacific, and the dramatic photograph of a small group of marines raising the American flag over the bitterly contested island of Iwo Jima became an icon of the war for Americans.
The Japanese Army was long on courage but shorter on individual initiative. A near-medieval force, its men often were led in wild banzai charges by sword-flourishing officers against machine-gun emplacements. The entire nation of Nippon was effectively mobilized against the looming Americans under the mindless slogan “Our Spirit against Their Steel.” But the history of the Japanese Army will be stained for the foreseeable future by the bestial atrocities it practiced against Allied troops and civilians alike; untold numbers of Chinese civilians, for example, were slaughtered during Japanese military campaigns in China, which continued to tie down substantial Japanese military resources. Only two-thirds of Allied troops unfortunate enough to fall into Japanese hands survived to the end of the war. Yet the Japanese Army was probably the best light infantry force of the war and was certainly the only World War II army that, on numerous occasions, genuinely fulfilled that most hackneyed order: “Fight on to the Last Man!”
The Imperial Japanese Navy and the air arms of the army and navy were superb in the early stages of the Pacific war. Both had extensive combat experience in the Chinese war and modern equipment. Japanese admirals were best in their class in 1941–1942, and Japanese air and naval forces, along with the Japanese Army itself, quickly wound up European colonial pretensions. Only the vast mobilized resources of the United States could turn the tide against Japan. And except for their complete loss of air control, only in Burma were the Japanese outfought on something like equal terms.
The aftermath of World War II proved considerably different from that of World War I’s prevailing disillusion. Amazingly, all of World War II’s belligerents, winners and losers alike, could soon look back and realize that the destruction of the murderous, archaic, racialist Axis regimes had genuinely cleared the way to a better world. All enjoyed peace and the absence of major war. Even for the Soviets the postwar decades were infinitely better than the prewar years, although much of this measure of good fortune might be attributed simply to the death of Joseph Stalin. Except for Great Britain, the British Commonwealth nations and even more so the United States emerged from the war far stronger than when they entered it after enduring a decade of the Great Depression.
By the 1950s, both war-shattered Western Europe and Japan were well on their way to becoming major competitors of the United States. The uniquely sagacious and foresighted Western Allied military occupations of Germany, Japan, and Austria in many ways laid the foundations for the postwar prosperity of these former enemy nations. (For the most part, similar good fortune bypassed the nondeveloped nations.) Within a few years former belligerents on both sides could agree that despite its appalling casualties and destruction, World War II had been, if not perhaps “The Good War,” at least something in the nature of a worthwhile war.
STANLEY SANDLER
References
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