Inferno

The World at War, 1939-1945

By Max Hastings

One of the most important truths about the war, as indeed about all human affairs, is that people can interpret what happens to them only in the context of their own circumstances. The fact that, objectively and statistically, the sufferings of some individuals were less terrible than those of others elsewhere in the world was meaningless to those concerned. It would have seemed monstrous to a British or American soldier facing a mortar barrage, with his comrades dying around him, to be told that Russian casualties were many times greater. It would have been insulting to invite a hungry Frenchman, or even an English housewife weary of the monotony of rations, to consider that in besieged Leningrad starving people were eating one another, while in West Bengal they were selling their daughters. Few people who endured the LLuftwaffe’s 1940-41 blitz on London would have been comforted by knowledge that the German and Japanese peoples would later face losses from Allied bombing many times greater, together with unparalleled devastation. It is the duty and privilege of historians to deploy relativism in a fashion that cannot be expected of contemporary participants. Almost everyone who participated in the war suffered in some degree: the varied scale and disparate nature of their experiences are themes of this book. But the fact that the plight of other people was worse than one’s own did little to promote personal stoicism.

(Hastings 2011, pp.xvii)

If Stalin was not Hitler’s cobelligerent, Moscow’s deal with Berlin made him the cobeneficiary of Nazi aggression. From 23 August onwards, the world saw Germany and the Soviet Union acting in concert, twin faces of totalitarianism. Because of the manner in which the global struggle ended in 1945, with Russia in the Allied camp, some historians have accepted the postwar Soviet Union’s classification of itself as a neutral power until 1941. This is mistaken. Though Stalin feared Hitler and expected eventually to have to fight him, in 1939 he made a historic decision to acquiesce in German aggression, in return for Nazi support for Moscow’s own programme of territorial aggrandisement. Whatever excuses the Soviet leader later offered, and although his armies never fought in partnership with the Wehrmacht, the Nazi-Soviet Pact established a collaboration which persisted until Hitler revealed his true purposes in Operation Barbarossa.

The Moscow nonaggression agreement, together with the subsequent 28 September Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation, committed the world’s two principal tyrants to endorse each other’s ambitions and forswear mutual hostilities in favour of aggrandisement elsewhere. Stalin indulged Hitler’s expansionist policies in the west, and gave Germany important material aid – oil, corn and mineral products. The Nazis, however insincerely, conceded a free hand in the east to the Soviets, whose objectives included eastern Finland and the Baltic states in addition to a large share of Poland’s carcass.

(Hastings 2011, pp.4-5)

The Wehrmacht was vastly better armed and armoured than its enemies. Poland was a poor country, with only a few thousand military and civilian trucks; its national budget was smaller than that of the city of Berlin. Given the poor quality and small number of Polish planes compared with those of the Luftwaffe, it is remarkable that the campaign cost Germany 560 aircraft. Lt. Piotr Tarczsynski’s artillery battery came under intense shellfire a mile from the river Warta. Tarczsynski, a forward observer, found his telephones dead; linesmen sent to investigate never returned. Without having summoned a single salvo, he was surrounded by German infantrymen who took him prisoner. Like many men in his predicament, he sought to ingratiate himself with his captors: “I can only compare my situation with that of someone finding himself unexpectedly faced by influential strangers upon whom he is completely dependent. I know I ought to have been ashamed of myself.” As he was marched away to captivity, he passed several dead Polish soldiers; instinctively, he raised his hand to salute each one.

(Hastings 2011, pp.15)

When the Whrmacht entered Lodz, thirteen-year-old George Slazak was bewildered by seeing some women throw flowers at the soldiers, and offer them sweets and cigarettes. Small children shouted “Heil Hitler!” Slazak wrote wonderingly: “Boys I was at school with waved swastika flags.” Though these welcoming civilians were Polish citizens, they were of German ancestry and now flaunted their heritage. Josef Goebbels launched a strident propaganda campaign to convince his own people of the justice of their cause. On 2 September the Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter announced the invasion in a double-deck headline in red ink: “The Fuhrer Proclaims the Fight for Germany’s Rights and Security.” On 6 September Lokal-Anzeiger’s headlines asserted: “Terrible Betiality of the Poles – German Fliers Shot – Red Cross Columns Mowed Down – Nurses Murdered.” A few days later, Deutshe Allegmeine Zeitung carried the startling heading “Poles Bombard Warsaw.” The story below stated: “Polish artillery of every calibre opened fire from the eastern part of Warsaw against our troops in the western part of the city.” The German news agency denounced Polish resistance as “senseless and insane.”

Most young Germans, graduates of the Nazi educational system, unhesitatingly accepted the version of events offered by their leaders. “The advance of the armies has become an irresistible march to victory,” wrote a twenty-year-old Luftwaffe flight trainee. “Scenes of deep emotion occur within the liberations of the terrorised German residents of the Polish Corridor. Dreadful atrocities, crimes against all the laws of humanity, are brought to light by our armies. Near Bromberg and Thornn they discover mass graves containing the bodies of thousands of Germans who have been massacred by the Polish Communists.”

(Hastings 2011, pp.16)

Seven hundred fascists were interned, though most of the aristocrats who had flirted with Hitler were spared. “It certainly is breath-taking how all these lords get away with theri pre-war affiliations to the Nazi regime,” complained the British communist Elizabeth Belsey in a letter to her soldier husband. If the British had emulated French policy towards communists, thousands of trades unionists and a substantial part of the intellectual class would also have been incarcerated, but these too were left at liberty. There was still much silliness in the air: the Royal Victoria Hotel at St. Leonards-on-Sea, advertising its attractions in The Times, asserted that “the ballroom and adjacent toilets have been made gas- and splinter-proof.” Published advertisements for domestic staff made few concessions to conscription: “Wanted: second housemaid of three, wages £42 per annum; two ladies in family; nine servants kept.” The archbishop of Centerbury declared that Christians were allowed to pray for victory, but the archbishop of York disagreed. While the war was a righteous one, he said, it was not a holy one: “We must avoid praying each other down.” Some clergymen urged their congregations to ask the Almighty’s help for charity: “Save me from bitterness and hatred towards the enemy.” There was anger among British Christians, however, when in November the pope sent a message of congratulation to Hitler on escaping an assassination attempt.

(Hastings 2011, pp.30)

The Dunkirk evacuation was announced to the British public on 29 May, when civilian volunteers from the Small Boat Pool joined warships rescuing men from the beaches and harbour. The Royal Navy’s achievement during the week that followed became the stuff of legend. Vice Adm. Bertram Ramsey, operating from an underground headquarters at Dover, directed the movements of almost 900 ships and small craft with extraordinary calm and sill. The removal of troops from the beaches in civilian launches and pleasure boats forged the romantic image of Dunkirk, but by far the larger proportion – some two-thirds – were taken off by destroyers and other large vessels, loading at the harbour mole. The navy was fortunate that, throughout Operation Dynamo, the Channel remained almost preternaturally calm.

(Hastings 2011, pp.64)

The legend of Dunkirk was besmirched by some uglinesses, as is the case with all great historical events: a significant number of British seamen invited to participate in the evacuation refused to do so, including the Rye fishing fleet and some lifeboat crews; others, after once experiencing the chaos of the beaches and Luftwaffe bombing, on reaching England refused to set forth again. White most fighting units preserved their cohesion, there were disciplinary collapses among rear-echelon personnel, which made it necessary for some officers to draw and indeed use their revolvers. For the first three days, the British were content to take off their own men, while the French held a perimeter southwards and were refused access to shipping. On at least one occasion when poilus attempted to board vessels, they were fired on by disorderly British troops. Only when Churchill intervened personally did ships begin to take off Frenchmen, 53,000 of them after the last British personnel had been embarked. Most subsequently insisted upon repatriation – and thereafter found themselves forced labourers in Germany – rather than remain as exiles in Britain.

(Hastings 2011, pp.65)

The towering reality was that the BEF got away. Some 338,000 men were brought back to England, 229,000 of them British, the remainder French and Belgian. The withdrawal and evacuation were widely held to be Gort’s personal triumph; but while the C-in-C indeed gave appropriate orders, success would have been unattainable had not Hitler held back his tanks. It remains unlikely, though just plausible, that this was a political decision, prompted by a belief that restraint would render the British more susceptible to peace negotiations. More credibly, Hitler accepted Gorig’s assurance that the Luftwaffe could finish off the BEF, which no longer threatened German strategic purposes; and the panzers needed rapid refit before being urgently redeployed against Wygand’s forces. The French First Army conducted a brave stand at Lille, which contributed importantly to holding the Germans off the Dunkirk perimeter; it was understandable that British soldiers showed bitterness towards their allies, but Churchill’s army had performed little better than Reynaud’s in the continental campaign.

(Hastings 2011, pp.66)

Modern staff-college war games of the 1940 campaign sometimes conclude with German defeat. This causes a few historians to argue that Hitler’s triumph on the battlefield, far from being inevitable, might have been averted. It is hard to accept this view. In the years that followed the 1940 debacle, the German army repeatedly demonstrated its institutional superiority over the Western Allies, who prevailed on battlefields only when they had a substantial superiority of men, tanks and air support. The Wehrmacht displayed a dynamic energy entirely absent from the 1940 Allied armies. Contrary to popular myth, the Germans did not conquer France in accordance with a detailed plan for blitzkrieg – lightning war. Rather, commanders – and especially Guderian – showed inspired opportunism, with results that exceeded their wildest expectations. If the French had moved faster and the Germans more slowly, the outcome of the campaign could have been different, but such an assertion is meaningless.

(Hastings 2011, pp.72)

Stalin probably expected eventually to fight Germany, but anticipated at least two or three years’ grace before a showdown. The Soviet Union had embarked on a massive rearmament programme that was still far from fulfillment. Stalin believed that Hitler gained too many material advantages from their relationship to breach the Nazi-Soviet Pact, at least until Britain was occupied. The German navy enjoyed access to northern Russian ports. Vast quantities of corn, commodities and oil flowed from the Soviet Union to the Reich. Even after the French surrender Stalin remained anxious to avoid provocation of his dangerous neighbour, and constructed no major fortifications on his western frontier. Instead, he exploited the chaos of the moment to increase his own territorial gains. While the eyes of the world were fixed on France, he annexed the Baltic states, where in the year that followed the NKVD conducted savage purges and mass deportations. From Romania, he took Bessarabia, which had been Russian property between 1812 and 1919, and the Bukovina. At least 100,000 Romanians, and perhaps as many as half a million, were deported to Central Asia, to replace Russian industrial workers conscripted into the army. Amid events in the west, few people outside the world’s foreign ministries noticed the human catastrophe created by Stalin in the east; to that extent, Hitler’s lunge across western Europe served Soviet interests. But Russia’s warlord recognised the outcome as a calamity almost as alarming for his own nation as for the vanquished Western powers.

Italy entered the war alongside Hitler on 10 June, in a shamelessly undignified scramble for a share of the spoils. Benito Mussolini feared Hitler and disliked Germans, as did many of his fellow countrymen, but he was unable to resist the temptation to secure cheap gains in Europe and the Allied African empires. Mussolini’s conduct inspired the derision of most of his contemporaries, friends and foes alike: he coupled himself to Hilter because he sought for his country a splendour he knew Italians could not achieve alone; he wanted the rewards of war, in return for a token expenditure of blood. To his intimates in May and June 1940, he repeatedly expressed hopes that a thousand or two Italians might be killed before a peace settlement with the Allies was signed, to pay for the booty he wanted.

On the eve of commencing hostility with France, Mussolini asserted privately his intention to declare war, but not to wage it. Unsurprisingly, this minimalist approach precipitated a fiasco: on 17 June, when the French had already asked for an armistice, he abruptly ordered an attack on the Franco-Italian border in the Alps. The Italian army, wrong-footed by the sudden transition from manning fixed positions to launching an offensive, was briskly repulsed. The Duce’s delusions and confusion of purpose persisted thereafter: he expressed hopes that the British would not make peace until Italy had been able to make some show of contributing to their defeat, and that the Germans would suffer a million casualties before Britain was overrun. He wished to see Hitler victorious, but not all-powerful. All his dreams would perish in a fashion that would have rendered Mussolini an object of pity and ridicule, had not his delusions cost so many lives.

(Hastings 2011, pp.74-75)

Among the more unlikely spectators of the German victory parade in Paris on 22 June was a bewildered nineteen-year-old English girl, Rosemary Say, who found herself trapped in the French capital:

The war machine rolled down the Champs Elysees: gleaming horses, tanks, machinery, guns and thousands upon thousands of soldiers. The procession was immaculate, shining and seemingly endless … like a gigantic green snake that wound itself around the heart of the broken city, which waited pathetically to be swallowed up. There was a huge crowd of onlookers, most of them silent but some cheering. My [neutral American] companions were like small boys: calling out the names of different regiments, exclaiming at the modern tanks and whistling at the wonderful horses. I was quiet, fully conscious that I was caught up in a moment of history. Even so, I felt no grand emotions … But as the hours passed and the seemingly endless spectacle continued, I began to feel a little ashamed at having accepted the invitation. I thought of my family and friends back in London, and of the fears for the future they must have.

Before the Germans attacked in the west, the Allies had wanted a long war, believing this would serve their best interests by enabling them a mobilise both American support and their own industrial resources against Hitler. The fall of Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium and Holland seemed to show that instead, the Nazis had achieved a swift and conclusive triumph. Few people anywhere in the world saw that Germany’s armistice with France, signed in the historic railway carriage at Compiegne on 22 June, marked not an end, but a beginning. The scale of Hitler’s ambitions, and the stubbornness of Churchill’s defiance, had yet to reveal themselves.

(Hastings 2011, pp.75-76)

The RAF strongly discouraged the cult of the “ace,” and of personal scores, but the Luftwaffe energetically promoted it. Such stars as Adolf Galland, Helmut Wick and Werner Molders were said by resentful comrades to suffer from “halswah” – the “sore throat” on which they were eager to hang the coveted ribbon of a Knight’s Cross – as all three did when their score of kills mounted. Galland, a supremely effective air fighter but also a selfish and brutal one, had no patience with weaklings in his command. One day on the radio net a frightened German voice wailed, “Spitfire on my tail!” and then again a few moments later, “Spitfire still behind me! What should I do?” Galland snarled, “Aussteigen, sie bettnässer!” – “Bail our, you bed-wetter!”

Air combat, unlike any other form of warfare, engaged exclusively very young men, who alone had the reflexes for duels at closing speeds of up to 600 miles per hour; by thirty, they were past it. Commanders, confined to headquarters, issued orders. But outcomes hinged upon the prowess of pilots in or just out of their teens. Almost everything they said and did in the air and on the ground reflected their extreme youth; on 17 August Lt. Hans-Otto Lessing, a Bf-109 pilot, wrote exultantly to his parents, describing his unit’s hundredth alleged “victory” like a schoolboy reporting the success of his football team: “We are in the Geschwader of Major Molders, the most successful … During the last few days the British have been getting weaker, though individuals continue to fight well … The Hurricanes are tired old ‘puffers’ … I am having the time of my life. I would not swap places with a king. Peacetime is going to be very boring after this!” One of the despised “puffers” killed him the following afternoon.

(Hastings 2011, pp.82-83)

Hitler might have attempted an invasion of Britain if the Luftwaffe had secured control of the airspace over the Channel and southern England. As it was, however, instinctively wary of the sea and of an unnecessary strategic gamble, he took few practical steps to advance German preparations, beyond massing barges in the Channel ports. Churchill exploited the threat more effectively than did the prospective invaders, mobilising every citizen to the common purpose of resisting the enemy if they landed. Signposts and place-names were removed from crossroads and stations, beaches wired, overage and underage men recruited to local Home Guard units and provided with simple weapons. Churchill deliberately and even cynically sustained the spectre of invasion until 1942, fearing that if the British people were allowed to suppose the national crisis head passed, their natural lassitude would reassert itself.

(Hastings 2011, pp.89-90)

From his own perspective, he had no choice. The German economy was much less strong than its enemies supposed – only slightly larger than that of Britain, which enjoyed a higher per capita income. It could not indefinitely be sustained on a war footing, and was stretched to the limits to feed the population and arm the Wehrmacht. Hitler was determined to secure his strategic position in Europe before the United States entered the war, which he anticipated in 1942. The only option unavailable to him was that of making peace, since Churchill refused to negotiate. Hitler persuaded himself that British obstinacy was fortified by a belief that Churchill might forge an alliance with Stalin, which could make victory over Germany seem plausible. Thus, the Soviet Union’s defeat would make Britain’s capitulation inevitable. If Germany was destined to engage in a death struggle with Russia, it would be foolish to delay this while Stalin rearmed. On 18 December, Hitler issued a formal directive for an invasion, to be launched at the end of May 1941.

Hitler saw three reasons for striking: first, he wished to do so, in fulfillment of his ambition to eradicate bolshevism and create a German empire in the east; second, it seemed prudent to eliminate the Soviet threat before again turning west for a final settlement with Britain and the United States; third, he identified economic arguments. Ironically, Russia’s vast deliveries of raw materials and commodities following the Nazi-Soviet PAct – which in 1940 included most of Germany’s animal-feed imports, 74 percent of its phosphorus, 67 percent of its asbestos, 65 percent of it chrome ore, 55 percent of its manganese, 40 percent of its nickel and 34 percent of its oil – convinced Hitler that such a level of dependence was intolerable. That summer, a poor German harvest made necessary the import of huge quantities of Ukrainian wheat. He became impatient to appropriate the Soviet Union’s cornbelt, and thirsty for oil of the Caucasus. Only late in the war did the Allies grasp the severity of their enemy’s fuel problems: petrol was so short that novice Wehrmacht drivers could be given only meagre tuition, resulting in a heavy military-vehicle accident rate. Even in 1942, the worst year of the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain imported 10.2 million tons of oil; meanwhile, German imports and synthetic production never exceeded 8.9 million tons. Thus it was that Hitler made seizure of the Caucasian oil wells a key objective of Operation Barbarossa, heedless of the handicap this imposed on operations to destroy the Red Army, by dividing Germany’s forces. He envisaged the invasion of Russia as both an ideological crusade and a campaign of economic conquest. Significantly, he confided nothing of his Russian intentions to the Italians, whose discretion he mistrusted. Throughout the winter of 1940-41, Mussolini continued to nurse happy hopes of a victorious peace following his own conquest of Egypt. It was a striking characteristic of Axis behaviour until 1945 that while there was some limited consultation between Germany, Italy and Japan, there was no attempt to join in creating a coherent common strategy for defeating the Allies.

In the last weeks of 1940, therefore, while the British people supposed themselves the focus of the Nazis’ malignity and headlines around the world described the drama of the blitz, Hitler’s thoughts were far away. His generals began to prepare their armies for a struggle in the east. As early as November, an Estonian double agent told the British SIS representative in Helsinki what he had learned from an Abwehr officer: “German command preparing June campaign against USSR.” The SIS man commented dismissively on the implausibility of such an indiscretion, saying, “Possibly statement made for propaganda purposes.” Evene had this report been believed in London, the British could have done nothing to shake Stalin’s complacency and promote Soviet preparations to meet the threat.

(Hastings 2011, pp.97-98)

Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory served his country wonderfully well in 1940-41, but thereafter it would reveal important limitations. He sought the preservation of British imperial greatness, the existing order, and this purpose would not suffice for most of his fellow countrymen. They yearned for social change, improvements in their domestic condition of a kind which seemed to the prime minister almost frivolous amid a struggle for global mastery. The Lancashire housewife Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots’ hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: “Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to ‘destroy’ and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so wrong somehow … [that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.” Mrs. Last was middle-aged, but her children’s generation was determined that once the war was won, money would be found to create a more egalitarian society.

(Hastings 2011, pp.100-101)

While Hitler cherished an enduring personal loyalty to Mussolini, whom he had once seen as a mentor, most Germans mistrusted and mocked Italy’s leader. Berliners claimed that whenever the Duce met the Fuhrer, barrel-organ grinders played the popular tune “Du Kannst nicht Treue sein” – “You Cannot Be Faithful.” In 1936, when a foolish woman at a party asked Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg who would win the next war, he is alleged to have answered, “Madam, I cannot tell you that. Only one thing I can say: whoever has Italy on his side is bound to lose.”

There was contemptuous joke in Nazi Party circles of Hitler’s lackey Wilhelm Keitel reporting, “My Fuhrer, Italy has entered the war!” Hitler answers, “Send two divisions. That should be enough to finish them.” Keitel says, “No, my Fuhrer, not against us, but with us.” Hitler says, “That’s different. Send ten divisions.”

(Hastings 2011, pp.102-103)

It demanded courage for a man to separate himself from his country, home and family, to accept the status of a renegade in the eyes of his own people, in order to serve in the ranks of Free France. But many Poles made such a choice. Why did the French instead oppose Allied forces fighting their conquerors and occupiers? There was deep bitterness about France’s predicament, which demanded scapegoats. Many Frenchmen considered their country betrayed by the British in June 1940, a sentiment intensified by the Royal Navy’s destruction of French capital ships at Mers-el-Kebir. There was self-hatred, which bred anger. Overlaid upon centuries-old resentment of perfide Albion, there was now the fresh grievance that Churchill had fought on after Petain succumbed. The German occupiers of France were disliked, but so too were the British across the Channel, especially by French professional soldiers, sailors and airmen.

“France does not want to be liberated,: the former Vichy prime minister and prominent collaborator Pierre Laval told the New York Times. “She wants to settle her fate herself in collaboration with Germany.” Many of his compatriots agreed: the Resistance became a significant force in France only in 1944, and made a negligible military contribution by comparison with the partisans of Russia and Yugoslavia. Few French defenders of Syria in 1941 found anything distasteful about killing British, Indian and Australian invaders. British troops advancing into Syria found graffiti on the wall of an abandoned fort: “Wait, dirty English bastards, until the Germans come. We run away now, and so will you soon.”

(Hastings 2011, pp.123-124)

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was the defining event of the war, just as the Holocaust was the defining act of Nazism. Germany embarked upon an attempt to fulfil the most ambitious objectives in its history, to push back the frontiers of Slavdom and create a new empire in the east. The Nazis argued that they were merely following the historic example set by other European nations in pursuing Lebensraum, living space, by seizing an empire in the territories of savages. The British historian Michael Howard has written: “Many, perhaps most Germans, and certainly most German intellectuals, saw the First World War as a battle for cultural survival against the converging forces of Russian barbarism and, far more subversive, the decadent civilisation of the West, embodied no longer by French aristocrats but by the materialist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world. This belief was taken over in its entirety by the Nazis and provided the bedrock of their own philosophy.”

Millions of young Germans had been conditioned since childhood to believe that their nation faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union. “The situation is ideal for the Bolshevists to launch their attack on Europe in furtherance of their general plan for world domination,” wrote an ardent Nazi Luftwaffe pilot, Heinz Knoke, in 1941. “Will Western capitalism, with its democratic institutions, enter into an alliance with Russian Bolshevism? If only we had a free hand in the west, we could inflict a shattering defeat on the Bolsheevist hordes despite the Red Army. That would save Western civilisation.” Imbued with such logic, Knoke was thrilled to find himself participating in the invasion of Russia. So were some more senior officers. Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, was chastened by the 1940 failure against Britain, a campaign which he thought ill-suited to his force’s capabilities. Now, he exulted, “at last, a proper war again!”

(Hastings 2011, pp.137-138)

In Berlin on 28 November, a conference of industrialists chaired by armaments supremo Fritz Todt reached a devastating conclusion: the war against Russia was no longer winnable. Having failed to achieve a quick victory, Germany lacked resources to prevail in a sustained struggle. Next day, Todt and tank-produciton chief Walter Rohland met Hitler. Rohland argued that, once the United States became a belligerent, it would by impossible to match Allied industrial strength. Todt, though an ardent Nazi, said, “This war can no longer be won by military means.” Hitler demanded, “How then shall I end this war?” Todt replied that only a political outcome was feasible. Hitler dismissed such logic. He chose to convince himself that the imminent accession of Japan to the Axis would transform the balance of strength in Germany’s favour. But the November diary of army chief of staff Franz Halder records other remarks by Hitler that acknowledged the implausibility of absolute triumph. For the rest of the war, those responsible for Germany’s economic and industrial planning fulfilled their roles in the knowledge that strategic success was unattainable. They drafted a planning paper in December 1941 entitled “The Requirements for Victory.” This concluded that the Reich needed to commit the equivalent of $150 billion to arms manufacture in the succeeding two years; yet such a sum exceeded German weapons expenditure for the entire conflict. Whatever the prowess of the Wehrmacht the nation lacked means to win; it could aspire only to force its enemies to parley, together or severally.

Many more months elapsed before the Allies saw that the tide of war had turned. In 1942, the Axis would enjoy spectacular successes. But it is a critical historical reality that senior functionaries of the Third Reich realised as early as December 1941 that military victory had become unattainable, because Russia remained undefeated. Some thereafter sustained hopes that Germany might negotiate an acceptable peace. But they, and perhaps Hitler also in the innermost recesses of his brain, knew the decisive strategic moment had passed. Gen. Alfred Jodl, the Fuhrer’s closest and most loyal military adviser, asserted in 1945 that his mast understood in December 1941 that “victory could no longer be achieved.” This did not mean, of course, that Hitler reconciled himself to Germany’s defeat: instead, he now anticipated a long war, which would eventually expose the fundamental divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. He aspired to achieve sufficient battlefield success to force his enemies to make terms, and he clung to this hope until April 1945. Since the Western Allies and the Russians shared morbid and persistent fears of each other seeking a separate peace, hitler’s speculation was at least a little less fanciful than it might now appear. Only time would show that the struggle was destined to be fought out to the end; that the rupture he anticipated between the West and the Soviet Union would indeed take place, but too late to save the Third Reich.

(Hastings 2011, pp.160-161)

Many intellectuals disdained Europe’s war because they perceived it as a struggle between rival imperialism, a view reflected in Quincy Howe’s 1937 tract England Expects Every American to Do His Duty. They found it easier to contemplate an explicitly American crusade against fascism than one that allied them with the old European nations, recoiling from association with the preservation of the British, and for that matter French and Dutch, empires. They disliked the notion that the honour and virtue of the United States should be contaminated by association. They questioned whether a war fought in harness with old Tories could be dignified as a moral undertaking. The left-wing Partisan Review asserted: “Our entry into the war, under the slogan of ‘Stop Hitler!’ would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here.”

The treasurer of Harvard, William Claflin, told the university’s president: “Hitler’s going to win. Let’s be friends with him.” Robert Sherwood noted the number of businessmen such as Gen. Robert Wood, Jay Hormel and James Mooney likewise convinced of Hitler’s impending triumph, and thus “that the United States had better plan to ‘do business’ with him.” At a meeting at the U.S. embassy in London on 22 July, senior diplomats agreed there was an even chance that Britain might still be unconquered by 30 September, but this tepid vote of confidence implicitly acknowledged a similarly plausible prospect that Churchill’s island might by that date be occupied. In the September 1940 Atlantic Monthly, Kingman Brewster and Spencer Klaw, editors respectively of the Yale and Harvard student papers, published a manifesto asserting students’ determination not to save Europe from Hitler.

(Hastings 2011, pp.182-183)

Senator D. Worth Clarke of Idaho, another isolationist, suggested in July 1941 that the United States should draw a line across the ocean behind which Americans would stand, taking peaceful control of their entire hemisphere, South America and Canada included: “We could make some kind of an arrangement to set up puppet governments which we could trust to put American interests ahead of those of Germany or any other nation of the world.” His remarks were gleefully reported in the Axis media as evidence of Yankee imperialism. Informed Germans assumed U.S. participation in the war much more confidently than did the British, or indeed many Americans. Back in 1938, Reich Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk anticipated a struggle that “will be fought not only with military means but also will be an economic war of the greatest scopes.” Von Krosigk was deeply troubled by the contrast between Germany’s economic weakness and the enormous resources available to its prospective enemies. Hitler believed that these would include America from 1942. He preferred not to hasten U.S. belligerency, but was untroubled by its prospect, partly because his own grasp of economics was so weak. Amid so many American domestic divisions, so much equivocation and hesitation, it was fortunate for the Allied cause that the decisions which brought the United States into the war were made in Tokyo rather than Washington, D.C.

(Hastings 2011, pp.187-188)

The nakedness of America’s Pacific bases continues to puzzle posterity. Overwhelming evidence of Tokyo’s intentions was available throughout November, chiefly through decrypted diplomatic traffic; in Washington as in London, there was uncertainty only about Japanese objectives. The thesis advanced by extreme conspiracists, that President Roosevelt chose to permit Pearl Harbor to be surprised, is rejected as absurd by all serious historians. It remains nonetheless extraordinary that his government and chiefs of staff failed to ensure that Hawaii, as well as other bases closer to Japan, were on a full precautionary footing. On 27 November 1941, Washington cabled all Pacific headquarters: “This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days … Execute appropriate defensive deployment.” The failure of local commanders to act effectively in response to this message was egregious: at Pearl Harbor on 7 December, antiaircraft ammunition boxes were still locked, their keys held by duty officers.

But it was a conspicuous feature of the war that again and again, dramatic changes of circumstance unmanned the victims of assault. The British and French in May 1940, the Russians in June 1941, even the Germans in Normandy in June 1944, had every reason to anticipate enemy action, yet responded inadequately when this came, and there were many lesser examples. Senior commanders, never mind humble subordinates, found it hard to adjust their mind-set and behaviour to the din of battle until this was thrust upon them, until bombardment became a reality rather than a mere prospect. Adm. Husband Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, respectively navy and army commanders at Pearl Harbor, were unquestionably negligent. But their conduct reflected an institutional failure of imagination which extended up the entire U.S. command chain to the White House, and inflicted a trauma on the American people.

“We were flabbergasted by the devastation,” wrote a sailor aboard the carrier Enterprise, which entered Pearl late on the afternoon of 8 December, having been mercifully absent when the Japanese struck. “One battleship, the Nevada, was lying athwart the narrow entrance channel, beached bow first, allowing barely enough room for the carrier to squeeze by … The water was covered with oil, fires were burning still, ships were resting on the bottom mud, superstructures had broken and fallen. Great gaps loomed where magazines had exploded, and smoke was roiling up everywhere. For sailors who had considered these massive ships invincible, it was a sight to be seen but not comprehended … We seemed to be mourners at a spectacular funeral.”

The assault on Pearl Harbor prompted rejoicing throughout the Axis nations. Japanese lieutenant Izumiya Tatsuro wrote exultantly of “the glorious news of the air attack on Hawaii.” Mussolini, with his accustomed paucity of judgment, was delighted: he thought Americans stupid, and the United States “a country of Negroes and Jews,” as did Hitler. Yet fortunately for the Allied cause, American vulnerability at Hawaii was matched by a Japanese timidity which would become an astonishingly familiar phenomenon of the Pacific conflict. Again and again, Japanese fleets fought their way to the brink of important victories, then lacked either the will or the means to follow through. Adm. Chuichi Nagumo was stunned by the success of his own aircraft in wrecking five U.S. battleships in their Sunday-morning attacks. For many years, it was argued that he wilfully missed the opportunity to follow through with a second strike against Pearl Harbor’s oil storage tanks and repair facilities, which might have forced the PAcific Fleet to withdraw to the U.S. west coast. Recent research shows, however, that this was not feasible. The winter day was too short to launch and recover a second strike, and in any event Japanese bombloads were too small to plausibly wreck Parl’s repair bases. Even the problem created by destruction of shore oil tanks could have been solved by diverting tankers from the Atlantic. The core reality was that Nagumo’s attack sufficed to shock, maul and enrage the Americans, but not to decisively cripple their war-fighting capability. It was thus a grossly misconceived operation. From 7 December 1941 the United States became unshakably committed to total war, total victory. The legend of the “Day of Infamy” united the American people as belligerents in a fashion no lesser provocation could have achieved.

(Hastings 2011, pp.192-194)

The administration overcame its scruples about monopolists who could deliver tanks, planes, and ships.

Everything grew in scale to match the largest war in history: in 1939 America had only 4,900 supermarkets, but by 1944 there were 16,000. Between December 1941 and the end of 1944, the average American’s liquid personal assets almost doubled. With luxuries scarce, consumers were desperate to find goods on which to spend their rising earnings: “People are crazy with money,” said a Philadelphia jeweller. “They don’t care what they buy. They purchase things just for the fun of spending.” By 1944, while British domestic production of consumer goods had fallen by 45 percent from its prewar levels, that of the United States had risen by 15 percent. Many regions experienced sever housing shortages and rents soared, as millions of people sought temporary accommodation to fit their wartime job relocations. “The Good War myth,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger, who then worked for the Office of War Information,

envisages a blissful time of national unity in support of noble objectives. Most Americans indeed accepted the necessity of the war, but that hardly meant the suppression of baser motives. In Washington we saw the seamy side of the Good War. We saw greedy business executives opposing conversion to defense production, then joining the goverment to maneuver for post-war advantage … We were informed that one in eight business establishments was in violation of the price ceilings. We saw what a little-known senator from Missouri [Harry Truman] called “rapacity, greed, fraud and negligence” … The war called for equality of sacrifice. But everywhere one looked was the miasma of “chiseling” … The home front was not a pretty sight at a time when young Americans were dying around the world.

(Hastings 2011, pp.225-226)

Within a year of PEarl Harbor, the arrest of Japan’s Asian and Pacific advances, and the beginnings of their reversal, made its doom inevitable. It is remarkable that, once Tokyo’s hopes of quick victory were confounded and American resolve had been amply demonstrated, Hirohito’s nation fought blindly on. Japanese strategy hinged upon a belief in German victory in the west, yet by the end of 1942 this had become entirely unrealistic. Thereafter, peace on any terms or even none should have seemed to Tokyo preferable to looming American retribution. But no more in Japan than in Germany did any faction display the will and power to deflect the country from its march towards immolation. Shikata ga nai: it could not be helped. If this was a monumentally inadequate excuse for condemning millions to death without hope of securing any redemptive compensation, it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.

(Hastings 2011, pp.263)

Most of Germany’s generals, in the dark recesses of their souls, knew that they had made their nation and its entire army – it was a myth that only the SS committed atrocities – complicit in crimes against humanity, and especially Russian humanity, such as their enemies would never forgive, even before the Holocaust begun. They saw nothing to lose by fighting on, except more millions of lives: it deserves emphasis that a large majority of the war’s victims perished from 1942 onwards. Only victories might induce the Allies to make terms. Hitler’s April directive for the summer operations called for a concentration of effort in the south; the objectives of Operation Blue were to destroy the Red Army’s residual reserves, seize Stalingrad and capture the Caucasian oilfields.

Stalin misjudged German intentions: anticipating a new thrust against Moscow, he concentrated his forces accordingly. Even when the entire Blue plan was laid before him, after being found on the body of a Wehrmacht staff officer killed in an air crash, he dismissed it as disinformation. But Russia’s armies remained much stronger than Hitler realised, with 5.5 million men under arms and rapidly increasing tank and aircraft production. Criminals and some political prisoners were released from the gulag’s labour camps for service – 975,000 of them by the war’s end. Berlin estimated Russia’s 1942 steel output at 8 million tons; in reality, it would attain 13.5 million tons.

(Hastings 2011, pp.295-296)

An American officer wrote from the Pacific: “When the tents are down, I think every man feels a loneliness because he sees that this wasn’t home after all. As long as there were four canvas walls about him, he could kid himself a little … Standing on barren ground surrounded by scrap lumber piles and barracks bags with nothing familiar on his horizon he feels uprooted and insecure, a wanderer on the face of the earth. That which is always in the back of his mind now stands starkly in the front: ‘Will it ever end, and will I be here to see it?’ “ Staff Sgt. Harold Fennema wrote to his wife, Jeannette, in Wisconsin: “So much of this war and army life amounts to the insignificant job of passing time, and that really is a pity. Life is so short and time so precious to those who live and love life that I can hardly believe myself, seeking entertainment to pass time away … I wonder sometimes where this is going to lead.” Yet if camp life was monotonous, at least it was closer to home than the theatres of war. Pfc. Eugene Gagliardi, a nineteen-year-old newspaper pressman from Brooklyn, regarded his entire later experience of service in Europe as “a nightmare. All my good memories of the army were before we went to France.”

(Hastings 2011, pp.321-322)

Many of the occupied countries, and especially France, made useful contributions to the German war economy under compulsion: in all, they supplied some 9.3 percent of the Reich’s armaments, and Danish agriculture provided 10 percent of Germany’s food needs. But Hitler might have fared better had he offered conquered peoples incentives as well as threats, rewards as well as draconian confiscations of property and commodities. The Nazis’ view of economics was grotesquely primitive: they regarded wealth creation as a zero-sum game, in which for Germany to gain, someone else must lose. The consequence was that, from 1940 onwards, Hitler’s empire was progressively pillaged to fund his war, a process that could end only in its bankruptcy.

(Hastings 2011, pp.487-488)

Only in 1943 did the Nazis acknowledge that hungry mouths also had useful hands: they belatedly accepted the value, indeed indispensability, of keeping prisoners alive to boster Germany’s shrinking industrial labour force. When this new policy was implemented, Goring observed with complacency that Russians performed 80 percent of the construction work on his Ju-87 Stukas. By the autumn of 1944, almost 8 million foreign labourers and POWs were engaged in the German economy, 20 percent of its workforce. BMW employed 16,600 prisoners at its Munich plant alone; though still treated with institutionalised cruelty, their rations were increased just sufficiently to sustain life. Industrial employers asked that punishments should be administered behind the wire of workers’ quarters, rather than in open view on factory premises, to avoid distressing German staff. A vast complex of guarded quarters was established in and around every major German city to hose foreigners of all kinds The Munich area harboured 120 POW facilities, 286 barracks and hostels for civilians and a brothel to service them, together with 7 concentration camp outstantions including a branch of Dachau, a total of 80,000 bedspaces.

(Hastings 2011, pp.488-489)

The edifice of Holocaust literature is vast, yet does not satisfactorily explain why the Nazis accepted the economic cost of embarking upon the destruction of the Jewish people, diverting scarce manpower and transport to a programme of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance. The answer must lie in the deranged centrality of Jewish persecution not merely to National Socialist ideology but to Germany’s policies throughout the global conflict. The Nazis were always determined to exploit the licence granted to a government waging total war to fulfill objectives that otherwise posed difficulties even for a totalitarian regime. Goring asserted at a key party meeting on 12 November 1938, following Kristallnacht: “If, in the near future, the German Reich should come into conflict with foreign powers, it goes without saying that we in Germany should first of all let it come to a showdown with the Jews.”

At that time, Nazi policy still promoted the emigration of German Jews, but a November 1939 article in the SS journal Schwartze Korps asserted the commitment to “the actual and definitive end of Jewry in Germany, its total extermination.” Many such remarks were made openly and publicly by leading Nazis: Hitler made his notorious “prophecy” in a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, asserting that war would result in “the annihilation of European Jewry.” He sought to make it plain that every Jew within his reach was a hostage for the “good behaviour” of the Western powers. If the British and French declined to acquiesce in his ambitions – above all if they chose to oppose these with force – the consequences would be their responsibility.

The Western powers treated such remarks as hyperbolic. Even when Hitler embarked on his rampage of hemishperic conquest, the democracies found it difficult to conceive that the people of a highly educated and long-civilised European society could fulfill their leaders’ extravagant rhetoric and implement genocide. Despite mounting evidence of Nazi crimes, this delusion persisted in some degree until 1945, and even for a time afterwards.

(Hastings 2011, pp.490-491)

“In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity … in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.” Russian attacks emphasised massed artillery bombardment and sacrificial tank and infantry advances, often led by “staff battalions” – penal units of political and military prisoner offered the possibility of reprieve in return for accepting the likelihood of extinction. Some 442,700 men served in them, and most died.

The Red Army never displayed much tactical subtly, save perhaps in harassing the enemy through the hours of darkness, a skill in which its men surpassed the Western Allies. A British analyst has written: “In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity … in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.” Russian attacks emphasised massed artillery bombardment and sacrificial tank and infantry advances, often led by “staff battalions” – penal units of political and military prisoner offered the possibility of reprieve in return for accepting the likelihood of extinction. Some 442,700 men served in them, and most died. The Russians continued to suffer higher casualties than did the Germans. If all soldiers find it hard to describe to civilians afterwards what they have endured, for Russians it was uniquely difficult. Even in the years of victory, 1943 to 1945, the Red Army’s assault units accepted losses of around 25 percent in each action, a casualty rate the Anglo-American forces would never have accepted as a constant. Of 403,272 Russian soldiers who completed tank training in the course of the war, 310,000 died.

(Hastings 2011, pp.529)

Informed Japanese knew that their home islands, on which millions of houses were constructed of wood and paper, now faced an ordeal by air bombardment; the Marianas airfields brought Japan’s cities within range of U.S. bombers. The shore battles showed that Japanese soldiers’ willingness for sacrifice could extract a high price for each American victory, but the invaders’ firepower was irresistible. Nimitz’s submarines were inflicting a scale of attrition on Japan’s merchant fleet unsustainable by a nation dependent on imports. The combination of naval blockade and air bombardment ensured Japan’s defeat, even if U.S. ground forces advanced no farther. But the Japanese government remained committed to fight on: the supremely stubborn military men who dominated Tokyo’s polity believed they could still achieve a negotiated settlement, preserving at least their holdings in China, by convincing the Americans that the cost of assaulting the Japanese homeland would be unacceptably high.

(Hastings 2011, pp.551)

On the other side of the hill, the Allied armies’ dash across France amid rejoicing crowds infused commanders and soldiers alike with a sense of intoxication. The GI Edwin Wood wrote of the exhilaration of pursuit: “To be nineteen years old, to be nineteen and an infantryman, to be nineteen and fight for the liberation of France form the Nazis in the summer of 1944! That time of hot and cloudless blue days when the honeybees buzzed about our heads and we shouted strange phrases in words we did not understand to men and women who cheered us as if we were gods … For that glorious moment, the dream of freedom lived and we were ten feet tall.” Sir Arthur Harris asserted that, thanks to the support of the RAF’s and USAAF’s bombers, the armies in France had enjoyed “a walkover.” This was a gross exaggeration, characteristic of the rhetoric of both British and American air chiefs, but it was certainly true that in the autumn of 1944 the Western Allies liberated France and Belgium at much lower human cost than their leaders had anticipated. A flood of Ultra-intercepted signals revealed the despair of Hitler’s generals, the ruin of their forces. This in turn induced in Eisenhower and his subordinates a brief and ill-judged carelessness.. With the Germans on their knees, unprecedented rewards seemed available for risk taking: Montgomery persuaded Eisenhower that in his own northern sector of the front, there was an opportunity to launch a war-winning thrust, to seize a bridge over the Rhine at the Dutch town of Arnhem, across which Allied forces might flood into Germany.

It remains a focus of fierce controversy whether the Western Allied armies should have been able to win the war in 1944, following the Wehrmacht’s collapse in France. It is just plausible that, with a greater display of command energy, Gen. Courtney Hodges’s U.S. First Army could have broken through the Siegfried Line around Aachen. Patton believed that he could have done great things if his tanks had been granted the necessary fuel, but this is doubtful: the southern sector, where his army stood, was difficult ground; until April 1945 its German defenders exploited a succession of hill positions and rivers to check Patton’s advance. The Allies spent the vital early September days catching their breath after the dash eastward. Gen. Alexander Patch’s U.S. Seventh Army, which had landed in the south of France on 15 August and driven north up the Rhone Valley against slight opposition, met Patton’s men at Chatillon-sur-Seine on 12 September. Lt. Gen. Jake Devers became commander of the new Franco-American 6th Army Group, deployed on the Allied right flank. Eisenhower’s forces now held an unbroken front from the Channel to the Swiss border.

(Hastings 2011, pp.558-559)

Another Berlin woman wrote likewise:

You see very young boys, baby faces peeping our beneath oversized steel helmets. It’s frightening to hear their high-pitched voices. They’re fifteen years old at the most, standing there looking so skinny and small in their billowing uniform tunics. What are we so appalled at the thought of children being murdered? In three or four years the same children strike us as perfectly fit for shooting and maiming … Up to now being a soldier meant being a man … Wasting these boys before they reach maturity obviously runs against some fundamental law of nature, against our instinct, against every drive to preserve the species. Like certain fish or insects that eat their own offspring. People aren’t supposed to do that. The fact that this is exactly what we are doing is a sure sign of madness.

(Hastings 2011, pp.602-603)

By the high summer of 1945, Japan’s rulers wished to end the war; but its generals, together with some politicians, were still bent upon securing “honourable” terms, which included – for instance – retention of substantial parts of Japan’s empire in Manchuria, Korea and China, together with Allied agreement to spare the country from occupation or war crimes indictments. “No one person in Japan had authority remotely resembling that of an American president,” observes Professor Akira Namamura of Dokkyo University, a Japanese historian. “The Emperor was obliged to act in accordance with the Japanese historian. “The Emperor was obliged to act in accordance with the Japanese constitution, which meant that he was obliged to heed the wishes of the army, navy and civilian politicians. He was able to take the decision to end the war only when those forces had invited him to do so.” Even if this assertion was open to the widest variety of interpretations, as it remains today, it was plain that Hirohito could move towards surrender only when a consensus had evolved within Japan’s leadership. This was narrowly achieved in mid-August 1945, but not a day before.

Many modern critics of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demand, in effect, that the United States should have accepted a moral responsibility for sparing the Japanese people from the consequences of their own leaders’ obduracy. No sane person would suggest that the use of the atomic bombs represented an absolute good, or was even a righteous act. But, in the course of the war, it had been necessary to do many terrible things to advance the cause of Allied victory, and to preside over enormous carnage. By August 1945, to Allied leaders the lives of their own people had come to seem very precious, those of their enemies very cheap. In those circumstances, it seems understandable that President Truman failed to halt the juggernaut which carried the atomic bombs to Tinian, and thence to Japan. Just as Hitler was the architect of Germany’s devastation, the Tokyo regime bore overwhelming responsibility for what took place at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If Japan’s leaders had bowed to logic, as well as to the welfare of their own people, by quitting the war, the atomic bombs would have been dropped.

(Hastings 2011, pp.627)

Each of the three principal victorious nations emerged from the Second World War confident in the belief that its own role had been decisive in procuring victory. Not for many years did a more nuanced perspective emerge, in Western societies at least. Hitler was correct in anticipating that his enemies’ “unnatural coalition” must collapse and give way to mutual antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West, although this occurred too late to save the Third Reich. The Grand Alliance, the phrase with which Churchill ennobled the wartime relationship of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, was always a grand charade; it was a necessary fiction to pretend that the three powers fought the war as a shared enterprise directed towards common purposes.

Some modern historians have sought to argue that the entire conflict might have been avoided if in the early years of Nazism Britain and France had forged a untied front with Russia against Hitler. This view seems untenable, as well as supremely cynical: how could the Western democracies have agreed on common political objectives with a Soviet regime as brutal and imperialistic as that of the Nazis? Stalin’s tariff for any deal with the French and British would have been identical with that he presented in exchange for the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact: a free hand for his own expansionist ambitions. This was unacceptable to the Western democracies until the tumult of war enforced unforeseen obligations and realities. Powerful elements of British, French and American conservative opinion deplored communism even more than fascism, and would have resisted appeasement of Stalin with more vigour than they displayed towards appeasement of Hitler.

(Hastings 2011, pp.636)

Whatever Stalin’s limitations as a military commander and his monstrous record as a tyrant, he presided over the creation of an extraordinary military machine, and pursued his objectives to triumphant fulfillment. In 1945, the Soviet Union seemed the only nation which had achieved its full war aims, creating a new eastern European empire to buffer its frontiers with the West, and securing important footholds on the Pacific coast. Former U.S. secretary of state Sumner Welles reported an alleged 1943 exchange between Stalin and Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary. The Russian leader said: “Hitler is a genius, but doesn’t know when to stop.” Eden: “Does anybody know when to stop?” Stalin: “I do.” Even if this conversation was apocryphal, the words reflected the reality that Stalin shrewdly judged the limits of his outrages against freedom in 1944-45, to avert an outright breach with the Western Allies, most importantly the United States. He kept just sufficient of his promises to Roosevelt and Churchill – for instance, by staying out of Greece and evacuating China – to secure his conquests in eastern Europe without precipitating a new conflict. But the Soviet Union was deluded by its military and diplomatic triumphs into a false perception of their significance. For more than forty years after 1945, it sustained an armed threat to the West at ruinous cost; the economic, social and political bankruptcy of the system Stalin had created was eventually laid bare.

The Russians emerged from the war conscious of their new power in the world, but also embittered by the colossal destruction and loss of life they had suffered. They believed, not mistakenly, that the Western Allies had purchased cheaply their share of victory, and this perception reinforced their visceral sense of grievance towards Europe and the United States. They forgot their role as Hitler’s allies between 1939 and 1941. Modern Russia maintains a stubborn, defiant denial about the Red Army’s 1944-45 orgy of rape, pillage and murder: it is deemed insulting that foreigners make much of the issue, for it compromises both the nation’s cherished claims to victimhood and the glory of its military triumph. In 2011, long after the Western Allies withdrew from almost all the territories they occupied in the wake of victory, Russia clings insistently to the national frontiers it claimed as war booty, embracing eastern Poland, eastern Finland and parts of East Prussia and Romania, together with Stalin’s Pacific coast conquests. It seems implausible that a nation ruled by Vladimir Putin will relinquish them.

(Hastings 2011, pp.641-642)

The Japanese writer Kazutoshi Hando, who survived the Tokyo firestorm, said in 2007: “In the aftermath of the war, blame was placed solely on the Japanese army and navy. This seemed just, because the civilian population had always been deceived by the armed forces about what was done. Civilian Japan felt no sense of collective guilt – and that was the way the American victors and occupiers wanted it. In the same fashion, it was the Americans who urged that no modern Japanese history should be taught in schools. The consequence is that very few people under fifty have any knowledge of Japan’s invasion of China or colonisation of Manchuria.” In the early twenty-first century, Hando lectured at a women’s college about the Showa era: “I asked fifty students to list countries which have not fought Japan in modern times: eleven included America.”

“It is important frankly to discuss what happened in the Second World War,” he added, “because today relations between China and Japan are so poor. But there is a problem in starting such a discussion, because so few younger Japanese know any fact. There are many people who do not support out militant nationalists, but still find it offensive to endure endless criticism from CHina and Korea. They dislike those countries poking their noses into what they see as matters of the Japanese people. Most of us think that we have apologised for the war: one of our former Prime Ministers has made the most fulsome apology. I myself think that we have done enough apologising.” This remains a matter of debate, and some British and American people strongly disagree with Hando. As recently as 2007, the head of the Japanese air force was obliged to resign his post after publishing a paper in which he asserted the philanthropic nature of Japan’s activities in China between 1937 and 1945.

Palestine was among the lands most conspicuously influenced by the outcome of the conflict. For more than two decades of British mandatory rule, its future had been keenly debated. Capt. David Hopkinson was one among the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who passed through the Holy Land in the course of his war service, and pondered its rightful destiny. Hopkinson had a special interest, because his wife was half Jewish. He wrote to her from Haifa in 1942, expressing a hostility to Zionism founded in his belief that “Jews are of greatest value within the countries where they have been long established. I am as impressed as everyone must be by the technical and cultural accomplishments of Jews in Palestine, but for an intensely nationalistic minority to seek to carve out for itself an independent state from territories to which others also have a claim seems to be inconsistent with the high ideas of peace and humanity in which civilized Europeans believe.”

Yet in 1945, such temperate views were swamped by the ghastly revelations of the Holocaust. It is important to emphasise that, even after newsreels from liberated Belsen and Buchenwald had stunned the civilised world, the full extent of the Jewish genocide became understood only slowly, even by Western governments. But it became understood only slowly, even by Western governments. But it became manifest that the Jews of Europe had fallen victim to a uniquely satanic programme of mass murder, which left many survivors homeless and dispossessed. The U.S. commissioner of immigration Earl Harrison visited the displaced persons camps of Europe and was shocked by what he found there. He reported to President Truman in August 1945: “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” By a vast historic irony, Hitler’s persecution transformed the fortunes of the Jewish people around the world. It provided an impetus to Zionism which seemed to many Westerners morally irresistible. Never again would anit-Semitism be socially acceptable in Western democratic societies; and the slaughter of Europe’s Jews precipitated the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. Yet, if the Holocaust made a devastating and lasting impact upon Western culture, many other societies around the world have never identified themselves with its significance, and in some cases even deny its reality. Widespread bitterness persists that the Western powers assuaged their own guilt about the wartime fate of the Jews by making a great historic gesture in lands identified by Muslims as rightfully Arab.

There is a wider issue: some modern historians who are citizens of nations that were once European possessions regard their peoples as victims of wartime exploitation. They suggest that Britain, especially, engaged them in a struggle in which they had no stake, for a cause that was not properly theirs. Such arguments represent points of view rather than evidential conclusions, but it seems important for Westerners to recognise these sentiments, as a counterpoint to our instinctive assumption that our grandparents fought “the Good War.”

Within Western culture, of course, the conflict continues to exercise an extraordinary fascination for generations unborn when it took place. The obvious explanation is that this was the greatest and most terrible event in human history. Within the vast compass of the struggle, some individuals scaled summits of courage and nobility, while others plumbed depths of evil, in a fashion that compels the awe of posterity. Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the tribulations that hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension. Almost all those who participated, nations and individuals alike, made moral compromises. It is impossible to dignify the struggle as an unalloyed contest between good and evil, or rationally to celebrate an experience, and even an outcome, which imposed such misery upon so many. Allied victory did not bring universal peace, prosperity, justice or freedom; it brought merely a portion of those things to some fraction of those who had taken part. All that seems certain is that Allied victory saved the world from a much worse fate that would have followed the triumph of Germany and Japan. With this knowledge, seekers after virtue and truth must be content.

(Hastings 2011, pp.649-651)

References

Hastings, Max. 2011. Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945. N.p.: Alfred A. Knopf.

ISBN 978-0-307-27359-8