The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Officers who allowed their troops to retreat were to be court-martialled. In imitation of the German example, Stalin ordered the creation of special squads behind the lines ‘to execute panic-mongers and cowards’ and penal battalions for shirkers, ‘thus giving them an opportunity to redeem their crimes against the Motherland by blood’. Punishments for desertion were extended to include the commanding officers and, under Order No. 270, even the families of deserters and of men taken prisoner. When Stalin’s own son Yakov was captured near Vitebsk, his wife was arrested and spent two years in the Lubyanka; her father-in-law ordered her release only when news came of Yakov’s death in German custody. Those Soviet prisoners of the Germans lucky enough to survive the war subsequently found themselves imprisoned once again under equally harsh conditions for ‘Betrayal of the Motherland’.

  What all this reminds us is that in order to defeat an enemy they routinely denounced as barbaric the Western powers had made common cause with an ally that was morally little better – but ultimately more effective at waging total war. ‘The choice before human beings,’ George Orwell observed in 1941, ‘is not… between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil… Whichever you choose, you will not come out with clean hands.’ Orwell’s Animal Farm is nowadays revered as a critique of the Russian Revolution’s descent into Stalinism; people forget that it was written during the Second World War and turned down by no fewer than four publishers (including T. S. Eliot, on behalf of Faber & Faber) for its anti-Soviet sentiments. Nothing better symbolized the blind eye that the Western powers now turned to Stalin’s crimes than the American Vice-President Henry Wallace’s visit to the Kolyma Gulag in May 1944. ‘No other two countries are more alike than the Soviet Union and the United States,’ he told his hosts. ‘The vast expanses of your country, her virgin forests, wide rivers and large lakes, all kinds of climate – from tropical to polar – her inexhaustible wealth, [all] remind me of my homeland… Both the Russians and the Americans, in their different ways, are groping for a way of life that will enable the common man every where in the world to get the most good out of modern technology. There is nothing irreconcilable in our aims and purposes.’ All were now totalitarians; in the words of Norman Mailer’s general in The Naked and the Dead:

  As kinetic energy, a country is organization, co-ordinated effort… fascism… The purpose of this war is to translate America’s potential into kinetic energy… America is going to absorb that [fascist] dream, it’s in the business of doing that now. When you’ve created power, materials, armies, they don’t wither away of their own accord… Your men of power in America… are becoming conscious of their real aims for the first time in our history.

  DEEP WAR

  Albert Speer had sensed the turning point as early as April 1942. By the winter of that year, the Germans knew that the days of blitzkrieg were gone, never to return. Their lines of communication were perilously over-extended. Their equipment remained ill-suited to the Russian winter. More importantly, however, the enemy was now for the first time capable of matching them on the battlefield. At Stalingrad, the Germans found themselves bogged down in a war of attrition that resembled the Western Front in the First World War – only far colder and crueller. The surrender of Paulus’s 6th Army on January 31–February 1, 1943, is often portrayed as the moment of truth. But it was the Battle of Kursk six months later that was the true beginning of the end for the Axis. For it was here, in what Vasily Grossman called the ‘cauldron of totalitarian violence’, that the full devastating might of the three-cornered Allied combination was revealed.

  At Stalingrad the Germans had been surrounded and succumbed in the end to shortages of supplies. At Kursk the Wehrmacht met the Red Army head to head. The sheer scale of what happened at the Kursk salient, in the stormy days of July 1943, is hard to grasp. The battlefield was the size of Wales; it takes three hours to drive from one end of it to the other. The Germans planned a classic pincer movement from north and south, with the aim of encircling the Soviet force within the salient. The Russian response was defence in depth. The aim was to fortify the salient and then use maskirovka – deceptive camouflage – to lure the Germans to their destruction. They dug 3,000 miles of trenches, laid 400,000 mines and assembled 1,336,000 men (two-fifths of the entire Red Army), 3,444 tanks, 2,900 aircraft and 19,000 guns. On the other side there were around 900,000 German soldiers in fifty divisions. The Germans might once have been able to overcome such a numerical disadvantage. But they now faced a Red Army primed with British intelligence and armed with the latest American hardware. Soviet commanders were communicating with one another using American radios. There were squadrons of P-39 Air Cobra tank busters lined up on Soviet airfields.

  The German offensive, codenamed Citadel, was timed for 2.30 on the morning of July 4. At 2.20 precisely, forewarned thanks to the code breakers of Station X at Bletchley Park,* Zhukov unleashed a ferocious pre-emptive bombardment, so deafening it sounded to him like a ‘symphony of hell’. A dozen penal battalions were marched at gunpoint to the front line and left there to blunt the initial German attacks. The Germans were caught by surprise, but pressed on, relying on the superior firepower of their brand-new Panther tanks. General Hermann Hoth drove the crack Death’s Head and Das Reich divisions of the 4th Panzer Army deep into the Soviet southern flank. It was the job of General Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army to stop him. Speeding westwards from the Soviet reserves, Rotmistrov hurled his forces into the battle at the crucial point, Prokhorovka Hill. Eight days after the battle had begun, two massive tank armies literally collided – 850 Soviet T-34s against 600 German panzers. For a time, scarcely anything could be seen in the smoke and dust. Rotmistrov’s tank commanders had to steer their tanks with the pressure of their feet on their drivers’ shoulders. Then torrential rain all but liquefied the battlefield. When the fighting finally stopped, all that remained was a ghastly morass of burnt-out tanks and charred bodies. For weeks after the battle, the whole region, thirty miles long and wide, remained, as the Soviet journalist I lya Ehrenburg put it, a ‘hideous desert’: ‘Villages destroyed by fire, shattered towns, stumps of trees, cars bogged down in green slime, field hospitals, hastily dug graves – it all merges into one.’

  This was what Ehrenburg called ‘Deep War’. There had never been a conflict like it. It was pitiless. It was remorseless. And yet it could not be endless. For although both sides finished more or less where they began, the German losses were far more serious in relative terms: more than half their men and half their vehicles. In the succeeding weeks, they were driven back relentlessly, losing Orel, then Briansk, then Belgorod, then Kharkov. A fortnight after Kursk, near Karachev, Ehrenburg saw a signpost: ‘1,209 miles to Berlin’. That seemed to sym-bolize the sudden realization that Germany’s defeat was now inevitable.

  For it was not only on the Eastern Front that the tide had irrevocably turned. In every theatre, as Brooke put it, the Allies had begun ‘to stop losing the war and [were] working towards winning it’. The Germans had been on the retreat in North Africa since the success of Operation Torch (the Allied landings at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers) and Montgomery’s victory at El Alame in in early November 1942. The Afrika Korps surrendered on May 12, 1943. The Battle of the Atlantic was effectively over by the summer of 1943, thanks to the improved detection and destruction of German submarines; the following year the Allies lost just thirty-one merchant ships to U-boat attacks, compared with over a thousand in 1942.

  In the Pacific, too, the tide had turned – and even more swiftly than in Eastern Europe. At the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway (May and June 1942), Admiral Chester W. Nimitz’s carriers first checked and then inflicted heavy casualties on the numerically superior Japanese fleet. As at Kursk, both sides suffered substantial losses, but the relative cost of the battle to the already over-stretched Axis power was far higher; the Japanese would never replace their four
sunk carriers, where as the Americans were still far from the peak of their shipbuilding capacity. The series of battles fought on and around the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons between August 1942 and February 1943 exposed the vulnerability of Japanese ground forces once the Americans had established naval and air superiority. In May 1943 US forces destroyed the Japanese forces on the Aleutian island of Attu and forced them to abandon Kiska; by September Japanese strategy had degenerated into holding an 8,000-mile last line of defence which they were already losing the means of supplying. Even in China there was progress. Colonel Claire Lee Chennault’s ‘Flying Tigers’ inflicted severe damage on Japanese targets, notably the Taiwanese airfields. In late 1943 Chennault’s arch-rival, General Joseph Stilwell, finally got the Chinese army to make an effective incursion into Burma. Together, all these advances signalled that the Axis powers were doomed, that they could not hope to win a war against the combined might of the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States. The Italians saw the writing on the wall and overthrew Mussolini in July 1943, only to be overrun by the Germans.

  Two months after the Battle of Kursk, the Joint Intelligence Sub Committee of the British War Cabinet drew up a fascinating report, noting the ‘striking similarities’ between Germany’s predicament in 1943 and her predicament in 1918. Allied air raids were producing as big ‘and perhaps [an] even greater sense of hopelessness and loss of morale’ as the naval blockade of the previous war:

  Germany’s European Allies… are again only waiting the first opportunity to get out of the war. One [Italy] has already done so… In these circumstances the German High Command in 1918 recognised the inevitability of eventual defeat and the futility of continuing the struggle. We believe that a similar feeling that Germany has lost all hope of winning the war, and that further fighting can only lead to useless bloodshed and destruction[,] is prevalent in Germany today and that it is shared even by some of the military leaders… A study of the picture as a whole leads us inevitably to the conclusion that Germany is, if anything, in a worse position today than she was at the same period in 1918.

  Despite the much higher level of political repression and the much harsher peace terms the Germans could now expect, the possibility could not be ruled out, the report concluded, that there might be a ‘crisis’ – perhaps even ‘some sudden change of regime’ – in Germany before the end of the year, paving the way to an armistice. In December 1943, no such crisis having occurred, Churchill asked a gathering of British and American chiefs of staff when Germany would be defeated; their answers ranged between March and November 1944.

  How could such well-informed authorities have been so right about the inevitability of Allied victory but so wrong in their prediction of when it would come? For the Germans and the Japanese fought on for nearly two long years after Kursk – a period, moreover, that saw the highest mortality of the entire war. No doubt it is possible to think of ways in which the Allies might have brought the war to a swifter conclusion. There are those who continue to believe (as the Soviets argued at the time) that a ‘Second Front’ could have been opened in Western Europe a year earlier than D-Day; that the landings in North Africa and Italy were simply a diversion from the main event, which was France. Many military analysts since Basil Liddell Hart – and, indeed, Siegfried Westphal, Rundstedt’s Chief of Staff – have argued that the Anglo-American advance after D-Day could have been faster if it had not been spread over such a broad front. Yet the decisive factor in the war’s protracted ending was not Allied over-caution so much as astonishing Axis tenacity. Any counter factual of an early end to the war falls foul of the fact that between June 1943 and May 1944 the Wehrmacht lost a minimum of 900,000 men. Those who still remained to fight after the Allied landings fought well enough; how much better would the Germans have fought a year earlier? Perhaps it was as well to have dress rehearsals for the decisive amphibious landings, first in North Africa and then in Italy.

  TO THE DEATH

  ‘If we were fighting reasonable people,’ an aide to the American General Omar Bradley remarked in December 1944, ‘they would have surrendered long ago.’ It is true that there were some major German surrenders before 1945: that of Paulus’s 6th Army at Stalingrad; the collapse of Army Group Centre in July 1944, when twenty-five divisions gave themselves up; the surrender of more than eighteen divisions at Iasi in August 1944. Yet the vast majority of German prisoners were captured only after the official surrender signed by General Jodl at 2.41 a.m. on May 7, 1945. According to one estimate, the Western Allies had captured just 630,000 Germans prior to the capitulation. The post-war Maschke Commission put the total number of Germans held prisoner in the first quarter of 1945 at more than two million, roughly shared between the Eastern and Western theatres of the European war. In all, the number of prisoners on the eve of the German capitulation cannot have exceeded three million.In other words, at least eight million of the final total of eleven million German soldiers laid down their arms only after the official surrender. Not untypical was the Courland Army, which resisted to the bitter end despite having been surrounded by the Red Army as early as January 1945. What is more, an unknown but surely large proportion of the three million pre-capitulation prisoners clearly gave themselves up only in the very last weeks of the war.

  The Japanese fought even more tenaciously than the Germans. In the Pacific war, the Western armies’ ratio of captured to dead was around 4:1. The Japanese ratio was 1:40. Only 1,700 Japanese prisoners were taken in Burma, compared with 150,000 who were killed; of the former, only 400 were physically fit, and all tried to commit suicide in their first week of captivity. Despite the fact that their position was patently hopeless, the Japanese defended Okinawa to the death after the Americans landed there in March-April 1945. Desperate hand-to-hand fighting, not least in the warren of caves into which the Japanese retreated, left more than 100,000 Japanese troops dead. Only around 7,000 of the defender sended up a sprisoners. Perhaps as many as 42,000 civilians also lost their lives. American casualties exceeded 49,000 (of whom some 12,000 died), the worst for any of the Pacific battles. Meanwhile, nearly 8,000 pilots in suicidal tokkotai units- the so-called kamikaze (‘divine wind’) – flew their planes directly into American ships, sinking thirty-six and destroying 763 of the aircraft on board. Not until they were on the verge of starvation in the closing weeks of the war did significant numbers of Japanese troops begin to give themselves up. And even in late July 1945 in south Burma 17,000 lost their lives in a futile attempt to break out from the hills and cross the formidable Sittang river. Unlike other nationalities, the Japanese tended to be captured singly and only when incapacitated. One Japanese soldier refused to lay down his arms until 1974. There is little question that the majority of those forces mobilized for the final defence of mainland Japan would have gone down fighting rather than surrender in the absence of an imperial command to do so.*

  How can we explain the tenacity of the German and Japanese armies in the Second World War? Why did they keep fighting after any rational hope of victory had evaporated? Part of the answer lies in the realm of military discipline. In Britain the death penalty for desertion was abolished in 1930 and never restored. The Americans too were lenient; only one GI was executed for desertion during the entire Second World War. But on the German side, as on the Russian, the penalties for desertion were significantly stiffened as the war went on. The Wehrmacht executed between 15,000 and 20,000 of its own men, mainly in the later stages of the war for the so-called political crimes of desertion or Wehrkraftzersetzung (undermining of the war effort), and effectively sentenced many thousands more to death by assigning them to punishment battalions. Such draconian measures became increasingly important on the Eastern Front when very high casualty rates (up to 300 per cent of the original strength of some divisions) prevented the formation of ‘primary group’ loyalties and desertion rates began to rise. Phrases like ‘most severe punishment’ and ‘ruthless use of all means’ became routine euphemisms f
or summary executions. By the end of the war, German Landsers faced a stark choice: ‘Death by a bullet from the enemy or by the “thugs” of the SS’. As one German deserter who made it to the Russian lines explained in October 1942, the reason more of his comrades did not surrender was fear ‘that if they deserted their families would be punished, that if they were seen trying to cross over they would be shot, and that if they were caught they would be executed’.

  A second reason Axis forces refused to surrender was not fear of punishment but fear of dishonour. On the Japanese side, certainly, this played a crucial role. The Japanese military had long sought to stigmatize surrender. Although there was no formal regulation against it in either the army or the navy’s pre-war criminal codes and disciplinary regulations, by the beginning of the Pacific war capitulation had become taboo. ‘Never live to experience shame as a prisoner’ was the stark message of the 1941 Field Service Code, and the Japanese army simply refused to acknowledge the existence of Japanese prisoners of war. In the words of Saitō Mutsuo, who trained as a kamikaze pilot:

  You see, the Japanese army had no concept of surrender. Even if there was no hope of beating the enemy you were still supposed to fight to the end. That, we were told, was Yamato damasbii – the Spirit of Japan. We were made to believe that there was something shameful in the way that American and British troops gave up the fight so easily, as they had done at Singapore and other places.

  The American war correspondent Ernie Pyle was told by a group of marines how a Japanese officer had responded to being surrounded on a beach by decapitating six of his own men and then brandishing his bloody sword until he was shot dead. At Attu the Japanese mounted suicidal banzai charges rather than capitulate. Those Japanese soldiers whom the Allies did succeed in capturing often committed suicide or attempted suicidal escapes. Even at the end of the war, there was extreme reluctance to make use of ‘surrender passes’ bearing the word ‘surrender’ in either Japanese (kosan, kofuku) or English; ‘I cease resistance’ was the preferred euphemism. Some Japanese soldiers refused to lay down their arms until the Imperial Headquarters issued an order on August 15, 1945, that ‘servicemen who come under the control of the enemy forces… will not be regarded asPoWs’. Many civilians felt the same reluctance to acquiesce in defeat; on Saipan and the Kerama Islands, men killed their own families and then themselves rather than surrender. The Allied insistence on unconditional surrender – announced by Roosevelt at Casablanca in January 1943 – may have stiffened resistance, since it seemed to imply the deposition of the Emperor.