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

by Niall Ferguson

  * It is interesting to note that Henlein was himself the product of a mixed marriage; his mother was Czech.

  * They were Oliver Stanley (President of the Board of Trade), Walter Elliot (Minister for Health), Earl Winterton (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) and Earl de la Warr (Lord Privy Seal).

  * Ivone Kirkpatrick, from the British embassy, who accompanied Wilson, was mesmerized: ‘At intervals he rose from his chair and drifted towards the door as if resolved to leavethe room. I gazed at him in fascination. During oneofhis many tirades I was unable to take my eyes off him and my pencil remained poised above the paper… At times, particularly when Wilson spoke about the Prime Minister’s desire for a peaceful solution, Hitler pushed back his chair and smote his thigh in a gesture of frustrated rage.’

  * Fuller had been the mastermind behind the British tank offensive at Cambrai in 1917. His frustration with the British Establishment led him to support Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

  * Like Guderian, Rommel had also thought deeply about tank warfare. His two pre-war books, Infantry Attacks and Tank Attacks, brought him to Hitler’s attention, leading to his appointment ashead of Hitler Youth training and later commander of Hitler’s personal security battalion, which accompanied the Führer when he visited occupied Czechoslovakia.

  * At the outbreak of war, the British had seven aircraft carriers, the Germans none; fifteen battleships to the Germans’ five; forty-nine cruisers to the Germans’ six; 192 destroyers to the Germans’ twenty-one.

  * Two striking examples: Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Celine) and Georges Rémi (Hergé). The former wasa confirmed anti-Semite well before the war and was imprisoned after the war for his role in the Vichy period. The latter (who was Belgian rather than French) had somewhat weaker prejudices against Jews and Americans, was strongly anti-Japanese and less than pro-German, but was certainly quite firmly anti-Communist. Some of the best of his Tintin stories were in fact produced during the German occupation: he Crabe aux pinces d’or, Le Secret de la licorne, he Trésor de Rackham le rouge and Les Sept Boules de crystal, all published in Le Soir between 1940 and 1944. After the war, Hergé was arrested for collaboration, but responded that he had merely answered King Leopold’s appeal not to abandon his country.

  * Significantly, 15 out of 25 leadersof the Einsatzgruppen had doctorates. These were more extraordinary than ordinary men – members of the German academic elite. The number of groups was later increased from five to seven, with an additional Einsatzkommando from Danzig.

  * It should be remembered that most of these territories had been ceded by Germany only under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Technically, they now became two new Reichsgaue: Danzig-West Prussia (including Danzig, Bromberg and Marien-werder) and Wartheland (including Posen and Littmannstadt, as Łódź was renamed). These were administratively part of the Reich but with the exception of Danzig treated as foreign territory for the purposes of travel. It was significant that they were defined as Gaue, the regional unit of party rather than state organization in Germany. Here the party would be able to act without the constraints of pre-1933 administrative institutions.

  * It was Johst who wrote the famous line, usually misattributed to Göring: ‘Wenn ich Kultur höre… entsichere ich meinen Browning’ (When I hear the word culture… I take the safety catch off my Browning). The line comes from the opening scene of Johst’s best-known play, Schlageter (1933), a tribute to the Nazi ‘martyr’ Albert Leo Schlageter. He described his visit to Poland with Himmler in the book Ruf des Reiches – Echo des Volkes! Eine Ostfahrt (1940).

  * The introduction of the star in Germany reopened the debate about the status of mixed marriages. It was decreed that the star would not be mandatory for ‘(a) a Jewish husband living in a mixed marriage if there are children born of this marriage who are not considered Jews. This also applies if the marriage is dissolved or if the only son was killed in the present war [and] (b) a Jewish wife in a childless mixed marriage for the duration of the marriage’.

  * The scale of the Quit India revolt, which was condoned by the supposedly non-violent Gandhi (‘I will prefer anarchy to the present system of administration’), is often forgotten. In all, more than 60,000 people were arrested. According to official statistics 1,028 people were killed and 3,125 seriously injured, though the total number shot dead may have been as high as 2,500. More than 300 railway stations were destroyed or severely damaged.

  † During his pre-war Marxist phase, Cripps had been expelled from the Labour Party for proposing a ‘Popular Front’ with the British Communists. This recommended him to Churchill as a potentially effective ambassador in Moscow.

  * Out of the 153 divisions, there were 19 panzer divisions and just 15 of motorized infantry.

  * For this sensationalist hypothesis, see Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker (1990) and Con-stantine Pleshakov, Stalin’s Folly (2005). Suvorov’s (wholly circumstantial) evidence was the destruction of defensive assets along the Soviet western frontier in 1940 and early 1941. The documents cited by Pleshakov – several drafts ‘on the principles of the USSR’s armed forces deployment’ from 1940 and 1941 – show only that Stalin was contemplating a pre-emptive strike. They are mere sketches, without any of the sort of detailed operational planning the Germans had been working on since July 1940.

  * Hess appears to have acted on his own initiative in the hope of brokering a separate peace with Britain on the eve of Barbarossa. He flew to Scotland apparently in the erroneous belief that the Duke of Hamilton – whom he had met at the 1936 Olympics – might be open to such an initiative. Hess parachuted from his Me 110, landing at Floors Farm near Eaglesham, on the bleak moors south-west of Glasgow. On hearing the news of Hess’s capture, Churchill declared: ‘Hess or no Hess, I am going to see the Marx Brothers.’

  * Russians remain reluctant to acknowledge Stalin’s gross negligence in 1941. In a poll conducted on the 50th anniversary of his death, the Russian Centre for Public Opinion found that 53 per cent of Russians still regard him as a ‘great’ leader. He was, a Russian pensioner told the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, ‘the father of the family, the person who took care of us’.

  * Goebbels noted in his diary for March 16, 1942: ‘Nationalistic currents are increasingly observable in all former Baltic states. The populations there apparently imagined that the German Wehrmacht would shed its blood to set up new governments in these midget states… This is a childish, naïve bit of imagination which makes no impression on us… National Socialism is much more cold-blooded and much more realistic in all these questions. It does only what is useful for its own people, and in this instance the interest of our people undoubtedly lies in the rigorous establishment of a German order within this area without paying any attention to the claims… of the small nationalities living there.’ Hitler, as we have seen, wanted Ukrainians to be like Indians in his imagined British Empire: docile, uneducated consumers of brightly coloured textiles made in Germany.

  * Significantly, the guidelines issued by the Reich Security Main Office for the ‘treatment of the Jewish question in the occupied territories of the USSR’ introduced a new and wider definition than had hitherto been used in the Reich: ‘A Jew is anyone who is or has been a member of the Jewish religion or otherwise declares himself to be a Jew or has done so or whose membership of the Jewish race is apparent from other circumstances. Anyone who has one parent who is a Jew within the meaning of the previous sentence is regarded as a Jew.’

  * Einsatzgruppe A massacred Jews in Kovno, Riga and Vilna, to name just three locations. Einsatzgruppe B operated in Byelorussia and the area west of Smolensk, killing Jews in Grodno, Minsk, Brest, Slonim, Gomel and Mogilev. Einsatzgruppe C ranged from eastern Poland into the Ukraine, carrying out mass murders in Lwów, Tarnopol, Kharkov and Kiev. Einsatzgruppe D was active in the southern Ukraine and the Crimea, especially in Nikolaiev, Kherson, Simferopol and Sebastopol. It will be seen that the role of the Einsatzgruppe was essentially to obliterate the historic
Pale of Jewish Settlement.

  * One estimate puts the total towards the end of the war at around 647,000, of whom around a third were from the Ukraine, 17 per cent apiece from the Caucasus and Turkestan and 12 per cent from the Baltic states. Some 11 per cent were Cossacks, 5 per cent were Tatars, 2 per cent Kalmyks and 2 per cent Byelorussians.

  * The most precise figures for the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War are asfollows: total population in 1939 – 9,415,840; lowest estimate of losses – 5,596,029; highest estimate – 5,860,129.

  * In 1938 Mussolini’s government passed legislation which forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews and banned Jewish teachers from schools. However, Italians were generally reluctant to assist the Germans with their wartime policies of deportation and mass murder. Between 1939 and 1943 many thousands of Jews sought refuge in Italy and Italian-occupied territory. Thischanged radically when the Germansoccu-pied Italy in the autumn of 1943. Nevertheless, despite German efforts to round up and deport the Italian Jews, 40,000 out of a pre-war population of around 50,000 survived the war. Less well known is the story of the approximately 21,000 Jewswho found sanctuary under Japanese rule. For example, thousands of refugees who had fled to Lithuania in 1939 were provided with exit visas by the Japanese diplomat Sugihara Chiune. In all, around 4,500 Jewsfrom Nazi-occupied countriesfled eastwards by such means, of whom all but a thousand succeeded in proceeding to safe destinations. Those left behind were moved to Shanghai, where there was already a large community of around 18,000 ‘stateless’ Jewish refugees. The Jews were confined to the Hongkew area of Shanghai in February 1943, but survived the war, despite German pressure for their extermination.

  * The fighting strength of the Chinese army was around 2.9 million, divided into 246 divisions and 44 independent brigades. However, each division had just 324 machine-guns between nine and a half thousand men. In all, the Chinese army had little more than one million riflesand just 800 piecesof artillery.

  * Because of the poor quality of the roadsand rampant theft, it wasestimated that 14,000 tonshad to leave Lashio in Burma for 5,000 tonsto arrive in Chungking. At most 30,000 tonsgot through each month.

  * Liaison conferences (Daihon’ei Seifu Renraku Kaigi) were an innovation dating back to 1937. They brought together representatives of the government and of the High Command. Those present generally included the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, the War Minister, the Navy Minister and the two Chiefs of Staff. They were relatively informal, with no individual formally presiding. Decisions had to be ratified at an Imperial Conference (Gozen Kaigi), which included membersof the Liaison Conference, the President of the Privy Council and the Emperor himself, who sat – usually silently – on a dais in front of a gold screen. His ratification made any decision reached on these occasions binding and all but irrevocable.

  * The Japanese force comprised more than 50 ships, including 4 large and 2 light carriers(each with a complement of around 70 aircraft), 2 battleships, 2 cruisers, 9 destroyers, 8 fuel tankersand 30 submarines, five of which were equipped with midget submersibles and three of which were sent ahead as an advance guard.

  * The Japanese forced some 78,000 survivors of the Bataan campaign to walk the 65 milesfrom Marivelesto San Fernando. The majority died en route asa result of physical violence, malnourishment and disease.

  * Orwell’s essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ epitomizes the subtle demoralization of the British in Asia in the 1930s. When an elephant runs amok, Orwell is expected to shoot it. He finds the task intensely distasteful and only does so out of a fear of ‘looking a fool’: ‘With the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it wasquite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.’

  * Reder wasa trained chemist who wasdeported from Lwów in August 1942. He worked asa member of the ‘death crew’, digging gravesand dragging bodiesout of the gaschambers. After four monthshe wassent to Lwów to help fetch a consignment of sheet metal for the camp. While his guard slept, he made his escape.

  * Ironically, Hitler said the same about the Japanese in May 1942: ‘The present conflict is one of life or death, and the essential thing is to win – and to that end we are quite ready to make an alliance with the Devil himself.’

  * ‘We must at all costs advance into the plains of Mesopotamia and take the Mosul oilfields from the British,’ declared Hitler on August 5, 1942. ‘If we succeed here, the whole war will come to an end.’ But three-quartersof total world oil production in 1944 came from the United States, compared with just 7 per cent from the whole of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf.

  * It is seldom acknowledged that for most of the period from 1940 until D-Day, black Africansconstituted the main elementsof the rank and file in the Free French Army. Even aslate asSeptember 1944, they still accounted for 1 in 5 of de Gaulle’sforce in North-West Europe.

  * Nearly three-quartersof the men in the four US divisions that took part in the Normandy landings became casualties within seven weeks of going ashore. Mortality ratesamong American riflemen were between 16 and 19 per cent. More than a quarter of the officers in some British rifle battalions were killed. Nearly half of Bomber Command crews ended up killed or missing in action. Only German submarine crews had a higher fatality rate (82 per cent).

  * Alan Brooke was contemptuous of Churchill’sinability to ‘grasp the relation of various theatres of war to each other’. In 1943 he wasdriven to distraction by the Prime Minister’s hobbyhorse, an occupation of northern Sumatra. Churchill was ‘temperamental like a film star, and peevish like a spoilt child’. By early 1944 Brooke wasconvinced that Churchill’sage and alcohol consumption were impairing hisjudge-ment; he went so far as to wish he would ‘disappear out of public life… for the good of the nation and… hisown reputation’. ‘The wonderful thing’, he wrote on September 10, 1944, ‘isthat ¾ of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the great Strategists of History… and the other ¼ have no conception what a public menace he is.’ Brooke was, admittedly, a bitter man. He felt that he, not Eisenhower, should have led the invasion of France, but this was to underestimate the rapidly growing disparity between the US and UK contributions to the war.

  * ‘For years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa,’ Charles Wilson famously told the Senate Armed Services Committee before hisappointment asSecretary of Defense wasconfirmed.

  * Soviet losses during the Second World War are estimated to have been around 25 million. Thisbreaksdown asfollows: at least 8.7 million military deaths, though the number may have been ashigh as10.2 million if German rather than Soviet figures are accepted for prisoners who died in captivity; 13.7 million victimsof German occupation, of whom 7.4 million were executed, 2.2 million worked to death in Germany and the remaining 4.1 million succumbed to starvation or disease. Yet at least two million and probably more Soviet citizensdied in placesbeyond the reach of Germans. It would be an error to blame Hitler for all the Soviet war victims.

  * The Sovietsgot their intelligence from Bletchley by two routes, one official and one illicit. Among those working at Bletchley was John Cairncross, the ‘fifth man’ of the Cambridge spy ring, who supplied information about German operations to his NKVD controller in London, Anatoli Gorsky. German deserters confirmed the British prediction about the timing of the planned German offensive.

  * The Japanese still had 169 infantry divisions, 4 tank divisions and 15 air divisions – around 5.5 million men – and the air force had 9,000 operational aircraft.

  * It is not easy to say precisely how many people the Germans killed. Suffice to say that the ratio of Allied
to Axis military deaths was 3.0:1 and the ratio of Allied to Axis civilian deaths was 5.8:1.

  * The incendiary bombs were filled with highly combustible substances such as magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly. After the target was burning, the hot air above it began to rise rapidly, sucking in colder air from the surrounding area. The effect wasgreatly magnified if the wind wasin the right direction, aswasthe case in both Hamburg and Dresden.

  * A number of the Doolittle airmen were captured and executed, inspiring the film Purple Heart. Shortly before his execution one of the pilotstellshiscaptors: ‘You can kill us– all of us… But if you think that’sgoing to put the fear of God into the United States of America and stop them from sending other fliers to bomb you, you’re wrong – dead wrong. They’ll blacken your skies and burn your cities to the ground and make you get down on your kneesand beg for mercy. Thisisyour war – you wanted it – you asked for it. And now you’re going to get it – and it won’t be finished until your dirty little empire iswiped from the face of the earth!’

  * That was not lost on the Moscow cinema-goers in whose company I watched the film Schindler’s List in 1993. At the moment towards the film’s denouement when a Red Army soldier on horseback shouts to the surviving prisoners: ‘You are being liberated by the forcesof the Soviet Union,’ the audience erupted into derisive laughter. A Russian audience understood only too well that this was a contradiction in terms.