A World at Arms (177 page)

With very few exceptions, German generals were simply not capable of working with the leaders of the countries allied with them. Feeling certain of their own superiority and the inferiority of all others, they showed these attitudes and thus made real cooperation practically impossible. The Japanese military leaders were, if anything, even more supercilious in their treatment of the military units recruited by them in the occupied areas of South and Southeast Asia. Furthermore, with very few exceptions, neither German nor Japanese leaders in either the military or naval sphere had much of a sense of the global inter-relationships of a global conflict. The admirals were, on the whole, less blinkered than the generals, but no individuals with broader vision could be found in either country’s leadership. What capabilities in either of these fields might have existed among the higher commanders of the Red Army and the Red Navy were so inhibited by the restraints imposed by Stalin on all in the country, and by the fact that the Soviet Union alone among major belligerents fought on only one front at a time, that it is impossible to tell. It was therefore among British and American commanders that one must look for these qualities.

Some of the higher commanders of the Western Allies were quite incapable of working effectively with Allied military leaders and staffs; Montgomery on the British and MacArthur on the American side are striking examples of this. But there were many who developed if they did not already have quite considerable abilities in this regard. Field Marshal Alexander, General Ismay and Air Marshal Tedder, and Admirals Ramsay and Mountbatten among the British, and Generals Eisenhower, Bedell Smith, Arnold, and Devers among the Americans obviously had this quality. These were practically invariably personal characteristics, though they were at times, especially after the war, alleged to be related to national rivalries. But Montgomery was no more British than Tedder, and Patton was no more American than Smith. Personal qualities and characteristics still counted in the most mechanized of wars.

Roosevelt and Churchill both had a sense of the war as a global one. The “Europe First” strategy which they adopted, and to which they held, certainly made good sense. And Roosevelt, as Eric Larrabee has pointed out, was particularly thoughtful and successful in picking the right men for the top posts.
²⁴
At least some of their higher military leaders also attained a truly global perception of the war. Field Marshal Brooke had a measure of this, and in spite of his endless criticism of Eisenhower, eventually entrusted some favorable comments on him to his diary.
²⁵
Even more than Eisenhower, Marshall and Arnold had a global view of the war. It is surely worth noting that Arnold would entitle his memoirs
Global Mission,
²⁶
and that Marshall subsequently saw his name attached to the plan for Europe’s economic recovery.

This points to one of the most important if rarely discussed effects of the war. Whatever the destruction and the dangers, whatever the new challenges and problems, constructive individuals with a combination of insight and enterprise were entirely capable of coping with them. The enormous damage left behind by the years of conflict looked at first beyond the capacity of humans to repair, but in the years after 1945, the European continent, most affected by the damage, emerged into the most prosperous era in its history. The new weapons suggested the possibility of eliminating life from the planet, but the decades after the war became the longest period of European peace since the introduction of the modern state system half a millennium earlier. The massive migrations of wretched refugees, “displaced persons” as they were officially called, came to contribute their energies and their talents toward the flowering of those countries in which they found refuge; as so often before in history–if rarely on such a huge scale–it turned out that the
most important possession of human beings was what they carried between their ears, and that could not be taken from them as long as they remained alive.

The years of seemingly endless warfare had shown all too clearly the capabilities of individuals for harming one another, for devising new methods of destruction, and for harnessing the power of society and nature for military purposes. But humans could also learn from prior mistakes and utilize their talents for reconstruction and for the creation of international mechanisms to preserve the peace. The establishment of cooperative arrangements for the rebuilding of a shattered Europe was limited to the continent’s western portion by the creation of a new Soviet empire in the very years that the old empires of the Western European states were being broken up, but there was no guarantee that the new Soviet and the old Russian empire would not eventually reach the same end, even if by a different path.

Already in the anti-German resistance movements during the years of occupation, there had been considerable informal discussion of the possibility of new arrangements in the future which would deemphasize the nation state and create in all or parts of Europe some type of structure which might embrace them all and eliminate or at least greatly attenuate conflict between them. In the years after 1945, the impetus toward European unification would continue, even if periodically interrupted. Greater success was attained earlier in the economic and then in the military sphere with political unity lagging far behind; but the impetus itself remained.

The vast dimensions of World War II certainly demonstrated the capacity of human beings for destroying each other and themselves, but in a way they also provide a clue to the enormous potential for organizing constructive programs and policies to which the energies of humanity might be harnessed. The new weapons of mass destruction not only brought the threat of unlimited disaster but inspired extreme caution. They could not preclude the possibility of miscalculation, but they certainly created an enormous incentive for avoiding catastrophe. It had become all too obvious that another world war would be the last. A combination of care and luck, inventiveness and insight might enable humanity to harness its capacities for constructive purposes. The great conflagration stood as a warning for all.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

No attempt will be made here either to list all the works cited in the text or to provide a detailed bibliography of World War II. All books and articles referred to in the footnotes and endnotes have been provided with full citations at their first mention in the endnotes; the purpose of this essay is to suggest to the interested reader a highly selective list of books and articles, including some utilized but not cited in this book, which appear to me to be of special note. The personal element in this selection is unavoidable. The existing literature is so vast, and is in my judgement of such greatly varied quality, that it makes more sense to offer suggestions and evaluations based on extensive acquaintance instead of trying to be exhaustive–something a printout from a computerized catalog can do far better. This essay begins with a section on bibliographies, for the benefit of those who wish to start with a broader set of references, and it contains many works which include bibliographies themselves, bibliographies which are in many cases very extensive indeed. Although the emphasis here will be on books and articles in English, there are subjects on which the most important literature is in other languages, primarily German, French, and Italian, so that some of these are included.

Just as it seems to me to make little sense to append a complete list of the works used in this book’s preparation, so I do not believe the reader will be aided by a list of archival folders consulted. Whenever a document from an archive is cited in the text, the reference provided has deliberately been made sufficiently specific to enable anyone either desirous of checking my interpretation or wishing to pursue further research to locate the original. At the end of this essay, therefore, there is a short discussion of major archives which have proved helpful, together with an even shorter list of works which describe archives and provide information on their status and organization. That has also appeared to be the appropriate place to comment on archival materials either still closed or only now being opened up and which may offer new perspectives on the war as they are made accessible and used.

The best place to begin any search is Janet Ziegler,
World War II: Works in English, 1945–65
(Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1971). Arthur L. Funk has prepared sequels to this book, the first covering the years 1965–75 issued by the World War II Studies Association (formerly the American Committee on the History of the Second World War), and the second, entitled
The Second World War: A Select
Bibliography of Books in English Since 1975
, published in 1985 by Regina Books of Claremont, California. Current bibliographic coverage is in the “Newsletter” of the World War II Studies Association. For more extensive listings, including items in languages other than English, the
Jahresbibliographie
issued annually by the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte (Library for Contemporary History) in Stuttgart and the
Bibliographie
of the
Vierteljahrshefie für Zeitgeschichte
are most helpful. The main French journal in the field, the
Revue d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale,
has changed not only its title but its coverage and emphasis.

There are specialized bibliographies on aspects of the war and on specific theaters. Myron J. Smith has prepared a considerable number of very good ones; there is also a fine one by John J. Sbrega,
The War against Japan: A Bibliography
(New York: Garland, 1989). On the Holocaust, see Jacob Robinson and Philip Friedman,
Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact
(New York: YIVO, 1960), and Jacob Robinson and Mrs. Philip Friedman,
The Holocaust and After: Sources and Literature in English
(Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1973). On war crimes and trials, Norman E. Tutorow,
War Crimes, War Criminals, and War Crimes Trials: An Annotated Bibliography and Source Book
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), is most comprehensive. For the diplomatic origins of the Cold War, Joseph L. Black,
Origins, Evolution, and Nature of the Cold War: An Annotated Bibliographic Guide
(Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1986), is a good place to start. Additional bibliographies of a specialized kind are listed by Ziegler and Funk.

For single-volume histories of the war, Martha Byrd’s
A World in Flames: A History of World War II
(New York: Atheneum, 1970, reprinted by Univ. of Alabama Press) for the military side is complemented on the diplomatic side by John L. Snell,
Illusion and Necessity: The Diplomacy of Global War 1939–1945
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963). There is a good German one–volume account in Lothar Gruchmann,
Der Zweite Weltkrieg: Kriegführung und Politik
(Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1967). The best collection of maps remains that in volume 2 of Vincent J. Esposito (ed.),
The West Point Atlas of American Wars
(New York: Praeger, 1959), which, in spite of the apparent limitation in its title, covers all fronts and sides of World War II. An excellent general survey of the European aspect of the war is in Gordon Wright,
The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945
(New York: Harper & Row, 1968); there is nothing like it for the war in East Asia. F. C. Jones,
Japan’s New Order in East Asia: Its Rise and Fall, 1937–1945
(London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), and Ienaga Saburo,
The Pacific War, 1931–1945
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), are helpful. John Costello,
The Pacific War
(New York: Quill, 1982), and Ronald H. Spector,
Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan
(New York: Free Press, 1985), cover the conflict in the Pacific; Christopher Thorne,
Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), emphasizes the diplomatic and political side at the expense of the conduct of operations and with vast emphasis on the tensions between the two Western Powers.

Alan S. Milward,
War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945
(Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1977) reviews the social and economic aspects of the war as a whole; Mark Harrison, “Resource Mobilization for World War II: The U.S.A., U.K., U.S.S.R., and Germany, 1938–1945,”
Economic History Review,
2d series, 41 (1988), 171–92, is an excellent introduction to its subject. John F. Kreis,
Air Warfare and
Air Base Defense, 1914–1973
(Washington: GPO, 1988), is even more comprehensive than its title. Of the books of pictures and documents, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Hans Dollinger,
Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Bildern und Dokumenten,
3 vols. (Wiesbaden: Löwit, 1963), remains the best.

There are several large collections of published documents on the war. The official American series,
Foreign Relations of the United States,
has appeared for all the war years; the volumes on the wartime conferences are especially significant. The Eisenhower papers have been issued in a very well edited set, Alfred D. Chandler,Jr. (ed.),
The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years,
5 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970); those of General Marshall, Larry 1. Bland (ed.),
The Papers of George Catlett Marshall,
are still being published (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press).
Pearl Harbor Attack: Hearings before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack
was originally published in 39 parts as a Congressional document in 1946; like the Nürnberg trial set, it has been reprinted with an introduction of mine by AMS Press.

The British publication of diplomatic documents stops in 1939 and only picks up again with 1945. For the war years, there are the published
Telegrams and Memoranda of the War Cabinet
issued by the Public Record Office, the
Weekly Political Intelligence Summaries
of the Foreign Office, published by Kraus International, and the documents appended to Churchill’s memoirs, Winston S. Churchill,
The Second World War,
6 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948–53).