The History Buff's Guide to World War II (38 page)

The high-flying dirigible garnished his Polish success with baseless proclamations—his Luftwaffe could crush the evacuation of Dunkirk, destroy Britain’s air defenses, supply besieged Stalingrad completely by air,
etc.
In only one prediction was he technically correct. Before the war he proclaimed, “The Ruhr will not be subjected to a single bomb.” The Allies eventually dropped far more than a single bomb on the industrial mecca.
⁵⁹

As if the air force wasn’t enough, Göring also meddled in army affairs. By 1941 his Luftwaffe ran half of Germany’s antiaircraft batteries, competing with army batteries for ammunition, guns, and spare parts. After 1942 the largest and best-equipped tank unit belonged to the Reichsmarshal, the “Panzerdivision Hermann Göring.” All of Germany’s eight paratroop divisions were under the jurisdiction of the Luftwaffe. Of Germany’s 150 infantry divisions on the eastern front, twenty-two of them wore Luftwaffe uniforms.
⁶⁰

By 1943, Göring’s bloated sun had finally set, his Luftwaffe all but shot out of the sky or beaten into the ground. As Allied bombers flew deeper and deeper into German territory, he accused his fighter pilots of cowardice, a strange recrimination. The top U.S. fighter scored forty kills in the war, while fourteen German pilots notched more than two hundred confirmed kills each.
⁶¹

Göring lived to be indicted in the Nuremberg trials, a slimmed-down, detoxed rebirth of his young pre-Nazi self. Defiant and bombastic throughout the proceedings, he was convicted on all counts. He swallowed poison just hours before he was to be hanged.

Only three Germans ever received the Grand Cross, the eighth and highest grade of the Iron Cross: Gebhard von Blücher for routing Napoleon at Waterloo, Paul von Hindenburg for defeating Russia in the First World War, and Hermann Göring.

3
. KLIMENT VOROSHILOV (USSR, 1881–1969)

A Bolshevik long before the 1917 revolution, Kliment Voroshilov was a Red Army commander in the R
USSIAN
C
IVIL
W
AR
when he met and befriended Stalin. Though lacking in intellect and military aptitude, Voroshilov impressed the Georgian with his dogmatic zeal. As years progressed, he displayed an ever-growing loyalty to Stalin, for which he eventually had a military academy, a tank (the heavy KV-1), and a city named after him (Voroshilovgrad, currently Lugansk). He also served as defense commissar from 1934 to 1940, during which the vapid sycophant developed a gift for inflicting terrible damage.

Through Stalin’s bloody purges, Voroshilov assisted in liquidating 80 percent of the Soviet Union’s senior officers, later bragging, “During the course of the cleansing of the Red Army in 1937–1938, we purged more than 40,000 men.” He further destroyed military readiness by improperly supplying and training Russia’s western armies. Few war games transpired while he was in office. Deployment plans were almost never issued. Many divisional headquarters lacked basic maps. Between extolling the leverage of heroism and dismissing the importance of tanks, he predicted that the next war would only take place in enemy territory and any battles therein would be brief and relatively bloodless.
⁶²

When war broke out, Voroshilov “coordinated” the invasion of largely defeated Poland in 1939 and an attack against Finland in the “W
INTER
W
AR
” of 1939–40, netting marginal victories and horrendous losses. During the latter affair the Soviets had six times as many soldiers as the Finns. But poorly motivated and without winter clothing, the Red Army suffered eight times the casualties. Nikita Khrushchev, then a political commissar, dubbed Voroshilov, “the biggest bag of [expletive] in the army.”
⁶³

In 1941, Stalin incredibly placed Voroshilov in charge of defending besieged Leningrad. Though the inhabitants courageously held out month after month, Voroshilov became convinced that defeat was near, so he wandered up to the front in the hopes of getting killed. He failed in that venture as well, and Gen. G
EORGI
Z
HUKOV
arrived the following day to secure the city’s defenses. Voroshilov was summarily removed and promoted to the Soviet Defense Committee.
⁶⁴

The inept Kliment Voroshilov was to have one more distinguished post before retirement. From 1953 to 1960, he was president of the Soviet Union.

4
. CHIANG KAI-SHEK (CHINA, 1887–1975)

It says something about a man if Germans, the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and Mao Zedong fight on his side and he still can’t win.

By 1936, a narcissistic, petty, oppressive but charismatic Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek had established a military academy with the help of German advisers. He also purchased German weapons and began to modernize a massive army of at least two million. At the same time, the Chinese Communists negotiated a “united front” with Chiang to oppose the looming power of Japan. When the Japanese invaded China proper in 1937, first to assist were the Soviets, who provided weapons, ammunition, even pilots and fighters. By 1942 the Allies designated Chiang supreme commander of the China theater and sent billions of dollars in L
END
-L
EASE
.

With all this, Chiang was able to amass an army of three million and more, but he failed to score a single major victory in eight years. Only twice did Chiang direct serious opposition, both times in 1937. In July he initiated a fight over S
HANGHAI
, primarily to gain international attention by placing the multinational port—and China’s richest city—in harm’s way. The event sparked a three-month battle, during which his forces were eventually routed. He immediately followed the devastating loss by jamming two hundred thousand troops in his indefensible capital of Nanking to the west. Both the cream of his army and his capital were demolished in weeks.
⁶⁵

For the rest of the war, he regressed into China’s primitive back-country, establishing a new capital in Chungking (Chongqing), six hundred miles from the Pacific coast. He forced millions of peasants into an undisciplined rabble of an army and presided over a ring of corrupt officials and regional warlords while hoarding money, weapons, and ammunition for an anti-Communist campaign he was aching to resume.

The popular stance in the pro-Chiang camp is that he traded space for time, letting Japan overextend itself into China and subsequently wither on the vine. Such a view overlooks a few basics. The space Chiang surrendered contained 80 percent of his industrial base, including nearly every major city and port in the country. The time he gained he did not use, even when his enemy was locked in a Pacific struggle against the United States.

As for the Communists, their armies never numbered more than a tenth of his force. However, they maintained a much greater level of discipline, conducted far more guerrilla operations, and were more willing to implement tax, rent, and land reforms than the rigid and remorseless Chiang. When two able and progressive Nationalist generals, Pai Chunghsi and Li Tsung-jen, begged the generalissimo to adopt similar methods, Chiang rejected them outright.

In the end, Chiang sacrificed more than a million Chinese soldiers and well over ten million Chinese civilians in his bid to stay in power. In 1949, the West was somehow surprised when the warlord also lost China as well.

Repulsed by Chiang’s limited intellect, his Allied chief of staff, Gen. Joseph Stilwell, referred to the generalissimo as “Peanut.”

5
. RODOLFO GRAZIANI (ITALY, 1882–1955)

He was the youngest Italian colonel in the First World War and showed great promise, but Rodolfo Graziani’s long tenure in Mussolini’s fascist regime provided little beyond pointless cruelty and military failure. A general by the early 1930s, stationed in the Italian colony of Libya, he attempted to crush an independence movement by closing religious shrines, executing thousands, destroying villages, and throwing almost the entire population of east Libya into concentration camps. In the 1935–36 war with A
BYSSINIA
, he granted military contracts to personal friends, endorsed ruthless behavior among his troops, and used poison gas on essentially defenseless Ethiopians.
⁶⁶

Graziani’s Second World War career varied little from his preceding record. Just as Germany was about to secure an armistice with defeated France, Mussolini wanted to rush into the Alps and claim up to a quarter of France for himself. Several advisers rejected the scheme. Army chief of staff Graziani cheered the idea and assured Mussolini his troops were ready. They were not. Invading the mountains without adequate ammunition, air support, or winter clothing, the Italians managed to advance just a few miles. They soon lost more men to frostbite than to bullets.
⁶⁷

Graziani’s crowning achievement transpired in autumn 1941. At the head of Mussolini’s forces in Libya, he reluctantly led 150,000 soldiers into Egypt against 30,000 British subjects, mostly Indians. Gains were modest until the Commonwealth counterattacked, which sent the Italians reeling. Heading the retreat was Graziani himself, at times more than 300 miles behind the front lines. He lost all but 20,000 of his troops. Upon hearing the news, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden said, “Never had so much been surrendered by so many to so few.”
⁶⁸

Yet Graziani’s pitiful career was not yet complete. When Nazi Germany rescued the deposed Mussolini in 1943, il Duce set up the Italian Social Republic in the northern half of the country and selected the ever-loyal Graziani as chief of staff and minister of defense.

In 1940, Graziani “earned” the position of overall commander in North Africa when his predecessor, Air Marshal Italo Balbo, was accidentally shot out of the sky and killed by Italian antiaircraft guns.

6
. TOYODA SOEMU (JAPAN, 1885–1957)

In the Samurai code of bushido, a warrior must be willing to sacrifice his life if needed. When Toyoda Soemu inherited the Imperial Combined Fleet in May 1944, he believed the time had come to demand such a sacrifice. In the year that followed he pressed the Japanese navy into a number of poorly planned engagements in search of a “final and decisive battle.” None of the battles were final or decisive, but all reduced a once-daunting force into a ghost of its former self.