The New Penguin History of the World (179 page)

This was even more certain after a great air battle over southern England in August and September had been won by British science, in the form of radar, and the Royal Air Force. For a moment, Englishmen knew the pride and relief of the Greeks after Marathon. It was true, as Churchill said in a much-quoted speech, that ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’. This victory made a German seaborne invasion impossible (though a successful one was always unlikely). It also established that Great Britain could not be defeated by air bombardment alone. The islands had a bleak outlook ahead, but this victory changed the direction of the war, for it was the beginning of a period in which a variety of influences turned German attention elsewhere. In December 1940 planning began for a German invasion of Russia.

By that winter, Russia had made further gains in the west, apparently with an eye to securing a glacis against a future German attack. A war against Finland gave her important strategic areas. The Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were swallowed in 1940. Bessarabia, which Romania had taken from Russia in 1918, was now taken back, together with the northern Bukovina. In the last case, Stalin was going beyond Tsarist boundaries. The German decision to attack Russia arose in part because of disagreements about the future direction of Russian expansion: Germany sought to keep Russia away from the Balkans and the Straits. It was also aimed at demonstrating, by a quick overthrow of Russia, that further British war-making was pointless. But there was also a deep personal element in the decision. Hitler had always sincerely and fanatically detested Bolshevism and maintained that the Slavs, a racially inferior group, should provide Germans with living space and raw materials in the east. His was a last, perverted vision of the old struggle of the Teuton to impose western civilization on the Slav east. Many Germans responded to such a theme. It was to justify more appalling atrocities than any earlier crusading myth.

In a brief spring campaign, which provided an overture to the coming
clash of titans, the Germans overran Yugoslavia and Greece (with the second of which Italian forces had been unhappily engaged since October 1940). Once again British arms were driven from the mainland of Europe. Crete, too, was taken by a spectacular German airborne assault. Now all was ready for ‘Barbarossa’, as the great onslaught on Russia was named, after the medieval emperor who had led the Third Crusade (and had been drowned in the course of it).

The attack was launched on 22 June 1941 and had huge early successes. Vast numbers of prisoners were taken and the Russian armies fell back hundreds of miles. The German advance guard came within a few miles of entering Moscow. But that margin was not quite eliminated and by Christmas the first successful Russian counter-attacks had announced that in fact Germany was pinned down. German strategy had lost the initiative. If the British and Russians could hold on and if they could keep in alliance with one another then, failing a radical technical modification of the war by the discovery of new weapons of great power, their access to American production would inexorably increase their strength. This did not, of course, mean that they would inevitably defeat Germany, only that they might bring her to negotiate terms.

The American president had believed since 1940 that in the interests of the United States Great Britain had to be supported up to the limits permitted by his own public and the law of neutrality. In fact, he went well beyond both at times. By the summer of 1941, Hitler knew that to all intents and purposes the United States was an undeclared enemy. A crucial step had been the American Lend-Lease Act of March that year which, after British assets in the United States had been liquidated, provided production and services to the Allies without payment. Soon afterwards, the American government extended naval patrols and the protection of its shipping further eastward into the Atlantic. After the invasion of Russia came a meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt which resulted in a statement of shared principles – the Atlantic Charter – in which the leaders of one nation at war and another formally at peace spoke together of the needs of a post-war world ‘after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny’. This was a long way from isolationism and was the background to Hitler’s second fateful but foolish decision of 1941, a declaration of war on the United States on 11 December, after a Japanese attack on British and American territories four days earlier. Hitler had earlier promised the Japanese to do this. The war thus became global. The British and American declarations of war on Japan might have left two separate wars to rage, with only Great Britain engaged in both; Hitler’s action threw away the chance that American power might have been kept out of Europe and
deployed only in the Pacific. Few single acts have so marked the end of an epoch, for this announced the eclipse of European affairs. Europe’s future would now be settled not by her own efforts but by the two great powers on her flanks, the United States and Soviet Russia.

The Japanese decision was also a rash one, though the logic of Japanese policy had long pointed towards conflict with the United States. Japan’s ties with Germany and Italy, though they had some propaganda value for both sides, did not amount to much in practice. What mattered in the timing of Japanese policy was the resolution of debates in Tokyo about the danger, or lack of it, of a challenge to the United States which must involve war. The crux of the matter was that Japan’s needs for a successful conclusion of the war in China included oil which she could only obtain with the tacit consent of the United States that Japan was to destroy China. This no American government could have given. Instead, in October 1941, the American government imposed an embargo on all trade by United States citizens with Japan.

There followed the last stages of a process which had its origins in the ascendancy established in Japan by reactionary and militant forces in the 1930s. The question had by this time become for the Japanese military planners purely strategic and technical; since they would have to take the resources in south-east Asia which they needed by force, all that had to be settled was the nature of the war against the United States and its timing. Such a decision was fundamentally irrational, for the chances of ultimate success were very small; once arguments of national honour had won, though, the final calculations about the best point and moment of attack were carefully made. The choice was made to strike as hard a blow as possible against American sea-power at the outset in order to gain the maximum freedom of movement in the Pacific and South China Sea. The result was the onslaught of 7 December, whose centre-piece was an air attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor which was one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed operations in the history of warfare. Yet it fell just short of complete success, for it did not destroy American naval air power, though it gave the Japanese for months the strategical freedom they sought. After their victory at Pearl Harbor the Japanese faced a prolonged war they were bound to lose in the end. They had united Americans. Isolationism could be virtually ignored after 8 December; Roosevelt had a nation behind him as Wilson never had.

When a few Japanese bombs had even fallen on the American mainland, it was obvious that this was much more truly a world war than the first had been. The German operations in the Balkans had by the time of Pearl Harbor left continental Europe with only four neutral countries: Spain,
Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland. The war in North Africa raged back and forth between Libya and Egypt. It was extended to Syria by the arrival there of a German mission and to Iraq when a nationalist government supported by German aircraft was removed by a British force. Iran had been occupied by British and Soviet forces in 1941. In Africa, Ethiopia was liberated and the Italian colonial empire destroyed.

With the opening of the Far Eastern war the Japanese wrought destruction on the colonial empires there, too. Within a few months they took Indonesia, Indo-China, Malaya, the Philippines. They pressed through Burma towards the Indian border and were soon bombing the north Australian port of Darwin from New Guinea. Meanwhile, the naval war was fought by German submarine forces, aircraft and surface raiders all over the Atlantic, Arctic, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Only a tiny minority of countries were left outside this struggle. Its demands were colossal and carried much further the mobilization of whole societies than had the First World War. The role of the United States was decisive. Her huge manufacturing power made the material preponderance of the ‘United Nations’ (as the coalition of states fighting the Germans, the Italians and Japanese was called from the beginning of 1942) incontestable.

None the less, the way ahead was still a hard one. The first half of 1942 was a very bleak time for the United Nations. Then came the turning-point, in four great and very different battles. In June, a Japanese fleet attacking Midway Island was broken in a battle fought largely by aircraft. Japanese losses in carriers and aircrews were such that she never regained the strategical initiative and the long American counter-attack in the Pacific now began to unroll. Then, at the beginning of November, the British army in Egypt decisively defeated the Germans and Italians and began a march west which was to end with the eviction of the enemy from all North Africa. The battle of El Alamein had coincided with landings by Anglo-American forces in French North Africa. They subsequently moved eastwards and by May 1943 German and Italian resistance on the continent had ceased. Six months earlier, at the end of 1942, the Russians had bottled up at Stalingrad on the Volga a German army rashly exposed by Hitler. The remnants surrendered in February in the most demoralizing defeat yet suffered by the Germans in Russia, and yet one which was only part of three splendid months of winter advance which marked the turning-point of the war on the eastern front.

The other great Allied victory has no specific date, but was as important as any of these. This was the Battle of the Atlantic. Allied merchant shipping losses reached their peak in 1942. At the end of the year nearly eight million tons of shipping had been lost for eighty-seven U-boats sunk. In
1943 the figures were three and a quarter million tons and 237 U-boats, and during the spring months the battle had been won. In May alone, 47 U-boats had been sunk. This was the most crucial battle of all for the United Nations, for on it depended their ability to draw on American production.

Command of the sea also made possible re-entry to Europe. Roosevelt had agreed to give priority to the defeat of Germany, but the mounting of an invasion of France to take the strain off the Russian armies could not in the end be managed before 1944, and this angered Stalin. When it came, the Anglo-American invasion of northern France in June 1944 was the greatest seaborne expedition in history. Mussolini had by then been overthrown by Italians and Italy had already been invaded from the south; now Germany was fighting on three fronts. Soon after the landings in Normandy, the Russians entered Poland. Going faster than their allies, it still took them until next April to reach Berlin. In the west, Allied forces had by then broken out of Italy into central Europe and from the Low Countries into northern Germany. Almost incidentally, terrible destruction had been inflicted on German cities by a great air offensive which, until the last few months of the war, exercised no decisive strategic effect. When, on 30 April, the man who had ignited this conflagration killed himself in a bunker in the ruins of Berlin, historic Europe was literally as well as figuratively in ruins.

The war in the Far East took a little longer. At the beginning of August 1945 the Japanese government knew it must be defeated. Many of Japan’s former conquests had been retrieved, her cities were devastated by American bombing, and her sea-power, on which communications and safety from invasion rested, was in ruins. At this moment two nuclear weapons of a destructive power hitherto unapproached were dropped with terrible effect on two Japanese cities by the Americans. Between the explosions, the Russians declared war on Japan. On 2 September the Japanese government abandoned its plan of a suicidal last-ditch stand and signed an instrument of surrender. The Second World War had come to an end.

In its immediate aftermath it was difficult to measure the colossal extent of what had happened. Only one clear and unambiguous good was at once visible, the overthrow of the Nazi regime. As the Allied armies advanced into Europe, the deepest evils of a system of terror and torture were revealed by the opening of the huge prison camps and the revelations of what went on in them. It was suddenly apparent that Churchill had spoken no more than the bare truth when he told his countrymen that ‘if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science’.
The reality of this threat could first be seen in Belsen and Buchenwald. Distinctions could hardly be meaningful between degrees of atrocity inflicted on political prisoners, slave labourers from other countries, or some prisoners of war. But the world’s imagination was most struck by the belated recognition of the systematic attempt which had been made to wipe out European Jewry, the so-called ‘Final Solution’ sought by Germans, an attempt which was carried far enough to change the demographic map: the Polish Jews were almost obliterated, and Dutch Jews, too, suffered terribly in proportion to their numbers. Overall, though complete figures may never be available, it is probable that between five and six million Jews were killed, whether in the gas-chambers and crematoria of the extermination camps, by shootings and extermination on the spot in east and south-east Europe, or by overwork and hunger.

Few people and no nations had engaged in the war because they saw it as a struggle against such wickedness. It cannot be doubted, though, that many of them were heartened as it proceeded by the sense that the conflict had a moral dimension. Propaganda contributed to this. Even while England was the only nation in Europe still on her feet and fighting for her survival, a democratic society had sought to see in the struggle positive ends which went beyond survival and beyond the destruction of Nazism. Aspirations to a new world of cooperation between great powers and social and economic reconstruction were embodied in the Atlantic Charter and United Nations. They were encouraged by sentimental goodwill towards allies and a tragic blurring of differences of interest and social ideals which were only too quickly to re-emerge. Much wartime rhetoric boomeranged badly with the coming of peace; disillusionment followed inspection of the world after the guns were silent. Yet for all this, the war of 1939–45 in Europe remains a moral struggle in a way, perhaps, in which no other war between great powers has ever been. It is important to remember this. Too much was to be heard of the regrettable consequences of Allied victory, and it is too easily forgotten that it crushed the worst challenge to liberal civilization that has ever arisen.