Read The Second World War Online
Authors: John Keegan
The Second World War
Contents
Part I
THE WAR IN THE WEST 1940-1943
4 Air Battle: the Battle of Britain
5 War supply and the Battle of the Atlantic
Part II
THE WAR IN THE EAST 1941-1943
7 Securing the eastern springboard
11 Crimean summer, Stalingrad winter
Part III
THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC 1941-1943
13 From Pearl Harbor to Midway
Part IV
THE WAR IN THE WEST 1940-1945
17 Churchill’s strategic dilemma
Part V
THE WAR IN THE EAST 1943-1945
25 Kursk and the recapture of western Russia
28 City battle: the siege of Berlin
Part VI
THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC 1943-1945
29 Roosevelt’s strategic dilemma
30 Japan’s defeat in the south
32 Super-weapons and the defeat of Japan
33 The legacy of the Second World War
John Keegan was for many years Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and is now Defence Editor of the
Daily Telegraph
. He is the author of many books, including
The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, Six Armies in Normandy, The Battle for History, Battle at Sea
and
A History of Warfare
, which was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize.
The Second World War
is his sixth book to be published by Pimlico.
John Keegan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received the OBE in the Gulf War Honours List.
The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world’s seven continents and all its oceans. It killed fifty million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilisation.
No attempt to relate its causes, course and consequences in the space of a single volume can fully succeed. Rather than narrate it as a continuous sequence of events, therefore, I decided from the outset to divide the story of the war into four topics – narrative, strategic analysis, battle piece and ‘theme of war’ – and to use these four topics to carry forward the history of the six main sections into which the war falls: the War in the West, 1939-43; the War in the East, 1941-3; the War in the Pacific, 1941-3; the War in the West, 1943-5; the War in the East, 1943-5; and the War in the Pacific, 1943-5. Each section is introduced by a piece of strategic analysis, centring on the figure to whom the initiative most closely belonged at that time – in order, Hitler, Tojo, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt – and then contains, besides the appropriate passages of narrative, both a relevant ‘theme of war’ and a battle piece. Each of the battle pieces has been chosen to illustrate the nature of a particular form of warfare characteristic of the conflict. They are air warfare (the Battle of Britain), airborne warfare (the Battle of Crete), carrier warfare (Midway), armoured warfare (Falaise), city warfare (Berlin) and amphibious warfare (Okinawa). The ‘themes of war’ include war supply, war production, occupation and repression, strategic bombing, resistance and espionage, and secret weapons.
It is my hope that this scheme of treatment imposes a little order for the reader on the chaos and tragedy of the events I relate.
The First [World] War explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far as one event causes another,’ wrote A. J. P. Taylor in his
Origins of the Second World War
. ‘The link between the two wars went deeper. Germany fought specifically in the Second War to reverse the verdict of the first and to destroy the settlement that followed it.’
Not even those who most vehemently oppose Mr Taylor’s version of inter-war history will take great issue with those judgements. The Second World War, in its origin, nature and course, is inexplicable except by reference to the First; and Germany – which, whether or not it is to be blamed for the outbreak, certainly struck the first blow – undoubtedly went to war in 1939 to recover the place in the world it had lost by its defeat in 1918.
However, to connect the Second World War with the First is not, if the former is accepted as the cause of the latter, to explain either of them. Their common roots must be sought in the years preceding 1914, and that search has harnessed the energies of scholars for much of this century. Whether they looked for causes in immediate or less proximate events, their conclusions have had little in common. Historians of the winning side have on the whole chosen to blame Germany, in particular Germany’s ambition for world power, for the outbreak of 1914 and hence to blame Germany again – whatever failing attaches to the appeasing powers – for that of 1939. Until the appearance of Fritz Fischer’s heretical revision of the national version in 1967, German historians generally sought to rebut the imputation of ‘war guilt’ by distributing it elsewhere. Marxist historians, of whatever nationality, have overflown the debate, depicting the First World War as a ‘crisis of capitalism’ in its imperialist form, by which the European working classes were sacrificed on the altar of competition between decaying capitalist systems; they are consistent in ascribing the outbreak of the Second World War to the Western democracies’ preference for gambling on Hitler’s reluctance to cross the brink rather than accept Soviet help to ensure that he did not.
These views are irreconcilable. At best they exemplify the judgement that ‘history is the projection of ideology into the past’. There can indeed be no common explanation of why the world twice bound itself to the wheel of mass war-making as long as historians disagree about the logic and morality of politics and whether the first is the same as the second.
A more fruitful, though less well-trodden, approach to the issue of causes lies along another route: that which addresses the question of
how
the two World Wars were made
possible
rather than why they came about. For the instances of outbreak are themselves overridingly important in neither case. It was the enormity of the events which flowed from the upheavals of August 1914 and September 1939 that has driven historians to search so long for reasons to explain them. No similar impetus motivates the search for the causes of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 or the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, critical as those conflicts were in altering the balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe. Moreover, it is safe to say that had Germany won the critical opening battle of the First World War, that of the Marne in September 1914, as she might well have done – thereby sparing Europe not only the agony of the trenches but all the ensuing social, economic and diplomatic embitterment – the libraries devoted to the international relations of Germany, France, Britain, Austria-Hungary and Russia before 1914 would never have been written.
However, because it was not Germany but France, with British help, who won the Marne, the First – and so the Second – World War became different from all wars previously fought, different in scale, intensity, extensiveness and material and human cost. They also came, by the same measure, closely to resemble each other. It is those differences and those similarities which invest the subject of their causation with such apparent importance. But that is to confuse accident with substance. The causes of the World Wars lay no deeper and were no more or less complex than the causes of any other pair of conjoined and closely sequential conflicts. Their nature, on the other hand, was without precedent. The World Wars killed more people, consumed more wealth and inflicted more suffering over a wider area of the globe than any previous war. Mankind had grown no more wicked between 1815, the terminal date of the last great bout of hostilities between nations, and 1914; and certainly no sane and adult European alive in the latter year would have wished, could he have foreseen it, the destruction and misery that the crisis of that August was to set in train. Had it been foretold that the consequent war was to last four years, entail the death of 10 million young men, and carry fire and sword to battlefields as far apart as Belgium, northern Italy, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Transcaucasia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Africa and China; and that a subsequent war, fought twenty years later by the same combatants over exactly the same battlefields and others besides, was to bring the death of 50 million people, every individual and collective impulse to aggression, it might be thought, would have been stilled in that instant.
That thought speaks well for human nature. It also speaks against the way the world had gone between 1815 and 1914. A sane and adult European alive in the latter year might have deplored with every fibre of his civilised being the prospect foretold to him of the holocausts that were to come. To do so, however, he would have had to deny the policy, ethos and ultimately the human and material nature of the state – whichever state that was – to which he belonged. He would even have had to deny the condition of the world which surrounded him. For the truth of twentieth-century European civilisation was that the world it dominated was pregnant with war. The enormous wealth, energy and population increase released by Europe’s industrial revolution in the nineteenth century had transformed the world. It had created productive and exploitative industries – foundries, engineering works, textile factories, shipyards, mines – larger by far than any at which the intellectual fathers of the industrial revolution, the economic rationalists of the eighteenth century, had guessed. It had linked the productive regions of the world with a network of communications – roads, railways, shipping lanes, telegraph and telephone cables – denser than even the most prescient enthusiast of science and technology could have foreseen. It had generated the riches to increase tenfold the population of historic cities and to plant farmers and graziers on millions of acres which had never felt the bite of the plough or the herdsman’s tread. It had built the infrastructure – schools, universities, libraries, laboratories, churches, missions – of a vibrant, creative and optimistic world civilisation. Above all, and in dramatic and menacing counterpoint to the century’s works of hope and promise, it had created
armies
, the largest and potentially most destructive instruments of war the world had ever seen.
