The Second World War (94 page)

It seems possible that a million Germans died in the flight from the east in the early months of 1945, either from exposure or mistreatment. In the winter of 1945 most of the remaining Germans of eastern Europe – who lived in Silesia, the Czech Sudetenland, Pomerania and elsewhere, numbering some 14 million altogether – were systematically collected and transported westward, largely into the British zone of occupation in Germany. The transportees who arrived were destitute and often in the last stages of deprivation. Of those who failed to complete this terrible journey, it is calculated that 250,000 died in the course of the expulsion from Czechoslovakia, 1.25 million from Poland and 600,000 from elsewhere in eastern Europe. By 1946 the historic German population of Europe east of the Elbe had been reduced from 17 million to 2,600,000.

The expulsions, often conducted with criminal brutality, were not illegal under the settlement the victors had agreed between themselves at the Potsdam Conference of July 1945. Article 13 of its protocol stated that the ‘transfer to Germany of Germans remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary will have to be undertaken’; at Potsdam, moreover, the Western Allies agreed to a realignment of the German frontier, giving half of East Prussia to Poland (the other half went to the Soviet Union), together with Silesia and Pomerania. These readjustments, balanced by the enforced cession by Poland of its eastern province to Russia, had the cartographic effect of moving Poland a hundred miles westward; demographically, they ensured that post-war Poland would be wholly Polish, at the expense of displacing the German populations of its new western borderlands.

The Potsdam agreement, to a far greater extent than that of Yalta, determined the future of European government in the post-war years. The concessions made to the Soviet Union by Britain and the United States at Yalta have been widely condemned by Western politicians and polemicists in the aftermath as a ‘betrayal’, particularly of the anti-communist Poles. As Roosevelt and Churchill recognised at the time, the Red Army’s victorious advance into Poland made Stalin’s plans for the most important country in eastern Europe a
fait accompli
. It ensured that the ‘London Poles’ would have no effective role in the post-war Warsaw administration, which would be dominated by the communist puppet ‘Lublin committee’. Potsdam took post-war arrangements far further than that. By endorsing the resettlement westward of eastern Europe’s Germans – both those of the borderlands of
Deutschstum
in Poland and Czechoslovakia and the more scattered settlements of German commercial, agricultural and intellectual enterprise in the Slav and Baltic states – it returned ethnic frontiers in Europe largely to those that had prevailed at the creation of Charlemagne’s empire at the beginning of the ninth century, solved at a stroke the largest of the ‘minority problems’, and ensured Soviet domination of central and eastern Europe for two generations to come.

The Soviet Union’s subsequent refusal to co-operate in the staging of free elections throughout the zones of occupation in post-1945 Germany had the additional effect of consolidating the ‘Iron Curtain’ between communist and non-communist Europe identified by Winston Churchill in his Fulton speech in 1946. The post-war settlement of 1918, by creating self-governing ‘successor states’ out of the tsarist, Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires which had dominated the eastern half of the continent before 1914, greatly diversified its political complexion. Potsdam ruthlessly simplified it. Post-1945 Europe west of the Elbe was to remain a polity of democratic states; east of the Elbe it was to relapse into autocracy, conforming to a single political system dictated and dominated by Stalinist Russia.

The imposition of Stalinism east of the Elbe after 1945 solved ‘the German problem’, which had transfixed Europe since 1870. It did not solve the problem of how to establish a lasting peace, either in Europe or in the wider world. The United Nations, which the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union had agreed to establish as a more effective successor to the League of Nations at Tehran in 1943, and which came into being at San Francisco in April 1945, was intended to be an instrument of international peace-keeping, with its own general staff commanding forces contributed by the member states under the authority of its Security Council (comprising representatives of Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, France and China as permanent members). The Soviet Union’s opposition to the establishment of the general staff, and its subsequent use of its veto to block peace-keeping resolutions, quickly emasculated the Security Council’s authority. Stalin’s foreign policy, which may be interpreted either as a resumption of Bolshevik commitment to the fomentation of revolution in the capitalist world or, more realistically, as an effort to entrench the Soviet victory of 1945 by keeping the anti-communist states of western Europe under threat of military attack, did not directly challenge the United Nations’ role. His sponsorship of an anti-democratic coup in Czechoslovakia and his institution of the Berlin blockade in 1948 apart, in the post-war years he took no step which directly threatened the stability of Europe as constituted at Yalta and Potsdam. His challenge to the Western position in the world was to be laid elsewhere – in the Philippines, in Malaya and, above all, in Korea, where he was to endorse an aggression by the communist north against the non-communist south in June 1950.

The Soviet Union, indeed, demobilised its military forces in Europe as quickly, if not as completely, as did the United States and Britain theirs after August 1945. By 1947 the size of the Red Army had been reduced by two-thirds; the remaining force sufficed to outnumber the occupation forces of the Americans and the British many times – the British Army of the Rhine numbered only five divisions in 1948, the American army in Bavaria only one – but, though its continuing preponderance was to drive the North Americans and Western Europeans into a North Atlantic alliance in 1949, the disparity did not tempt the Soviet leadership to risk extending its power west of the Elbe.

There are many explanations for this. One is that Soviet foreign policy, for all its coarseness and brutality, was directed by a distinct legalism, which constrained Russia to the spheres of influence defined at Yalta and Potsdam. Another is that the American monopoly of nuclear weapons, persisting in its strict form until 1949 but effectively for a decade thereafter, deterred the Soviet Union from foreign policy adventures. A third, and contestably the most convincing, is that the trauma of the war had extinguished the will of the Soviet people and their leadership to repeat the experience.

The legacy of the First World War was to persuade the victors, though not the vanquished, that the costs of war exceeded its rewards. The legacy of the Second World War, it may be argued, was to convince victors and vanquished alike of the same thing. ‘Every man a soldier’, the principle by which the advanced states had organised their armies, and in large measure their societies, since the French Revolution, achieved its culmination in 1939-45 and, in so doing, inflicted on the countries which had lived by it a tide of suffering so severe as to banish the concept of war-making from their political philosophies. The United States, least damaged and most amply rewarded by the war – which left it in 1945 industrially more productive than the rest of the world put together – would be able to muster sufficient national consent to fight two costly, if small, wars in Asia, in Korea and Vietnam. Britain, which had also come through the war relatively unscathed in terms of human if not material loss, would preserve the will to fight a succession of small colonial wars, as France, another country comparatively untouched by severe loss of life, would do as well. By contrast, the Soviet Union, for all the fierce face it showed its putative enemies in the post-war era, eschewed confrontations which put its soldiers at direct risk; its recent venture into Afghanistan, costing a quarter of the number of lives lost by the United States in Vietnam, appears to reinforce, not vitiate, that judgement. Not a single German soldier, despite the Federal Republic’s resumption of conscription in 1956, has been killed by enemy action since May 1945, and the likelihood of such a death grows more, not less, remote. Japan, the most reckless of the war-makers of 1939-45, is today bound by a constitution which outlaws recourse to force as an instrument of national policy in any circumstances whatsoever. No statesman of the Second World War was foolish enough to claim, as those of the First had done, that it was being fought as ‘a war to end all wars’. That, nevertheless, may have been its abiding effect.

My thanks are due above all to the colleagues and pupils among whom I spent twenty-six years at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. When I joined the academic staff of the Academy in 1960, many of the military instructors were veterans of the Second World War and it was from conversation with them that I first began to develop an understanding of the war as a human event. I also learnt a great deal from my pupils; because of the Sandhurst method of instruction, which requires cadets to prepare ‘presentations’ of battles and campaigns, I was often almost as much a listener as a teacher in the Sandhurst Halls of Study and found a great deal of illumination in hearing those episodes described by embryo officers too young to have taken part in them. A number of my pupils have subsequently become professional military historians themselves, including Charles Messenger, Michael Dewar, Anthony Beevor and Alex Danchev. Of all Sandhurst influences, however, none was stronger than that of the Reader in Military History, Brigadier Peter Young, DSO, MC, FSA, a distinguished Commando soldier of the war, the founder of the War Studies Department and an inspiration to generations of officer cadets.

The Sandhurst Library contains one of the most important collections of Second World War literature in the world, and I was fortunate enough to be able to use it almost daily for many years. I would particularly like to thank the present Librarian, Mr Andrew Orgill, and his staff; I would also like to thank Mr Michael Sims and his staff at the Staff College Library, Mr John Andrews and Miss Mavis Simpson at the Ministry of Defence Library and the staff of the London Library.

Friends, and colleagues past and present, at Sandhurst and
The Daily Telegraph
whom I would particularly like to thank include Colonel Alan Shepperd, Librarian Emeritus of Sandhurst, Mr Conrad Black, Mr James Allan, Dr Anthony Clayton, Lord Deedes, Mr Jeremy Deedes, Mr Robert Fox, Mr Trevor Grove, Miss Adela Gooch, Mr Nigel Horne, Mr Andrew Hutchinson, Mr Andrew Knight, Mr Michael Orr, Mr Nigel Wade, Dr Christopher Duffy and Professor Ned Willmott. I owe warmest thanks of all to Mr Max Hastings, the Editor of
The Daily Telegraph
and a distinguished historian of the Second World War. Among others I would like to thank are Mr Andrew Heritage and Mr Paul Murphy.

The manuscript was typed by Miss Monica Alexander and copy-edited by Miss Linden Stafford and I thank them warmly for their professional help. I would also like to thank my editor, Mr Richard Cohen of Hutchinson, and the team he assembled to see the manuscript through production, particularly Mr Robin Cross, Mr Jerry Goldie and Miss Anne-Marie Ehrlich. I owe much gratitude, as always, to my literary agent, Mr Anthony Sheil, and Miss Lois Wallace, my former American literary agent. I am especially indebted to the scholars who read the manuscript: Dr Duncan Anderson, Mr John Bullen, Mr Terry Charman, Mr Terence Hughes, Mr Norman Longmate, Mr James Lucas, Mr Bryan Perrett, Mr Antony Preston, Mr Christopher Shores and Professor Norman Stone. For the errors which remain I alone am responsible.

My thanks finally to friends at Kilmington, particularly Mrs Honor Medlam, Mr Michael Gray and Mr Peter Stancombe, to my children, Lucy Newmark and her husband Brooks, Thomas, Rose and Matthew, and my darling wife, Susanne.

John Keegan
Kilmington Manor
June 6, 1989

Bibliographies of the Second World War abound. None is comprehensive, nor is that surprising, since 15,000 titles in Russian alone had appeared by 1980. Excellent working bibliographies may be found, nonetheless, in most good general histories of the war, such as the revised edition of
Total War
by P. Calvocoressi, G. Wint and J. Pritchard (Lodon, 1989).

Rather than supply an equivalent of such bibliographies, I have decided to offer a list of fifty books available in English which together provide a comprehensive picture of the most important events and themes of the war, which are readable and from which the general reader can derive his own picture of the war as a guide to deeper reading. The list inevitably reflects my own interests and prejudices and is certainly not complete; it does not, for example, contain a title on the Polish campaign of 1939 or on the Scandinavian or Italian campaigns; it is thin on the war at sea in western waters and on the war in the air; and it is biased towards the fighting in Europe rather than in the Pacific. These distortions are, however, in most cases caused by gaps in the literature. There are still no books which meet the criteria I set myself on the Polish or Italian campaigns. If this judgement seems a depreciation of the remarkable work of the American, British and Commonwealth Official Historians, may it please be noted that I have nevertheless included several volumes which appear in those series, and have omitted others purely for reasons of space. I have included no books in foreign languages, though I would have dearly liked to include the war diary of the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,
the daily record of Hitler’s operations staff. Its full title is: P. Schramm,
Kriegstagebuch des OKW der Wehrmacht,
vols 1-8, Munich, 1963. The place of publication of the titles cited is London, unless otherwise stated, and the edition, including those in English translation, is the most recent.

An indispensable guide to the campaigns is Colonel Vincent J. Esposito’s
The West Point Atlas of American Wars,
vol 2, New York, 1959; the atlas contains meticulous maps of the main theatres of fighting, whether American troops were engaged or not, complemented by clear narratives on the facing page.