The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (81 page)

Fortunately for Stalin, he had received – and this time had the sense to believe – intelligence from Richard Sorge in Tokyo that in December 1941 the Japanese intended ‘only an advance into the South Pacific, nothing more’. It was Sorge’s assurance that ‘the Soviet Far East may be considered guaranteed against Japanese attack at least until the end of winter’ that enabled Stalin to divert fifty-eight divisions from Siberia to the West. The weather too was turning against the Germans, freezing fuel and fingers alike, and their casualty rate was soaring as Soviet resistance stiffened. The era of the blitzkrieg was over; what Curzio Malaparte ironically called the ‘Thirty-Year Lightning War’ had begun. Nevertheless the predicament of the Soviet Union in the months that followed Zhukov’s Moscow counteroffensive showed little sign of sustained improvement. German forces overran the Crimea. By the summer of 1942, they had reached the banks of the River Don, the gateway to the Caucasus, and were pressing on towards
the Volga. The Soviet oilfields at Maykop were captured; the swastika flew on the peak of Mount Elbruz. Poland, the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Byelorussia: all were in German hands. By this stage in the war, Germany and her allies controlled virtually all of Western and Central Europe too, with the exception of a handful of neutral countries (Eire, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain). As one Russian commentator put it, ‘Paris, Vienna, Prague and Brussels had become provincial German cities.’ The Balkans had yielded to German arms, as had Crete. In North Africa it was very nearly the same story. On June 21, 1942, Rommel’s Afrika Korps captured the British stronghold of To bruk and then thrust into Egypt to within fifty miles of Alexandria. Intoxicated by victory, Hitler contemplated the future German conquest of Brazil, of Central Africa, of New Guinea. The United States, too, would ultimately be ‘incorporated… into the German World Empire’. Ribbentrop’s shopping list for a post-war ‘supplementary colonial area’ included British and French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar and Northern Rhodesia. Japan, meanwhile, had achieved no less astonishing victories in Asia and the Pacific. By 1941, as we have seen, the greater part of eastern China was in Japanese hands. The six-month onslaught that began with Pearl Harbor created a vast Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, embracing modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, to say nothing of a huge arc of Pacific islands.

By the summer of 1942, then, only an incurable optimist could be certain that the Allies would win the war. In March of that year, following the Japanese triumphs in Asia, Churchill seriously contemplated resigning. Eden, who might have succeeded him, was fearful that the Soviets would make a separate peace with Hitler. ‘We have already lost a large proportion of the British Empire,’ lamented Alan Brooke in his diary, ‘and are on the high road to lose a great deal more of it.’ Britain seemed to be ‘a ship… heading inevitably for the rocks… Would we able to save India and Australia?… Egypt was threatened… Russia could never hold, [the] Caucasus was bound to be penetrated.’ The Germans might even reach the Gulf oilfields(‘our Achilles’ heel’).

Could the Axis powers have consolidated their lightning victories
of 1939–42 in such a way as to achieve ultimate victory? Military historians have long debated the strategic options open to Germany and Japan, in search of alternative decisions that might have tipped the war Hitler’s and Hirohito’s way. Leaving aside unlikely scenarios like a successful German invasion of Britain in 1940, a cancellation of Operation Barbarossa or a Japanese decision to attack the Soviet Union rather than the United States, four more or less plausible possibilities have been suggested:

1. Hitler might have accepted his military leaders’ advice (notably that of Admiral Raeder) and focused his attention on winning the war in the Mediterranean in 1941, before invading the Soviet Union. He might, for example, have struck across the Eastern Mediterranean to Cyprus, Lebanon and Syria; or through Turkey (violating her neutrality) towards the Caucasus; or across Egypt to Suez and beyond. Even as it was, the British positions in Malta and Egypt were acutely vulnerable. Rommel might well have been able to drive the British out of Egypt if he had been sent the twenty-nine German divisions that were sitting more or less idle in Western Europe.

2. Alternatively, Hitler might have diverted more resources into winning the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942. Certainly, the German submarines were inflicting severe losses on Allied shipping throughout 1942 and into the spring of 1943.

3. Hitler might have waged his war against the Soviet Union more intelligently. Again, he might have listened to the experts (Halder and Gud-erian among them), who advised him to concentrate German efforts on capturing Moscow rather than diverting Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group south wards towards Kiev. In a similar vein, Hitler might not have squandered his 6th Army so profligately at Stalingrad; Alan Brooke’s fear was that Paulus might instead conquer the Caucasus, opening the way to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulfoil fields.

4. The Japanese could have waged a different war against the Western powers, attacking Ceylon rather than Port Mores by and Midway in 1942 in order to challenge British dominance of the Indian Ocean. They might also have diverted troops away from China and Manchuria – where 56 per cent of their overseas forces were still stationed at the end of the war – to reinforce their line of defence in the Pacific.

The difficulty with all these counter factuals – a side from their postulating a Hitler who was not as deaf to expert military advice as the real Hitler was – is that virtually none of them suggests a way in which the Axis powers could have overcome the over whelming economic odds against them once they had taken on simultaneously the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union. To be sure, the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939–42 narrowed the economic gap between the Axis and the Allies. The Germans very successfully sucked resources out of occupied Western Europe; at their peak in 1943 un requited transfers from France amounted to 8 per cent of German gross national product, equivalent to a third of pre-war French national income. Germany all but monopolized the exports of the West European countries she occupied. The former Czechoslovakia, too, was a substantial net contributor to the German war effort. So deep did Operation Barbarossa and subsequent offensives penetrate that they captured more than half of Soviet industrial capacity. Moreover, the Germans were able to treat their empire as a bottomless reservoir of cheap labour. Foreign workers accounted for a fifth of the active civilian labour force by 1943. After being put in charge of German armaments production, Albert Speer galvanized the Reich’s economy, almost trebling weapons output between 1941 and 1944 by imposing standardization on the manufacturers and achieving startling improvements in productivity. The Japanese also performed feats of economic mobilization, increasing aircraft production by a factor of five and a half between 1941 and 1944.

Yet it was no where near enough. The Big Three Allies had vastly superior material resources. In 1940, when Germany and Italy had faced Britain and France, the latter combination’s total economic output had been roughly two-thirds that of the other side’s. The defeat of France and Poland lengthened the odds against Britain, but the German invasion of the Soviet Union restored the economic balance. With the entry of the United States into the war, the scales tipped the other way; indeed, they all but toppled over. Combined Allied GDP was twice that of the principal Axis powers and their depend encies in 1942. It was roughly three times as large in 1943, and the ratio continued to rise as the war went on, largely as a result of the rapid growth of the US economy (see
Figure 15.1
). Between 1942 and 1944

Note: This chart calculates the ratio of Allied to Axis combined gross domestic product. The bars to the right remove not only US GDP from the calculation but also the value of American aid to the UK and Soviet Union.

Figure 15.1
Ratio of Allied to Axis GDP, with and without the United States, 1938–1945

American military spending was nearly twice that of Germany and Japan combined. It is difficult to see how different strategic decisions could have prevented this disastrous lengthening of the economic odds against an Axis victory. So much of the increment in Allied production simply lay beyond the reach of Axis arms, in the United States and beyond the Urals. Moreover, the additional oilfields that might have come within Hitler’s reach had he fought the war differently were still far too modest in their output to have narrowed significantly the petroleum gap between the two sides.
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It is important also to bear in mind that the Axis powers were
fighting not only against the British, Russians and Americans; they were fighting against the combined forces of the British, Russian and American empires as well. The total numbers of men fielded by the various parts of the British Empire were immense. All told, the United Kingdom itself mobilized just under six million men and women. But an additional 5.1 million came from India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Victories like El Alamein and even more so Imphal were victories for imperial forces as much as for British forces; the colonial commitment to the Empire proved every bit as strong as in the First World War. Especially remarkable was the fact that more than two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the British Indian Army during the war – more than sixty times the number who fought for the Japanese. The rapid expansion of the Indian officer corps provided a crucial source of loyalty, albeit loyalty that was conditional on post-war independence. The Red Army was also much more than just a Russian army. In January 1944 Russians accounted for 58 per cent of the 200 infantry divisions for which records are available, but Ukrainians accounted for 22 per cent, an order of magnitude more than fought on the German side, and a larger proportion than their share of the pre-war Soviet population. Half the soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army at Stalingrad were not Russians. The American army, too, was ethnically diverse. Although they were generally kept in segregated units, African-Americans accounted for around 11 per cent of total US forces mobilized and fought in all the major campaigns from Operation Torch onwards. Norman Mailer’s reconnaissance platoon in
The Naked and the Dead
includes two Jews, a Pole, an Irishman, a Mexican and an Italian. Two of the six servicemen who raised the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima were of foreign origin; one was a Pima Indian. More than 20,000 Japanese-Americans served in the US army during the war. As John Hersey put it in
A Bell for Adano
, the hero of which is ‘an Italian-American going to war in Italy’:

America is the international country… Our Army has Yugoslavs and Frenchmen and Austrians and Czechs and Norwegians in it, and everywhere our Army goes in Europe, a man can turn to the private beside him and say: ‘Hey, Mac, what’s this furriner saying?’… And Mac will be able to translate. This
is where we are lucky. No other country has such a fund of men who speak the languages of the lands we must invade… Just as truly as Europe once invaded us, with wave after wave of immigrants, now we are invading Europe, with wave after wave of sons of immigrants.

Hence the irony of Hersey’s insight that the typical GI’s sole war aim was to ‘go home’.

The Germans, as we have seen, had made some efforts to mobilize other peoples in occupied Europe, as had the Japanese in the Far East, but these were dwarfed by what the Allies achieved. Indeed, the abject failure of the Axis empires to win the loyalty of their new subjects ensured that Allied forces were reinforced by a plethora of exile forces, partisan bands and resistance organizations. Even excluding these auxiliaries, the combined armed forces of the principal Allies were already just under 30 per cent larger than those of the Axis in 1942. A year later the difference was more than 50 per cent. By the end of the war, including also Free French
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and Polish forces, Yugoslav partisans and Romanians fighting on the Russian side, the Allies had more than twice as many men under arms. Fifty-two different nationalities were represented in the Jewish Brigade formed by the British in 1944. They followed an earlier wave of 9,000 or so refugees from Spain, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia who had joined the so-called Alien Companies, nicely nicknamed the ‘King’s Own Loyal Enemy Aliens’.

The best measure of the Allied advantage was in terms of military hardware, however, since it was with capital rather than labour – with machinery rather than manpower–that the Germans and the Japanese were ultimately to be defeated. In every major category of weapon, the Axis powers fell steadily further behind with each passing month. Between 1942 and 1944, the Allies out-produced the Axis in terms of machine pistols by a factor of 16 to 1, in naval vessels, tanks and mortars by roughly 5 to 1, and in rifles, machine-guns, artillery and combat aircraft by roughly 3 to 1. Blitzkrieg had been possible when
the odds were just the other way round. Once both sides were motorized – one of the defining characteristics of total war – the key to victory became logistics, not heroics. The fourfold numerical superiority of British armour was one of the deciding factors at El Alamein. The average ratio of Soviet to German armour at the beginning of the offensives of 1944 and 1945 was just under eight. The ratio in terms of combat aircraft on the Eastern Front rose from three in July 1943 to ten by January 1945. Likewise, Allied dominance of the skies ensured the success of D-Day and guaranteed the ultimate defeat of the Germans in Western Europe. One German soldier clearly remembered ‘the day that it was all made clear to me, the impossibility of Germany prevailing’: