A History of the World (80 page)

From the first, it was clear that ideology would take second place to national self-interest. The Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 settled the fate of Poland, which was invaded and divided up the following month. From then until the end of 1941, a period of nearly two and a half years, the United States managed to stay out of the war. But for about two years, until the surprise (to Stalin) invasion of the USSR in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Soviets and Nazis were working uneasily together. As the military historian Max Hastings reminds us, this enabled Hitler’s armies to receive huge material help from the Soviet Union: ‘Supply trains continued to roll west until the very moment of the invasion; the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were largely fuelled by Soviet oil; the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats had access to Russian port facilities.’
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So from 1939 to 1941 the war was confined to a relatively limited area. It was essentially a duel between those old Great War enemies, the British and French on one side and the Germans on the other; but this time the French had been knocked out. Had Hitler been able to invade Britain in 1940, or found some other way to force the British to sue for peace, the war might have ended there.

If that had happened, we would today be less dominated by America, and Soviet Russia would have stayed essentially behind her earlier borders. The entire continent of Europe would not have been under direct German control. Spain’s General Franco had spurned a full-scale military alliance with Hitler, which, given the help he had received during the Spanish Civil War, seemed wary to the point of ingratitude. Mussolini’s Italy was an ally, but not a carbon-copy. Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland stayed neutral. Greece, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia might have remained altogether untouched by the fighting. Would so many Jews have died? Would cities like London, Hamburg, Dresden and Coventry have stayed untouched? Outside Europe, had the British sued for peace it would probably have led to the swift collapse of her empire. Churchill thought so. India might well have come under Japanese control. The US, isolationist, would presumably not have acquired the atomic bomb so early, since to do so relied on British and emigrant Jewish scientists as well as on a huge industrial effort to beat Hitler’s scientists.

Such musings belong to speculative novelists, however, because the British leader refused to sue for peace; because Britain prevented a
German invasion; and because Hitler’s thinking, the way he had constructed Nazi Germany, and his personality in the end rendered his attack on the Soviet Union inevitable. His rhetorical universe was founded on a conflict between Germanism and Jewish Bolshevism, and his offer to the German people was of a great new empire that would make them rich and secure, and that could only come about via the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would have been better for him to have humbled Churchill first; but eventually he had to turn towards Moscow. In
Mein Kampf
, Operation Barbarossa was already visible on the horizon.

Britain’s defeat of the Luftwaffe in the late summer and autumn of 1940, which has become an almost Arthurian or Shakespearean myth-story for the modern British, meant more than just frustrating the invasion. It meant that when the US joined the war it could pose a direct threat to Germany, not just to Japan. Roosevelt had dodged and prevaricated as he tried to help Britain with aid and old destroyers, while soothing an American public still hostile to war. However much Americans warmed to the plucky Londoners during the Blitz, the thought of plunging into a new world war to save the British Empire was not a popular one.

In any case, Germany was not the most obvious enemy. Japan’s war against China had made the Tokyo militarists the most hated figures in Washington. And Japan had tried to briefly attack Siberia but had been pushed back by the Russians; her high command now believed the American oil embargo necessitated her driving south, with a view to winning a big enough Pacific empire to give her security against the US. The notion that Japan might actually conquer the continent-sized United States was of course always absurd, but her rulers still thought that sufficiently dramatic military successes would intimidate Washington into an early peace. Tokyo assumed – as did most observers – that Hitler was bound to be victorious in Europe.

It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that something like the Pearl Harbor attack was bound to happen. The devastatingly successful torpedo-bomber assault on the US Pacific Fleet, which sank four battleships and many other vessels, was, at a technical and operational level, a feat of military genius. It certainly kept the Americans at bay while the Japanese armies swept through South-East Asia. It was also, however, an act of strategic idiocy. It showed how little Tokyo’s
politicians and military chiefs understood America. It brought the world war to the Pacific and made the eventual defeat of Japan inevitable. And because Britain was still holding out, still connected to the US by the lifeline of the Atlantic and still supported by the formidable resources of her empire, it made US entry into the war against Hitler plausible in a way it had not been the day before the Japanese warplanes struck.

Some leaders instantly understood all this. Churchill telephoned Roosevelt for confirmation of the attack. The US President told him that ‘we are all in the same boat now’ and Churchill later recorded his visceral, emotional reaction: ‘So we had won, after all.’ Interestingly, Hitler completely misread the event, delighting that Japan was now on Germany’s side: ‘We can’t lose the war at all. We now have an ally that has not been conquered in 3,000 years.’
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As for the Americans, her entry into the conflict merely confirmed Hitler’s belief that Germany faced a worldwide Jewish threat.

The history of the Second World War is, of course, the history of battles, of leaders and their strategies, of planes and tanks and armies. It can be recounted in a series of place names that resound and will continue to rumble for a long time to come – Warsaw, Dunkirk, Alamein, Stalingrad, Kursk, Singapore, Midway, Okinawa, Nagasaki. It is composed of ‘battles’ which in earlier times would have comprised entire wars – the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, the Battle of the Pacific. The first generations of postwar historians and memoirists emphasized the titanic role of leaders such as Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Rommel, Tojo and Zhukov, and focused strongly on the equipment used, the fighters and bombers, the battleships and tanks, the rockets and radar. They were followed by historians who put more emphasis on the slaughter of civilians and cities, and the failures of judgement.

The morals drawn from this conflict, which killed perhaps around seventy million people (twice as many of them civilians as soldiers), were varied. For the Russians, who lost more both in total and as a percentage of the population of the Soviet Union, it is the Great Patriotic War. At the time it seemed a vindication of Stalin (despite his wobbles early in the war) and of the Red Army, whose victory over the ultimate evil, Nazism, involved few others. For the Americans, it was the war to save democracy, which established the moral and physical
hegemony of their nation. For Jews (and many Gentiles) it was the Shoah, or Holocaust, the ultimate ethical failure of European civilization, whose consequence was modern Israel. For many Arabs it was the war that persuaded Europeans to steal their land for the Jews, making the Arabs pay for European guilt. For Germans it was the consequence of their time of madness and for the British their ‘stand alone’ moment, which outshines any of the more dubious episodes of empire, or military reverses.

And so on. Most people have drawn simple lessons, as we mostly need to. Yet as we gain distance and perspective, many of the first lessons are being revised. The huge ‘Russian’ death-toll also involved the deaths of massive numbers of Ukrainians, Poles and others who were not ethnically Russian; and indeed many of them were killed by Russians. The postwar Stalinist determination to play down the special horror of what happened to European Jewry – ‘Do not divide the dead’ – reduced a dreadful truth to patriotic self-congratulation. Furthermore, the deliberately inflicted famines and mass deportations inside the USSR before 1939 had ravaged vast territories, which were then more vulnerable to German depredation.

Hitler intended simply to empty vast areas between the Black Sea and the Baltic for German settlers, but Stalin’s treatment of the same area – a ‘breadbasket’ emptied to feed Soviet cities – paved the way. One superb recent study,
Bloodlands
by Timothy Snyder, begins simply: ‘In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.’ They died between 1933 and 1945, and though about half of all the soldiers who died in the Second World War died in this same area, ‘not a single one of the fourteen million murdered was a soldier on active duty. Most were women, children and the aged; none were bearing weapons; many had been stripped of their possessions, including their clothes.’ Of the fourteen million, roughly two-thirds were killed by the Nazis, and one-third by the Stalinists.

Add to the account the long period when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany worked together, slicing up Poland and fuelling war, and the huge material help given to the Red Army by the British and Americans once Hitler had invaded, and the story of the Great
Patriotic War starts to look rather more complicated. The greatest moral failing of pre-war Nazi Germany was not the collapse of democracy but the campaign to dehumanize Jews, to warp and shrivel empathy so drastically in the minds of the German people that Jewish people became very easy to kill. But if one looks at the campaign run by Lenin and then Stalin to reduce the better-off farmers, the kulaks, to the status of loathsome enemies of the people, was this not similar?

Kulaks, like Jews, were depicted as coarse, bloated, ridiculous beings. Like the German soldiers, Bolshevik commissars found it very easy to kill kulaks, and incite others to join them. This had started with Bolshevik hatred of the ignorant peasantry. In its emphasis on a ‘merciless war’ to ‘crush’ the enemy and on the celebration of terror, the language of Lenin and his cronies was not dissimilar in tone to Hitler’s at the same time. By the early 1930s under Stalin, hatred of kulaks had been disseminated through posters and campaigns. The behaviour of the Red Brigades ravaging the countryside looking for grain and those who stored it, is strongly reminiscent of German soldiers’ later behaviour: ‘They would urinate in barrels of pickles, or order hungry peasants to box each other for sport or make them crawl and bark like dogs, or force them to kneel in the mud and pray.’
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Mass rape and then starvation followed. Cannibalism was rife. The same ritual humiliations and dehumanizing of Jews and peasants would be practised by the Germans when they arrived a decade later.

Germany’s own Jews were comparatively few by 1939, and the vast majority of them died not in Germany but in the violated territories to the east. Though six million would die, Hitler’s ‘hunger plan’ for the region meant another thirty to forty million non-Jews were expected to die from starvation, to free their soil for the invaders. Before the Shoah, the Russians had killed much of the intelligentsia and professional leadership of Poland and many of the brighter and more ambitious Ukrainian peasants.

Once the war started, both the Russian and German armies conducted themselves with astonishing ferocity, mass-raping and murdering civilians in enemy territory and killing prisoners of war. During the first phase of Barbarossa, as many Soviet PoWs were dying as British and US PoWs died during the whole war.
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The Russians would repay the Germans in kind, with mass rapes and shootings as they headed back towards Berlin. Nor was the violence limited to
nation against nation. It is thought that more Russian soldiers were killed by their own officers for cowardice or desertion – some three hundred thousand of them – than all the British troops killed during the Second World War.
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The Great Patriotic War was also a triumph of human willpower, notable for the heroic sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, and the determined suffering of millions of soldiers. In the end Stalin’s Russia had more military factories, situated far to the east, beyond the German advance and able to churn out far more fighting equipment; and more men; and more land. The Red Army vastly outnumbered the Germans, and overwhelmed them with tanks and aircraft. But the ‘Great Patriotic War’ also left its victor a grey, fearful, stunted and fundamentally pessimistic society. The Soviets would end the war ruling their own enslaved European empire and threaten worldwide nuclear annihilation; but unable to build a decent society.

The American experience of the war was much easier. It produced the huge industrial boom at home, which raised living standards and set the United States on a firm route to global market domination, which is only now ending. Far fewer Americans died, proportionally and absolutely: around 417,000 in total, against 5.7 million Soviet casualties, or 2.5 per cent of the US’s population in 1939 as compared to around 25 per cent in the case of the USSR (or Japan). Hastings points out that 17,000 Americans lost limbs while fighting – but 100,000 became amputees as a result of industrial accidents at home.
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The US fought the war with growing skill, tenacity and awesome technical advances, but fought it in other people’s countries. This war that never seriously reached US civilians has been remembered for its moral simplicity as ‘the good war’. Yet America could not have won the good war without its ally, Soviet Russia, nor without the survival of another bête noire of US politicians, the British Empire.

America’s war was dominated by three events. The first was the remorseless destruction of the Japanese in the Pacific, most crucially at the battle of Midway in June 1942, as the US fleets and airpower began to destroy at sea the advances won by Japanese bayonets and infantry on land. This ended with the dropping of the atomic bomb and the occupation of Japan itself. The second, with the British, was the slow and bloody victory of convoys and long-range aircraft against the U-boats in the Atlantic, which allowed the reinforcement of Britain
herself and the supplying of the USSR. This in turn led to the third great event, the 1944 invasion of France by US, British and Canadian forces. By then the Americans had turned much of southern England into a vast encampment for US firepower, whence British and American bombers were annihilating German cities. America would end the war unstained by war crimes, optimistic about the future of democracy, and stronger than ever before.