The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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BOOK: The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred
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NIALL FERGUSON
The War of the World

History’s Age of Hatred

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Introduction

PART I
The Great Train Crash

1 Empires and Races

2 Orient Express

3 Fault Lines

4 The Contagion of War

5 Graves of Nations

PART II
Empire-States

6 The Plan

7 Strange Folk

8 An Incidental Empire

9 Defending the Indefensible

10 The Pity of Peace

PART III
Killing Space

11 Blitzkrieg

12 Through the Looking Glass

13 Killers and Collaborators

14 The Gates of Hell

PART IV
A Tainted Triumph

15 The Osmosis of War

16
Kaputt

Epilogue: The Descent of the West

Appendix: The War of the World in Historical Perspective

Illustrations 1900–1928

Illustrations 1929–1942

Illustrations 1943–1953

Sources and Bibliography

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations
Section 1: 1900–1928

  
1
. ‘Racial Map of Europe’ (1923).

  
2
. ‘The Yellow Peril’: drawing of 1895 by Hermann Knackfuss.

  
3
. European soldiers captured at the Battle of Yang-Cun are brought before the Boxer generals.

  
4
. ‘
Bon appetit!
’: German cartoon of March 1904.

  
5
. Pogrom victims and survivors, Odessa 1905.

  
6
. The Archduke Francis Ferdinand meets Bosnian dignitaries in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914.

  
7
. Gavrilo Princip and the other members of ‘Young Bosnia’ in court in Sarajevo.

  
8
. Two soldiers from France’s West African colonies during the First World War.

  
9
. Scottish prisoners of war, First World War.

10
. Russian cartoon of the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, 1917–18.

11
. An anti-Semitic caricature of Trotsky from the Russian Civil War era.

12
. The waterfront at Danzig (Gdańsk).

13
. The bodies of Armenian children, Turkey 1915.

14
. Rudolf Schlichter,
Armenian Horrors
, watercolour on paper
c.
1920.

15
. Greek refugees throng the docks at Smyrna, fleeing from Turkish troops, September 1922.

Section 2: 1929–1942

16
. Georg Grosz’s
Grosstadt
(1917).

17
. Poverty in the American Depression.

18
. ‘Look, you boob… !’: George Bernard Shaw on the superiority of Soviet Communism.

19
. Soviet industrialization poster.

20
. Ukrainian collectivization poster.

21
. Georgian poster on self-determination.

22
. Gulag prisoners.

23
. Jacob Abter, one of the members of the Leningrad Society for the Deaf and Dumb executed during the Great Terror.

24
. An ethnic German family takes a break from harvest toil.

25
. Illustration from a children’s book published by the Stürmer Ver-lag in 1935.

26
. Victor Klemperer.

27
. Isaiah Berlin’s diplomatic pass, issued on September 15, 1945.

28
. Hershel and Rivka Elenberg.

29
. Henryka Lappo before deportation from eastern Poland to the Soviet Union.

30
. A Nazi wartime poster blaming atrocities on ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’.

31
. Five Jewish women and girls about to be shot outside Liebau, in Latvia, in December 1941.

32
. Victims of the Rape of Nanking.

33
. A man tends children wounded in a Japanese raid on Shanghai railway station, 1937.

Section 3: 1943–1953

34
. and
35
. Marja and Czeslawa Krajewski, murdered in medical experiments at Auschwitz in 1943.

36
. The Axis powers as aliens: American wartime poster.

37
. Tatars in the Red Army.

38
. A German soldier in the wake of the Battle of Kursk in July 1943.

39
. Nazi poster for Dutch consumption.

40
. The destruction of Dresden in February 1945.

41
. The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
’s caricature ‘Mr Moto’.

42
. Phoenix war worker Natalie Nickerson with a Japanese soldier’s skull.

43
. Two American tanks advance under Japanese fire during the Battle for Okinawa, June 1945.

44
. A Japanese naval lieutenant is persuaded to lay down his arms on Okinawa.

45
. A Soviet soldier tries to steal a Berlin woman’s bike.

46
. Soldiers training in Guatemala to fight the Guerrilla Army of the Poor.

47
. Chinese children read from Chairman Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’.

48
. Pol Pot greets Deng Xiaoping in Phnom Penh in 1978.

49
. Milan Lukić in his home town of Višegrad in 1992.

Picture Acknowledgements

Picture 1; taken from
Source Records of the Great War
, Vol. VII (1928)

Pictures 2–6, 10, 12, 14, 37, 48: AKG images, London

Pictures 7, 13, 15, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Picture 16: © DACS 2006 (supplied by Bridgeman Art Library)

Picture 21: The David King Collection

Pictures 25, 30: Mary Evans Picture Library

Pictures 26, 38, 49: Empics

Picture 27: Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust. Copyright © Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust

Picture 28: Ty Rogers

Picture 29: Mrs H. Lappo

Picture 33: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

Pictures 34, 35: Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial

Picture 42: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Picture 45: Ullstein Bild

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but this has not been possible in all cases. If notified, the publishers will be pleased to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

List of Maps

Map 1
. The Jewish Pale of Settlement

Map 2
. Austria-Hungary before the First World War

Map 3
. The German diaspora in the 1920s

Map 4.
Political boundaries after the Paris peace treaties,
c
. 1924

Map 5
. The Asian empires in autumn 1941

Map 6
. Manchuria and Korea

Map 7
. The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1941–45

Map 8
. The Nazi Empire at its maximum extent, autumn 1942

Map 9
. The Pale of Settlement and the Holocaust

Map 10
. Germany partitioned, 1945

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE WAR OF THE WORLD

‘Quite stunning’
The Times Literary Supplement

‘Full of epigrams, witticisms and thought-provoking paradoxes and ironies… supremely readable and thought-provoking’ Andrew Roberts

‘This is Ferguson’s best work, by far, since
The Pity of War
’ Paul Kennedy,
New York Review of Books

‘Delivered with immense brio and pace… so easy to zip through’
Spectator

‘Entertainingly provocative… He is a fine debunker’
Economist

‘A great read… One is swept along by the author’s superb clarity of expression and the persuasive verve of his style’
Irish Times

‘A gripping read’
Scotland on Sunday

‘A thoughtful, often provocative, portrait of the period… an historian who can rattle cosy assumptions’
The Times

‘Without doubt, this is Ferguson’s best work to date… one of the most revolutionary reinterpretations of this era’
Tribune

‘A sweeping and handsomely controlled narrative in which he balances wide-screen storytelling and close-focus anecdote… Even those who have read widely in twentieth-century history will find fresh, surprising details’
Boston Globe

‘Again he shows himself to be a writer of extraordinary energy and versatility’ Norman Stone,
Wall Street Journal

‘Wielding at once the encyclopedic knowledge of an accomplished scholar and the engaging prose of a master storyteller, Ferguson commendably brings fresh insights to a history by now familiar’
San Francisco Chronicle

‘A staggering achievement. Written in clear, lively prose, it asks to be savoured, enjoyed and argued with’
Sunday Morning Post
(South China)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Niall Ferguson is one of Britain’s most renowned historians. He is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The bestselling author of
Paper and Iron
,
The House of Rothschild
,
The Pity of War
,
The Cash Nexus
,
Empire
and
Colossus
, he also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world. Since 2003 he has written and presented three highly successful television documentary series for Channel Four:
Empire
,
American Colossus
and, most recently,
The War of the World
. He, his wife and three children divide their time between the United Kingdom and the United States.

for
Felix,
Freya,
Lachlan
and
Susan

Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

Romeo and Juliet
, V.iii

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

The Waste Land
, V

A Note on Transliteration and Other Linguistic Conventions

There are at least seven different systems for the transliteration of Mandarin Chinese into Roman characters. Broadly speaking, the English-speaking world switched from one system (Wade-Giles) to another (Hanyu Pinyin) towards the end of the period covered by this book, partly in response to its official adoption by the People’s Republic of China and the International Organization for Standardization. Thus, to take perhaps the most obvious example, Peking became Beijing.

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