War: What is it good for? (45 page)

Back in 1904, when Halford Mackinder predicted that the struggle
between the inner rim, the outer rim, and the heartland would dominate the twentieth century, he was already worrying that Japan might follow a path like the one Ishiwara recommended. “Were the Chinese,” he speculated, “organized by the Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might constitute the yellow peril to the world's freedom just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent, an advantage as yet denied to the Russian tenant of the pivot region.”

When Mackinder was delivering his famous lecture in 1904, Japan was pressing from the outer into the inner rim, fighting Russia for access to Manchuria, but thirty-five years later Manchuria was completely under its control. There was no immediate danger of Japan's invading the heartland, and a tough, undeclared war with Stalin in the summer of 1939 saw Soviet tanks inflict a sharp defeat on the Japanese at Nomonhan. But the conquest of coastal China—to Mackinder, the prerequisite for conquering the heartland—was moving ahead. Japan seemed to be working from Mackinder's script: by taking over Manchuria and China, Ishiwara announced,
“the Japanese people can become rulers of Asia and be prepared to wage the final and decisive war against the various white races.”

All this was alarming—very alarming—but what worried defenders of the status quo most was, once again, Germany. The Versailles settlement had created a buffer zone of small states in eastern Europe, but Germany's strategic problem (and opportunities) had not gone away. It was still sandwiched between the Russian heartland and the Franco-British outer rim, and violence seemed as plausible a policy in the 1930s as it had been in the 1910s.

Back in 1917, the kaiser had compared Europe with the ancient Mediterranean. Because Rome's victory over Carthage in the First Punic War of 264–241
B.C.
had failed to resolve the two powers' real issues, he observed, a more terrible—but also more decisive—Second Punic War had to be fought twenty years later. Germany too, he predicted, would have to fight a Second Punic War. All it needed was a Hannibal—and in 1933 it got one.

The Tempest

“Germany's problem,” Hitler told his advisers in 1937, “could be solved only by the use of force.” This, he argued as early as 1925 in his book
Mein Kampf,
meant that Germany had to refight the First World War, and this time get it right.

Germany's 1914 strategy, Hitler thought, had been basically correct, and in the war to come, the army would once again strike west while marking time in the east. After overthrowing the outer-rim powers of France and Britain, Germany would turn on the Soviet Union. At that point, though, Hitler went beyond the thinking of the 1910s. In 1917, Ludendorff had insisted that anywhere that Germans lived, from the Rhine to the Volga, was part of a “Greater Germany,” but Hitler imagined what the historian Niall Ferguson calls a “Greatest Possible Germany,” where
only
Germans lived. This would give the German race
Lebensraum,
or “living space,” where sturdy Teutonic farmers would go forth and multiply free from the taint of lesser races.

Success, Hitler said, depended on learning two great lessons from World War I and then going beyond them. The first came originally from British officers, who, in 1918, had seen that combining German storm-troop tactics with their own style of massed tank attacks and (insofar as the technology of the day allowed it) close air support could make trench warfare obsolete. The idea, the maverick military theorist Captain Basil Liddell
Hart explained, was to make the fight more fluid, with success coming
“above all
in the ‘follow-through'—the way that a break-through … is exploited by a deep strategic penetration; carried out by armoured forces racing on ahead of the main army, and operating
independently
.”

Lack of funds and a certain amount of stick-in-the-mudness meant that the interwar British, French, and American armies did little to develop this bold vision, but Soviet generals did pick it up. Organizing tanks into large armored corps for independent operations, they planned to wage what they called “deep battle,” pushing far behind the enemy front in just the way suggested by Liddell Hart; but Stalin had most of these officers shot in 1937, and their replacements, understandably, tried to avoid radical ideas that might attract the great man's attention.

Only in Germany, where the strict limits imposed by the Treaty of Versailles had left military men with no option but to innovate, did the doctrine of combined-arms breakouts—what journalists later labeled “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war—really take hold. By the time Hitler started flooding the army with money in the mid-1930s, its leaders had embraced blitzkrieg, and its engineers were building tanks, aircraft, and radios that (unlike the weapons of 1918) could withstand the stresses of mobile war. Germany's temporary monopoly on the new tactics gave Hitler a real chance to grab victory before anyone else realized what was going on.

Blitzkrieg meant embracing risk and chaos, turning the storm of steel into a true tempest. Bombers and parachutists would sow disorder deep in the enemy's rear, attacking civilians as often as soldiers and choking the roads with refugees. Up at the front, squads of infantry covered by intense artillery fire and swooping dive-bombers would probe for gaps in the enemy line, slipping between strongpoints or turning open flanks. Tanks and trucks would surge through the openings, and now the real fight would begin. Armored columns would fan out miles behind enemy positions, racing to overrun command centers before reserves could concentrate, cut off, and crush the penetrations. Eventually, the breakthrough would outrun its supplies, but by then a second echelon of armor would have burst through. If necessary, a third would follow, always keeping the defenders off balance, until, sooner rather than later, confusion overwhelmed everything and the enemy's will collapsed.

Blitzkrieg worked exactly as advertised. Poland's armies disintegrated before Britain and France could even mobilize, and France itself, which had fought so long and hard in World War I, collapsed completely in May 1940 when a thousand German tanks burst through a carelessly guarded
stretch of the front. Three weeks later, Winston Churchill gave the greatest speech of his career, insisting, “We shall go on to the end.” But when his war secretary secretly gathered senior officers in a hotel room to ask whether their troops “could be counted on to continue to fight in all circumstances,” the answer shocked him. “No one dared,” one of the officers recalled, “to estimate any exact proportion.”

Britain, of course, did fight on, but twelve months later Germany looked even closer to winning the war. With more than four thousand tanks driving east, the Soviet army seemed to be crumbling as abruptly as the French had. The “Russians lost this war in the first eight days,” the German chief of staff announced. Stalin promptly had a mini-breakdown and fled to his country estate, where—on the eighth day—the rest of the Politburo came looking for him. “We found him in an armchair in the small dining room,” one of them wrote. “He looked up and said, ‘What have you come for?' He had the strangest look on his face and the question itself was pretty strange.” Stalin, his henchmen realized, thought they had come to execute him before surrendering to the Germans.

But the Soviets too fought on, because—and this was the second lesson Hitler took from World War I—wars are not lost on battlefields alone. Despite (or because of?) his experiences in the trenches as the army collapsed in 1918, Hitler shared the popular view that Germany had never been defeated in the field. It had failed, he was certain, because traitors had stabbed it in the back—from which he drew the conclusion that this time around, Germany had to strike the would-be traitors before the war even began. He started with communists, rounded up by the thousands in 1933. Next came rivals on the extreme right, murdered en masse in 1934, and then, on a larger scale still, all groups judged insufficiently German.

“The main thing,” Hitler said in private in 1938, “is that the Jews are driven out.” The Roman Empire had expelled the Jews from their homeland two thousand years earlier, and Europeans had periodically persecuted them ever since, but the Nazis, once again, took things further. The Jews' homelessness, Hitler argued, made them the absolute opposite of Germans, who had a sacred bond to the soil. Jewish rootlessness and commercial greed would corrupt the coming thousand-year Reich and must therefore be eradicated. Almost the minute they invaded Poland in 1939, German troops started shooting Jews. When that proved too slow and expensive, they converted trucks to act as mobile gas chambers. Hitler probably took the decision to round up and murder every Jew in Europe in July 1941, soon after he attacked the Soviet Union. Hitler's inner circle, agreeing with their
master that Europe's other
Untermenschen
—“subhumans”—would also have to go, floated plans to cut off the food supply to Russian cities, starving tens of millions of people to death over the coming winter.

This was people's war taken to the extreme, and it made World War II unique. There had been orchestrated massacres in World War I (in Serbia, Belgium, Africa, and above all Armenia), but such calculated barbarism, on such a scale, was—as Churchill put it—“a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.” Not all of Hitler's genocidal plans came off, but the Nazis still murdered at least twenty million civilians.

That is why, in the introduction to this book, I raised what I called the what-about-Hitler problem. If it is true, as I have been claiming, that war has been productive, creating bigger societies that pacify themselves internally and generate economic growth, then what about Hitler? His Greatest Possible Germany would have been the biggest society the continent had seen since the Roman Empire, yet it would also have impoverished most of its subjects and made their lives much more dangerous—the exact opposite of productive war.

I suggested in the introduction that the solution to the what-about-Hitler problem is fairly obvious once we take a long-term perspective on history. Since caging began ten thousand years ago, conquerors have been making wastelands, but they or their successors then faced a harsh choice between turning into stationary bandits and being replaced by new conquerors, who would face exactly the same choice. Churchill predicted that if Hitler beat Britain, “the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” All the evidence, though, suggests that Hitler's regime would in fact have had to make the same choice between stationary banditry and extinction as every other regime in history.

Hitler always recognized that winning the war in Europe would not be the end of his struggle. “For a foreseeable period of about one to three generations,” he predicted, eastern Europe would provide scope for the German race to grow, but after that it would need to expand again, probably overseas. At that point, somewhere between the 1970s and the 2030s, Hitler's successors would fight a Third World War, in which Germany would crush whatever remained of the British Empire and take dominion over the globe.

Perhaps because they were so convinced that traitors rather than the
arrival of American troops had cost them victory in 1918, few Nazi leaders ever understood that the real problem for their long-term plans was the United States, not Britain. Nothing else can explain why, just days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the Americans rather than hoping that the war in the Pacific would distract them from Europe. “What does the USA amount to anyway?” asked Hermann Göring, the head of the German air force. Churchill, however, saw exactly what it amounted to. “Now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death,” he said of hearing the news about Pearl Harbor. “So we had won after all!”

Hitler had been making vague plans to attack the United States since 1938, and periodically ordered German factories to start building long-range bombers that could reach New York and great surface fleets to contest the Atlantic, only to cancel the commissions as more pressing problems arose. Whether he would have gotten more serious had he beaten Britain and the Soviets in 1940–41, we can only speculate; but such speculation is useful, I think, because as soon as we ask this question, we see why the Nazis, like all rulers since productive war began, would quickly have been forced to choose between becoming stationary bandits and being defeated.

Had Hitler built bombers and fleets in earnest and tried to wage a transatlantic war, he would soon have run into the same difficulties that Japan encountered in the Pacific. The first was that once the Americans worked out how to survive blitzkrieg, the struggle would turn into a long, logistical slogging match; and the second, that even with all the resources of an enslaved Europe to draw on, Hitler could not win this.

In some ways, Hitler's position was rather like Napoleon's, 135 years earlier. Both men tried to conquer Europe by wedding the modern energies of people's war to an old idea of empire, using violence to unify the European inner rim and then close it off from the commercial, open-access orders of the outer rim. This, I suggested in
Chapter 4
, was already a losing strategy when Napoleon tried it around 1805, because the vast wealth being generated by the Atlantic economy meant that real power now came from getting the invisible hand and the invisible fist to work together. Because Britain was doing this and Napoleon was not, the emperor never stood much chance of prevailing over the nation of shopkeepers. By the time Hitler reran a more extreme, bloodthirsty version of the strategy around 1940, the odds against it were even steeper. It is perhaps no coincidence that Hitler, exactly like Napoleon, was turned back at the English Channel, in the snows before Moscow, and in the sands of Egypt. Both
men suffered the same fate because both men were trying to do the same thing.