War: What is it good for? (46 page)

If Hitler had broken Britain, he would just have found himself facing the United States' even bigger and more dynamic open-access order. Like the hunter-gatherers confronting farmers in prehistory, or the stateless societies struggling against ancient empires, the autocrats of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were on the wrong side of history.

Rather than creating the thousand-year Reich that Hitler so often spoke of, a Nazi victory in Europe would have set up a situation very like the real-world Cold War that took shape after 1945. A totalitarian European empire and an open-access American order would have glared at each other from behind fences of nuclear missiles, struggling for influence over Latin America and the carcasses of the old British and French Empires. They would have sponsored coups, waged proxy wars, and wooed each other's allies (Nixon might have flown to Tokyo in 1972 to split Japan from Germany, rather than flying to Beijing to split China from the Soviet Union). They might even have had their own Petrov moments.

There would have been differences too, of course. Had Hitler won, the European empire would have been ruled from Berlin, not Moscow, and would have run all the way to the Atlantic, rather than stopping at the Iron Curtain. Hitler and his successors might have been more willing than Stalin and his to risk nuclear war. And without western Europe in its orbit, the United States would surely have found it harder to prevail. But in the end, the Nazis would still have faced the same core problem as the communists, of how to compete with a dynamic, open-access outer-rim order, and been confronted with exactly the same choices. They could have recognized the strengths of the open-access economy and begun imitating it, as mainland China did after Mao's death in 1976, or they could have ignored it and collapsed, as the Soviet Union did in 1989.

I will have much more to say about the Cold War in the last parts of this chapter; here I will content myself with observing that these are the reasons why I conclude that the what-about-Hitler problem is not really a problem at all (for the theory that I am advancing in this book, that is, not for the people who lived through his reign of terror). Hitler's regime was an extreme case in the annals of atrocity. A Nazi victory would have been a disaster, condemning decades of Europeans to the grip of the Gestapo and the death camps, driving the rate of violent death back up to levels not seen for centuries. But even so, the Nazis would have remained subject to the same iron laws as every other government in history. As the decades
lengthened into generations, the need to compete commercially and militarily with the open-access order would have forced Hitler's successors to make a choice between defeat and turning into stationary bandits. In the 2010s, I hazard to suggest, Europe might still have been a dark continent where secret police kicked in doors in the middle of the night, but the downward march of violent death rates would have resumed. Hitler could have slowed the civilizing process, but he could not have stopped it altogether.

As it was, of course, Hitler did not win. Had he handled the Stalingrad campaign better in 1942, he could still have prevailed, and even in the summer of 1943, when he launched the biggest tank battle in history at Kursk, he still stood a chance. But by then his enemies had learned not only to survive blitzkrieg but also to mount their own versions. Committing their enormous economies to total war, they overwhelmed Germany and Japan (
Figure 5.11
). Thousand-bomber raids pounded the Axis homelands day and night, paralyzing their economies and killing about a million civilians (including a hundred thousand in Tokyo in a single night). When the German army invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, it needed 600,000 horses to haul its guns and supplies, greatly slowing its advance,
but by 1944 the Allied armies were fully motorized. Now it was the turn of veteran German forces to disintegrate as American tanks broke out after the D-Day landings (Operation Cobra) and Soviet armor smashed its way through to the German frontier, annihilating Hitler's Army Group Center (Operation Bagration). With their cities in flames, Hitler shot himself and Japan's emperor broadcast his first-ever speech to his people. “The war situation,” he conceded, “has not developed necessarily to Japan's advantage.” With that, the tempest was over.

Learning to Love the Bomb

The Second World War was the most destructive ever fought. When we include those who starved, succumbed to disease, and were murdered in German, Soviet, and Japanese camps, it claimed fifty million to a hundred million lives, as compared with fifteen million dead in World War I and another twenty million in the civil wars that followed it. World War II turned much of Europe and East Asia into wastelands and cost something like $1 trillion (as I write, in 2013, the equivalent of perhaps $15 trillion, the entire annual output of the United States or the European Union). And yet, in a paradox as striking as any in the history of conflict, World War II also managed to be among the most productive ever fought.

That was because the war began the process of clearing away the chaos left by the demise of the British globocop. This, needless to say, was not the end Churchill had had in mind when he asked for the British people's blood, toil, tears, and sweat. In August 1941, before the United States had even entered the war, he had rushed back from a secret meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to boast to the cabinet that he had “a plain and bold intimation that after the war, the US will join with us in policing the world until the establishment of a better order.” But this was not to be. There was a popular saying during the war that Britain provided the time, Russia provided the men, and America provided the money to defeat Hitler, but by November 1943, when Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt held their first group meeting, time was already on the Allies' side. Only men and money now mattered, and Churchill found himself sidelined.

Far from sharing global condominium with the United States, Britain woke up from celebrating victory over Germany and Japan to the worst economic hangover in its history. Its debts were much worse than in 1918, its economy completely distorted by war production, and its very food supply dependent on American loans. “It was extraordinarily unreal, even
absurd, and shabby,” a left-wing journalist wrote in his diary in December 1945 after spending two days watching Parliament debate the terms of a new American bailout. “Speakers took up their position, but the only reality was the fear which none of them dared to express—the fear of the consequences if cigarettes and films and spam were not available from America.”

Absurd and shabby it might have been, but unreal it was not. Britain had gone broke fighting Germany. To pay its debts, it had to put exports ahead of consumption, and food rationing actually got stricter after 1945. When eggs became freely available in 1950, there was euphoria. “What this means to us only an English housewife can understand,” one diary records; “at last actually we could beat up two eggs and put them in a cake … THE FIRST TIME FOR TEN YEARS.”

Trapped between insolvency and demands to expand the open-access order into an expensive welfare state, Britain soon found running its old empire an unaffordable luxury. Back in 1916, a German general commanding Turkish troops defending Iraq against a mostly Indian army fighting for the British Empire had written home that “the hallmark of the twentieth century must be the revolution of the colored races against the colonial imperialism of Europe,” but it took another world war to fulfill his prophecy.

British rule never recovered from its failure to stand up to Japan. The scene at Penang in Malaya in December 1941 was fairly typical: as Japanese spearheads infiltrated past the British fortifications, the European defenders left without firing a shot, abandoning their local allies to the invaders' tender mercies. Out of the dozens of Asian civil servants who had actually run the town on Britain's behalf, only one was even told about the evacuation, and he was then turned out of the boat to make room for the British commandant's car. It was, thought a young British woman caught up in the rout, “a thing which I am sure will never be forgotten or forgiven.”

Although two and a half million Indians volunteered to fight for the empire while only a few thousand joined the Japanese army (often so they could get out of prisoner-of-war camps), the London government nevertheless had no illusions about being able to keep control in the subcontinent after the war ended. It pulled out in indecent haste in 1947, and by 1971 Britain ruled virtually nothing east of Suez (or east of Dover, for that matter).

“Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” the former American secretary of state Dean Acheson famously remarked in 1962,
but that was not entirely true. The ex-globocop in fact transitioned remarkably smoothly to being the main supporter of the new power that had taken its job, probably because Britain really had very few options. Less than a year after Hitler's suicide, Churchill could already see that “an Iron Curtain has descended across the [European] continent.” The war had not been productive enough to install a new globocop, but it did set up two new hemispherical cops.

During the Five Hundred Years' War, Europe had (almost) conquered the world, and now the Soviet Union and the United States had between them conquered Europe. They had divided the continent down the middle, solving the great strategic problem posed by a mighty Germany forever fearful of being crushed between the outer rim and the heartland by tearing the country in two. Seen in isolation, the First World War had been very much a counterproductive war, crippling the British globocop, but from the vantage point of 1945 it now looked more like the opening round in a longer productive war, which was moving toward replacing the nineteenth-century globocop with a much stronger twentieth-century version. Many thoughtful observers concluded that there would have to be one more great productive war, with the two hemispherical cops fighting it out until just one globocop remained standing.

But one thing stood in the way of this outcome: the bomb.

Splitting the atom had changed everything. The biggest artillery bombardments in the world wars had typically lobbed fifteen to twenty thousand tons of high explosives at enemy trenches over the course of several days, but the individual bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki concentrated these barrages into single blasts and also poisoned the survivors with lethal neutrons and gamma rays. With just two bombs, the United States killed more than 150,000 people. A war between two nations with large nuclear arsenals (in 1986, the peak year, the United States and the Soviet Union had seventy thousand warheads between them) was beyond anything that could be imagined. It would be truly counterproductive war, laying lands waste for thousands of years to come. Even Stalin found the thought unbearable.

The question, then, was what to do about it. One possibility was that the world would be scared straight: after looking into the abyss, it might finally beat its swords into plowshares. Albert Einstein wrote to
The New York Times
less than a month after Hiroshima and Nagasaki explaining that this was the only option. An earnest committee at the University of Chicago issued guidelines for a world government. Hope even flared that
the United Nations, the League of Nations' successor, would make war redundant.

But all these answers begged the same question: What happens when the nuclear giants fall out? The idea that the United Nations' Atomic Energy Commission would control all atom bombs collapsed when the Americans and the Soviets could not agree on inspection protocols, and by 1947 confidence in the power of talk was disappearing. Soviets called the United Nations “not so much a world organization as an organization for the Americans”; American officials, watching the delegates' antics, dismissed it as “the monkey house.”

Another possibility was that the world might be scared violent. Pushing the lesser-evil logic to its horrifying limits, some Americans pointed out that since they had not only atom bombs but also bombers that could reach enemy cities, while the Soviets had neither, it made sense to fight a one-sided nuclear war now rather than a much worse, two-sided one later. Churchill even contemplated a plan (called, quite rightly, Operation Unthinkable) to follow up nuclear attacks by having the recently surrendered German army reinvade Russia.

The flaw with this thinking was that during the four years that the United States had the world's only atomic bombs, it did not have enough of them to defeat the Soviets. The Joint Chiefs of Staff calculated in 1948 that if they dropped all 133 of their bombs on Soviet cities, they would kill three million people—a horrifying number, but not enough to shatter a nation that had survived twenty-five million deaths during World War II. Not until 1952, when American physicists set off a thermonuclear (“hydrogen”) bomb with a blast equal to seven hundred Hiroshimas, was the United States in a position to kill tens of millions of communists, but by then—thanks as much to their spies as their scientists—the communists had a bomb of their own (
Figure 5.12
).