Chapter Content
Okay, so let's talk about World War II, right? I mean, it's a huge topic, but let's dive in.
So, you know, during the 1930s, it's kinda crazy, but while most countries were, like, totally stuck in the Great Depression, Germany was actually bouncing back pretty quickly. But, um, the thing is, the Nazi ideology, it made it pretty obvious that Hitler wasn't planning on using all that recovered wealth for peaceful stuff, you know?
Then, bam, in 1935, Hitler just announces that Germany's ditching the Treaty of Versailles and starting to rearm. That, uh, that threw a wrench into things for the World War I allies, Britain and France. See, the United States was, like, super isolationist and didn't wanna send troops to Europe, and the British and French definitely didn't want to go through another World War, not at all. But Hitler's rearmament plan, it forced Britain and France to make a decision, a pretty tough one at that.
The thing is, the diplomatic stuff that happened in the 30s, it wasn't really fair. It wasn't necessarily about Germany being disarmed and depressed while Britain and France were well-armed and less affected by the Depression. It was more that Britain and France were desperate to avoid war and they figured everyone else was too. Hitler, though, he didn't see it that way.
So, Britain and France basically went with a strategy of appeasement, you know? Giving Hitler small diplomatic wins, hoping he'd stick to his word once he got them. The idea was, maybe, if they could get him to sign an agreement, he'd actually honor it, and things would calm down. But, uh, spoiler alert, that didn't work out so well.
Hitler, he had some pretty convincing arguments to start with. The Treaty of Versailles limited the German army, but nobody else had really downsized their armies, you know? So, he was like, "Why should Germany be the only one afraid of getting invaded?" Plus, the whole "Nazi Germany's a pariah state" thing didn't really fly in European diplomacy. Back then, countries didn't really interfere with what other governments did inside their own borders.
What did matter in Europe was the language people spoke. The Treaty of Versailles tried to redraw borders based on language as much as possible...except for Germany. German speakers were living all over the place, not just in Germany.
As long as Hitler kept his goals to, like, getting rid of those army restrictions and fixing the language border issues, it was hard for Britain and France to say no.
I mean, did Britain and France really want to invade Germany, get rid of Hitler, and set up a weak government that would just make German nationalism even worse? Well, most of them thought that was a pretty bad idea, except Winston Churchill, you know? He saw the danger, but he was seen as, like, a bit of a nut, you know? He'd been wrong about stuff before, so why listen to him now?
Besides, the French and British leaders thought they had bigger fish to fry, you know? Like, dealing with the Great Depression. And some of them even wanted to see Germany rejoin the Western European community. With Germany disarmed, there was a weak spot between the Soviet Union and the Rhine River, and a strong Germany could be a buffer against, uh, communist Russia. So, as the German army started growing again, Britain and France basically did nothing.
Then, in 1936, Hitler broke the treaty again by sending troops into the Rhineland. Britain and France faced the same decision, and again, they didn't act. It seemed pointless to make a big deal out of it, you know? No other country had demilitarized zones, so why single out Germany? Enforcing the treaty would mean invading Germany again.
In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. Austria was mostly German-speaking, so Hitler said he was just bringing the German people together, righting a wrong from the past. And, uh, to some extent, he had a point. The German armies marched in and were even greeted with enthusiasm in some places.
After Austria, Hitler set his sights on the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia. It had a lot of German speakers, and some of them were complaining and demanding to be part of Germany, with some financial help from Germany, of course.
Britain had to defend France; France had to defend Czechoslovakia. But Britain and France didn't want to go to war to keep the Sudetenland from joining Germany. They worried that World War II would bring the horrors of the trenches to civilians. And they were right to worry.
So, in 1938, the British and French prime ministers went to Munich and made a deal with Hitler. He could take the Sudetenland, and he'd promise to respect the rest of Czechoslovakia. Britain and France would guarantee Czechoslovakia's independence. The Czechs weren't even invited to the meeting, can you believe that?
Chamberlain, the British prime minister, came back to Britain and was cheered as a hero, you know? He said he had secured "peace for our time." But Churchill, he saw it differently. He thought they were choosing shame over war, and he figured they'd probably end up with both.
Then, Hitler took all of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Britain and France did nothing. Chamberlain said that the agreement they made at Munich was no longer valid because Czechoslovakia had fallen apart from the inside.
But, then, a couple of days later, Chamberlain changed his mind. Not about Czechoslovakia, but about appeasement.
He gave security guarantees to Poland and Romania. He said that if Germany attacked them, Britain and France would declare war. Chamberlain seemed to think this would stop Hitler.
But why would it? How could British troops help Poland when Germany was in the way? Hitler thought the British and French were bluffing. And he wanted to get ready to attack east, to do what the United States had done to the Indigenous people of North America.
In the spring of 1939, Hitler demanded that the borders be redrawn again, this time to take back German speakers in a "Polish corridor" that separated Germany and East Prussia.
If the British and French had been realists, they might have just let Hitler go east, you know? Figured that a Hitler fighting wars in the east wouldn't bother them, at least for a while. And if he did eventually turn west, then they'd deal with him then.
But they didn't do that. They had guaranteed Poland and Romania. They doubled down, betting on, well, hoping for the best basically.
Chamberlain and his foreign minister didn't seem to think much about what would happen if their strategy didn't work, you know? They knew they didn't want war. They thought Hitler felt the same. So, he must be bluffing, right? Nobody wanted another World War.
So, one side was willing to come close to war, but they still thought nobody actually wanted one. They thought they'd given Hitler enough. Drawing a line would prevent war. The other side was sure war was inevitable, better than things as they were, and necessary to get the living space they felt they deserved. Plus, the British and French politicians had backed down when they had a strong hand. Why wouldn't they back down now that they were weak? Neither of them could really help Poland.
If they didn’t, however, Germany might face a war on its western border, and it was for this reason that Hitler became interested in a temporary alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Over the years, even while trying to rally countries against fascism, Stalin had sent signals to Hitler. Hitler wasn't interested at first. He only became interested in a deal with Stalin in 1939, when he realized how useful Soviet neutrality would be for his conquest of Poland. He and Stalin agreed to split Poland down the middle. The Soviet Union also got the green light from Germany to take over Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Stalin made a huge mistake. The deal let Hitler fight three wars in a row without worrying about his other side: Poland, Britain and France, and then the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union barely survived until the United States joined the war. US factories and support kept the Soviet army going, and the US Army and Air Force made it possible for Britain and the US to get back into the war on the ground. It would've been way better for the Soviet Union to fight Germany in 1939 with Britain and France on their side than to face Germany alone in 1941, 1942, and 1943.
Stalin is hard to understand, you know? Churchill called the Soviet Union "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." But here's a guess at what was going on in Stalin's head:
"Hitler? He's just a tool of the capitalists. He wants to invade us to get our cheap resources so his capitalist bosses can make more money."
"So, what if we give him all the resources he wants at a super cheap price?"
"Then he won't invade. He won't have a reason to."
"And then what?"
"Then, the capitalist powers will fight each other over markets, like they always do."
"And after the war?"
"We move in and expand communism."
"So, our goal is to appease Hitler, give him what he wants, and then wait for our moment."
Maybe Stalin thought there'd be a repeat of World War I, you know? Trench warfare that would drag on and exhaust the capitalist countries, making them ripe for a communist revolution. But he didn't realize how dangerous even a temporary alliance with Hitler really was.
So, you had one side convinced that capitalist countries were doomed to fight each other and create a communist paradise, and the other side convinced that a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy was an existential threat.
In 1939, Hitler and Stalin invaded and split up Poland.
And it turned out that Britain and France weren't bluffing, after all.
They did what they said they'd do. Hitler attacked Poland on September 1st. On that same afternoon, the British prime minister invited his critic, Winston Churchill, to join the War Cabinet. Then, he ignored Churchill for two full days. Fifty hours after the Nazi attack, the British government demanded that the German army leave Poland. And then, they declared war. France followed. But their forces weren't ready and were far from Poland, which fell to Hitler and Stalin in a month.
And while they hadn't been bluffing, they hadn't exactly been preparing either. They had no plans for fighting a war against Germany. And they didn't come up with any, so for eight months after the fall of Poland, things were quiet on the western front.
People often criticize Chamberlain and Daladier for their actions, you know? They didn't stop Hitler when he was weak. They didn't get ready to fight him when he was strong. They didn't even build a grand alliance with the United States and the Soviet Union.
But there's another way to look at it. Only one country with a land border with Nazi Germany, France, declared war on it. Everyone else waited until Hitler declared war on them, or just attacked. And only one other country in the 1930s, Britain, declared war on it. They only did it when they saw no other choice, and they had no idea how to fight the war. But they were willing to risk their empire to stop Hitler, which is more than anyone else did, you know?
Their efforts weren’t rewarded.
In six weeks in 1940, France fell. The Nazis forced France to surrender and chased the British army off the continent at Dunkirk, where they left all their equipment. But, surprisingly, Britain didn't make peace. They kept fighting, daring Hitler to invade. Hitler didn't try. He sent bombers instead, day and night. He funded rocket-building programs, producing the V-series of terror weapons.
But after France, he turned his armies east, like he always planned. In 1941, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. But he hadn't fully mobilized his economy, so he attacked with what he had.
Stalin's first reaction was to tell his troops not to fire back, afraid of provoking the Nazis. The Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground on the first day. Stalin's mistakes were costly.
Stalin had purged the army of anyone he thought was a threat. It was dangerous to bring him bad news. When the Nazis attacked, the Soviet army wasn't ready. They hadn't finished building their defenses after taking part of Poland. So, the USSR lost a whole army in the first few weeks.
By 1941, the Nazis had advanced and stopped their advance. Stalin and the Soviet command misjudged the situation and lost a second army, as they tried to push forward in counterattacks, refusing to withdraw. In the four months after the Nazi invasion, almost four million Soviet troops were captured. And the Nazis attacked again. By December, the Nazi armies were close to Leningrad, Moscow, Kharkov, and Rostov.
But the USSR had a third army that stopped the Nazis.
When the United States entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the War in the Pacific had already been going on for five years. It started with Japan's invasion of China.
World War II in Europe is hard to imagine without World War I. World War I and the Great Depression also helped Japan turn to imperialism.
World War I helped Japanese industrialization. Exports from Europe to Asia stopped during the war. Asian countries bought goods from the growing Japanese Empire. Japanese industrial production and exports quadrupled.
After the war, European economies started exporting to Asia again, and Japanese industries faced competition. The Japanese economy was also hurt by the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. But Japanese industrialization continued. In the 1920s, manufacturing became more valuable than agriculture.
Japanese manufacturing relied on unmarried young women. But they lacked experience and didn't stay long. So, Japanese manufacturers worked to balance them with experienced male workers.
This led to the "permanent employment system." Japanese male workers were hired after school and promised lifetime employment, with raises, healthcare, and pensions, in return for loyalty. This system may have flourished because it fit Japanese society well. Also, the Japanese economy avoided recessions, so companies didn't have to fire workers.
Cotton textiles, furniture, apparel, and a small heavy industrial sector were the main parts of the Japanese economy by the 1930s. This sector was controlled by the zaibatsu, business groups that cooperated, owned each other's stock, and relied on the same banks and insurance companies. Japan's financial system was similar to Germany's.
The Great Depression came to Japan in 1930. Exports, especially silk, fell. Sticking to the gold standard hurt the Japanese economy. Japan responded by leaving the gold standard and increasing government spending, especially on the military. The Great Depression touched but didn't stun the Japanese economy. And it showed that the European imperialist powers were in trouble.
In 1931, the Japanese government became expansionist. They extended their influence into Manchuria, which then declared "independence" as the Japanese state of Manchukuo. Expansion was followed by rearmament. Rearmament was followed by a full-scale attack on China in 1937. Government orders for war material boosted Japanese industrial production. Japan embraced a war economy from 1937, building warships, airplanes, engines, radios, tanks, and machine guns.
But to continue its war against China, it needed oil from the United States or Indonesia. President Roosevelt wanted to contain Japan. So, in 1941, after Japan occupied Indochina, Roosevelt froze Japanese financial assets in the United States.
The Japanese government got licenses to buy oil in the United States, but they couldn't pay because their assets were frozen. The asset freeze turned into a de facto oil embargo. The Dutch colonial authorities also insisted on being paid in dollars for oil from Indonesia.
Without oil imports, Japan's military couldn't run. The embargo gave Japan a choice between giving in to the United States or starting a war to seize the oil fields of Indonesia. This should have been predicted, and the United States should have been more alert in the Pacific.
Faced with what they saw as no choice, the Japanese military attacked first. In 1941, attacks began on British, Dutch, and US forces in the Pacific. The attack on Pearl Harbor sank the battleships of the US Pacific Fleet. The attack on Clark Field in the Philippines destroyed the B-17 bomber force that could have blocked Japanese seaborne invasions.
Without the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war against the United States, it's hard to see how the United States would have entered World War II. US public opinion favored giving Britain and the Soviets weapons to fight Hitler but keeping American boys out of it. If that opinion had continued, history might have been very different.
The range of World War II participants changed. In Europe, it started as France, Britain, and Poland against Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia conquered Poland in 1939. The Soviets attacked Finland, which fought them to a draw. In 1940, Germany attacked and occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France. Italy joined on Germany's side. By 1940, only Britain was fighting Nazi Germany. In 1940 and 1941, Britain acquired Greece and Yugoslavia as allies. But they were conquered by Nazi Germany in 1941. In 1941, Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Russia. And in 1941, the Japanese navy attacked US, British, and Dutch territories in the Pacific. Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. At that point, the war was truly global.
It was a "total war." At its peak, about 40 percent of the US gross domestic product was being spent on the war. About 60 percent of British GDP was spent on the war. About sixty million people died in the war.
How do we understand World War II?
Consider death.
When World War II ended, perhaps forty-five million in Europe and fifteen million in Asia were dead. More than half were from the Soviet Union. Even west of the Soviet border, about one in twenty were killed. In Central Europe, it was close to one in twelve. During World War I, most of those killed were soldiers. During World War II, well under half of those killed were soldiers.
European Jews: 6 million (70 percent)
Poland: 6 million (16 percent)
Soviet Union: 26 million (13 percent)
Germany: 8 million (10 percent)
Japan: 2.7 million (4 percent)
China: 10 million (2 percent)
France: 600,000 (1 percent)
Italy: 500,000 (1 percent)
Britain: 400,000 (1 percent)
United States: 400,000 (0.3 percent)
To explain the war, we can look at the first three major campaigns: the Polish campaign of 1939, the French campaign of 1940, and the first six months of the Russian campaign in 1941.
In the Polish campaign, the Nazis lost 40,000 soldiers. The Poles lost 200,000 soldiers and 1 million prisoners. In the French campaign, the Nazis lost 160,000 soldiers. The Allies lost 360,000 soldiers and 2 million prisoners. In the first six months of the Russian campaign, the Nazis lost 1 million soldiers. The Russians lost 4 million soldiers and 4 million prisoners.
The Nazis were simply better at war than their enemies. They understood dive bombers, tank columns, surprise attacks, and digging in. The interwar German army had only 100,000 soldiers, but they had learned their business well. That's the first lesson of World War II: fight the Nazis and expect to be outclassed. Expect to lose more soldiers than the Nazi armies. That was true for everyone at the start of the war.
Also, the Nazis' opponents were outclassed. That's the second lesson of World War II: fight the Nazis and expect to find your soldiers overwhelmed, surrounded, cut off, out of supplies, fleeing, and forced to surrender in large numbers.
Tactical and operational superiority matters.
Consider the French campaign of 1940. The French expected the Nazis to attack through Belgium north of the Ardennes Forest. Instead, the Nazis attacked through the Ardennes Forest itself, against the weak French Ninth Army.
Three days into the battle, it was clear that a major Nazi attack was coming through the Ardennes, and the French began to respond. They sent reinforcements.
By May 15, these forces had been reinforced.
So what happened to all these forces?
The French First Armored Division simply ran out of gas. While waiting for fuel, Rommel's Seventh Panzer Division attacked and destroyed them.
The French Second Armored Division was ineffective because its assembly areas had been overrun by the Nazis before it could even begin to fight.
Huntziger ordered the French Third Armored Division to retreat. The infantry formations of the French Sixth Army were overrun by the Nazis while they were trying to organize themselves.
By May 16, France's heavy armored divisions had been squandered.
When the Nazis had attacked, the French had had only three armored divisions. On May 11, the French high command ordered Charles de Gaulle to form and take command of the Fourth Armored Division. On May 17, he led an attack that caused the Nazis some uncertainty. But his division was below strength and without training. When France fell, de Gaulle didn't surrender, but declared that he was the leader of Free France. He made it stick, and the Free French fought with the Allies until 1945.
The French failed in tactics, strategy, and operations.
On May 10, Churchill became leader of the British Empire. Five days later, he received a call from the French prime minister, who said, "We have been defeated."
On May 16, Churchill flew to Paris. He learned that the situation was dire. The French general explained that the Germans had broken through north and south of Sedan. The French army was destroyed. Armored vehicles were advancing with unheard-of speed.
The Germans, the General stated, were expected in Paris in a few days. Shocked, Churchill asked about the French Army's reserve.
The General said, "Aucune" [None].
Churchill was wrong: the French had possessed a strategic reserve. It had been committed, and it had been ground up in a week. Systemic failures had doomed France.
Before we scorn the French army, remember what happened to the US 106th Infantry Division when Nazi Germany was on its last legs. The same had happened to the US II Corps at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. Everyone who faced the Nazis failed more or less equally, at least in their initial encounters.
The tactical and operational superiority of the Nazi armies was a powerful force multiplier. But it was offset by strategic deficits. Consider the high-water mark of Nazi conquest in Europe, November 1942. The Nazis had forces in Russia, between the Baltic Sea and the Black and Caspian Seas. Why were those forces in the southeast extended so far from the rest? They were trying to conquer the Caucasus oil fields. Hitler was convinced that Nazi Germany couldn't continue the war unless they controlled more oil fields than the Romanian ones.
He was wrong.
The armies near the Don and Volga Rivers were guarding the left flank of the armies in the Caucasus. They were also trying to capture Stalingrad.
It's unclear why. Capturing Stalingrad wouldn't provide better flank protection than a position back at Kalach on the Don River. And the armies ought to have been worrying about their own flanks, because between them and Voronezh were only poorly trained soldiers from Italy and Germany's less-than-enthusiastic allies.
The USSR had avoided losing the third wave of its Red Army. They had been mauled. They had fallen back. But they had avoided destruction via mass encirclements. Meanwhile, they had built a fourth wave of their army with which to launch winter offensives.
The Soviets attempted two great offensives in the winter of 1942–1943. Operation Mars was directed against the center of the Nazi line, near Moscow. It failed. Operation Uranus was directed against the Nazi flanks near Stalingrad. It succeeded, pulling off a grand encirclement and capturing the entire German Sixth Army.
It was an extraordinary victory, made possible only by the strategic lapses that had ordered the Nazi eastern front forces to their dispersed positions.
The Red Army might thus have grasped the last chance for the Allies to win a victory in World War II that didn't require destroying Germany completely. If Operation Uranus had failed, would Stalin have been able to raise another army? Or would that have been the end of the Soviet Union?
While the Allies could afford strategic lapses, the Nazis couldn't. Not while they were fighting a total war on several fronts. The Nazis lost about 50,000 soldiers every month. Nazi Germany had a population of about 60 million, with about 15 million men of military age. Half of those could be mobilized. The other half were needed for war work. With a maximum army strength of only 7.5 million, losing 50,000 each month is a heavy drain.
The surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and the army group in Tunisia, and the collapse of the Nazi Army Group Center under the impact of Soviet Russia's offensive made things very difficult for the German war effort.
Better Nazi strategy that didn't undermine Germany's tactical and operational edge would have prolonged the war. Perhaps it would have allowed Germany to win it.
But Germany probably still wouldn't have won the war, even with the best strategy. Germany would not have been able to overcome the logistical and productivity differentials.
Set war production of the United States in 1944 equal to 100. By this metric, in 1940 Britain's production was 7 and Nazi Germany's and Japan's were 11. In 1942, all the Allies together were producing 92, and Germany and Japan were producing 16. And by 1944, it was 150 to 24.
From 1942 on, Hitler's defeat was nearly inevitable. Even Britain alone was matching Nazi Germany in war production. Throw in the United States and the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany was outproduced more than eight to one.
A three-to-one tactical-operational advantage in casualties doesn't help when you're outnumbered in tanks and aircraft eight to one and outnumbered in potential military manpower ten to one. Starting in the fall of 1942, important battles went against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. By the end of it, it was clear who would win the war. Ideology dictated that they must keep fighting, so they did. It was the end of the beginning.
In 1945, US, British, and Russian forces met in the rubble that had been Germany. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin as the Russians closed in. Even if the armies of these nations hadn't proven victorious, there was the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. Japan surrendered in the summer of 1945.
Could science have offered the Nazis an escape? No. When Hitler took power, Germany had the best atomic physicists, but their work was dismissed as "Jewish science." The lucky ones fled into exile and helped defeat the Nazis.
The Nazis had no atom bombs. In contrast, the United States had the power to turn cities into radioactive wastelands.
World War II was horrid. Some say it was avoidable. If the British and French had been willing to use force to remove Hitler when he occupied the Rhineland, or when he threatened Czechoslovakia, there would have been no World War II in Europe. If Stalin had allied with Britain and France and declared war on Nazi Germany when Hitler invaded Poland, Hitler would have been crushed sooner, and World War II in Europe would have ended sooner.
Perhaps. Such speculation depends more on individuals than underlying facts.
Or suppose Roosevelt had decided that it was unwise to use an oil embargo to pressure Japan to withdraw from China. Perhaps the United States and Japan would have been at peace, China's coastal provinces would have been Japanese colonies, anarchy would have reigned in China's interior, and the Japanese military would have enjoyed great prestige.
Had anyone other than Churchill become British prime minister in 1940, the British government would have negotiated a separate peace with Nazi Germany. When Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Russia in 1941, it would have done so with its full strength. Stalin's regime might have collapsed, and European Russia could have become a Nazi German territory or state.
It's not likely that Hitler would have refrained from attacking Russia in any possible scenario.
Except Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, and Emperor Hirohito were who they were, and that made a difference.
Most of the alternative ways that World War II might have gone would trade a postwar period with a communist evil empire for a postwar period with a Nazi evil empire. Not an improvement.
What the world confronted after the surrenders was very different from those alternatives: a defeated, ruined Germany; a victorious, ruined Russia; a defeated, ruined Japan; destruction crisscrossing Europe; a victorious, exhausted British Empire; and a victorious, economically dominant, and newly confident United States. The world was thus very different from what anyone could have forecast back in 1933, or even 1938.