World War II

A Beginner's Guide

Christopher Catherwood

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780745114
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Zweiter Weltkrieg

With over sixty million casualties World War II was the bloodiest conflict in history. In this incisive introduction, Christopher Catherwood covers all the key battles, while giving the wider story behind them. He also brings a fresh angle to the conflict, emphasising the huge impact of the preceding Sino-Japanese War on World War II and the relative unimportance of the British campaign in Africa.From the impact of the Hiroshima bombing to the horrors wreaked by the Red Army and the Nazis, Catherwood makes clear the legacy of the war today. Full of text-boxes revealing key details about intelligence, weaponry, and the social milieu of the conflict, there is no better brief introduction.

1
The Origins of War and the Great Betrayal

Britain and other European countries are filled with memorials to a conflict described by those who built them as ‘The Great War’. Sometimes the people of the town or university or whoever created the original plaque have added new names, for those killed between 1939–45.

Anyone who sees such monuments can notice that far more died in the first world war than in the second. These are of course military deaths, those killed in actual combat. What made World War II so much worse was the fact that millions of civilians were slaughtered in bombing raids, in deliberate genocide and in ways inconceivable before 1939.

Those who lived through what we now call World War I believed strongly that it was the ‘War to End All Wars’– the last carnage on such a scale. People of the 1920s and 1930s could not conceive of the atrocities to come.

It is vital that we remember this. As Billy Wilder said, ‘Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.’ We see the years 1919–39 entirely and understandably through the prism of what happened in the six years that followed. It was a war that was truly on a scale unlike any other, genuinely global and with a death toll (of well over the 55 million guesstimate) that would have been inconceivable to the survivors of World War I. There is only one precedent for the number of civilians who died in World War II, namely the Thirty Years War of 1618–48. Perhaps only the ferocity and savagery of the Mongol Horde under Chinggis (or Genghis) Khan comes anywhere near the barbarity of the Japanese and Germans from 1937–45. In the 1920s, these Mongol invasions were a long way in the past.

It is very easy, therefore, to be wise after many events. Of few historical episodes is this more the case than with World War II. ‘How could people not listen to Churchill,’ we think, ‘when you look at the Holocaust?’

THE HOLOCAUST

The murder of nearly six million innocent Jewish civilians during World War II has become the symbolic act of barbarism not just of that conflict but also arguably of all time. Unfortunately, events since the end of the war have put the Holocaust into a political perspective related to later and still current times. This means that their deaths are now seen more in the light of the present-day state of Israel than as a tragedy in its own right. In addition, other genocides have now been recognised. These include the murder of over a million Armenians in World War I and the death of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in World War II. The international concentration on the six million Jews has thus sadly been taken out of its own context and into a debate on whether murdered Jews have more right to be remembered than slaughtered Armenians or Poles.

This is deeply unfortunate as the death of six million innocent civilians is a tragedy, regardless of whether other equally blameless civilian groups were also murdered by the Nazis.

Furthermore, the Holocaust took place in distinct phases. Not everyone died in camps designed for extermination. The other description of the Holocaust is the Jewish word shoah. Historians divide the murders into the ‘shoah by bullet’ and the ‘shoah by gas’, with the death camps being the latter. German SS Einsatzgruppen (or killing squads) shot well over a million Jews in cold blood, the worst massacre being the butchery of 33,000 Jews in September 1941 at Babi Yar, a place near the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

Much about the Holocaust remains a subject of debate, especially who decided what and when. But it seems that the notion of killing all eleven million Jews living in the whole of Europe arose when it seemed, briefly, in late 1941 as if the invasion of the USSR might be successful. Concentration camps, in which special category prisoners such as socialists, homosexuals and other anti-Nazi groups were interred, had existed from shortly after the Nazi take­over in 1933. When Poland was conquered in 1939 Jews were placed in small and enclosed areas in major cities, in ghettos, such as those that existed in Warsaw and Cracow. But this solution still created logistical problems for the Nazi occupying authorities, so the idea of total extermination of all Jews arose as mainstream policy.

The specific death camps for extermination – Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and others – began to be built from 1941 onwards, with gas chambers specifically constructed for the purpose of industrial-scale extermination. This policy was finalised at a meeting in a villa in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, in January 1942. In charge was Reinhard Heydrich, number two in the SS hierarchy, but there were also diplomats from the German foreign office and similar bureaucrats from other ministries, for all of whom the death of eleven million people on purely racial grounds was entirely an administrative issue. Over a million Jews died at Auschwitz-Birkenau and some 800,000 at Treblinka.

Was the Holocaust unique? A reading of Hitler’s work Mein Kampf and two decades of Nazi speeches suggests strongly that anti-Semitism was part of the core of Nazi DNA. The elimination of an entire human ethnic/religious group can be seen in the context of the desire also to exterminate, for example, all crippled or mentally defective people.

But anti-Semitism was also part of many fascist movements in Europe at that time. The massacre by Romanian troops of over fifty thousand Jews in the Black Sea port of Odessa in October 1941 shows that the Germans were not alone in their barbarous attitudes. (The pre-war Romanian League of the Archangel Michael was as violently anti-Semitic as the Nazi Party.) Many of the most enthusiastic SS death camp guards were Latvian or Ukrainian. Anti-Semitism was by no means a purely Germanic form of evil, and is a phenomenon with an ancient history throughout Europe.

Perhaps it is this quality of horror that makes the shoah unique. Tens of millions of civilians of all nationalities were cruelly butchered during World War II, but only the Jews were singled out for extermination on the grounds of ideological hatred and policy.

With the benefit of hindsight

Many have argued that in the great debates in the 1930s on how to treat Nazi Germany, Churchill was completely right to argue against the appeasement of Germany and vindicated by subsequent events such as the German seizure of the rump of Czechoslovakia in early 1939. But that is not how people saw it at the time. This can be illustrated by an interesting vignette from the conversation, just before D-Day, between a leading US official and Churchill’s personal chief of staff, General Ismay. The Americans were, with good cause, troubled by the British lack of martial vigour for the impending invasion of Europe. Ismay’s defence of his country’s caution was to remind the Americans of the 57,000 British casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. That the United Kingdom had been scarred by that experience was hardly surprising.

In retrospect, it would have been far better if the British army had been considerably larger in 1939 than was actually the case. This in itself is significant, because not even Churchill understood this. If one reads military historians such as the late Richard Holmes, and writers such as Gordon Corrigan, they all make the same point: that the army was too small. Churchill and others had a different view of what was needed, and since the UK only won the Battle of Britain in the skies by the narrowest of margins in 1940, it was as well that Churchill so zealously argued in the 1930s for an increase in the size of the Royal Air Force. But to fight a modern war, one needs soldiers and the right kind of equipment. From 1938–40, during the build-up to war and then its first phase, Britain arguably had far too few troops and nowhere near the right amount or kind of equipment to fight a continental war.

The chiefs of staff – the general staff of the army, and those of the navy and Royal Air Force – all instinctively knew much of this. But they had to deal with the politicians elected to govern by the British people, and in turn the government needed to be sensitive to public opinion in order to get elected. The key thing to remember is that after the carnage and trauma of the ‘Great War’ the last thing anyone wanted was another conflict on this scale. Churchill was not just a lone voice in the wilderness speaking against the obtuseness of lesser statesmen, but he was in reality going against the grain of the overwhelming mass of public opinion, not just in Britain but also in what were then the key Dominion nations such as Canada and Australia.

Furthermore, Britain was an Asian power as well as a European one. Until the 1970s, Britain had an entire fleet in the Pacific, based in Singapore. It also had extensive colonial possessions in what is now Malaysia. But the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ was the British Raj, which comprised what became India and Pakistan in 1947 (and thence Bangladesh later in 1971). This was a vast empire, richer than that of any other European country, and was at the heart of all the military and naval calculations made by the British government and by the chiefs of staff.

All that transpired between 1919–39 can be interpreted in this light. So, too, can much of what happened during the war. The generals of World War II were the lieutenants and captains of World War I. It could be argued that after the trauma of Flanders, they never shook off the survivors’ guilt for living when so many of their comrades did not. Furthermore, as Max Hastings often reminds us, Britons are not by nature a martial race. ‘Never again’ is a potent rallying cry and it was one that was heard time and again in the twenty years between the two wars.

The main consequence of this was the virtual denuding of the victorious British Army after 1919, and thus of that country’s ability to fight. Since time immemorial Britain had been a predominantly naval power. We can be profoundly thankful that in 1939 the Royal Navy was still powerful enough to protect the nation’s shores. From conscription in 1916 until demobilisation three years later, the United Kingdom had gone against the grain and deployed a massive army on continental European soil, something that had not happened upon such a scale even in the Napoleonic wars.

The winners lose the way: the consequences of disarmament

But with victory Britain reverted to its old ways. The army was more an instrument of colonial power, as it had been for most of the nineteenth century, than a modern weapon to be deployed in Europe against a major power. Britain may have invented the tank (something in which Churchill played a key role as First Lord of the Admiralty and later as Minister of Munitions), but thereafter it was as if the Great War was an aberration in the nation’s military history, never to be repeated.

As for the USA, its retreat into isolation is so famous as not to need much elaboration. Not so well known is the fact that as late as 1940 the US Army was no bigger than that of Belgium. But in the twenty years between 1919–39, the USA, however powerful economically, was a military minnow. Many ordinary Americans remained isolationist, and to them the very notion of a large peacetime army was anathema. The fact that even as far into the war against Hitler as the November 1940 presidential election, Roosevelt had to campaign on staying neutral or lose the White House, tells us all that we need to know about what the USA could or could not do in global affairs.

Both in moral terms and with the hindsight of 1937–45 (and perhaps with that of 1941–5 in particular) it is doubtful that much could have been done to stop Hitler and the Japanese in a way that would either have prevented the conflict altogether or lessened it considerably when it came. That, however, is not how people at the time saw it. As we shall see, it was not really until Hitler’s seizure of the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 that most British and Dominion (Canadian, etc.) people saw that war might be necessary, let alone inevitable. Even today there are mavericks in both Britain and the USA who still argue that isolation from continental Europe was the better option, however extraordinary such views might seem to most of us in the light of the Third Reich’s barbarity.

The other issue that confuses the origins of World War II is that so many people in the West felt that the Germans had been unfairly treated in 1919. Compared to the total destruction of the country in 1945, Germany had in fact been let off rather lightly, but this again is to use a degree of hindsight unknown back in the 1920s and 1930s. Reparations soon came to be perceived as unjust, linked as it was to the concept that Germany alone had started war in 1914. As the cause of war had been the murder of an Austrian archduke, many rejected so simple an interpretation.

Since US president Woodrow Wilson had argued between 1917–19 for self-determination, it also seemed inequitable to most people that Germans should be denied what had been granted to other people. For example, Austria, while ethnically German, was not allowed to unite with Germany, thus negating Wilson’s grant of self-determination to Poles, Czechs and other ethnic groups. When Hitler, therefore, began to rant against the Diktat of Versailles and demand renegotiation, he was asking for something that many in the West felt was only fair and Germany’s due.

The debate: was it the Third Reich or simply Germany?

One of the major historical controversies of the 1960s was whether or not the Third Reich was simply Germany, a nation state like any other, or something altogether more evil and dangerous. Today most of us would argue that a country led by Hitler and one that passionately supported the philosophy and practices of Nazism deserved nothing at all. But we have to remember that in the 1920s, under the moderate conservative politician Gustav Stresemann, Germany was seen as rehabilitating itself among the civilised nations (and Stresemann won no less than the Nobel Peace Prize for German–French reconciliation in 1926). When Germany under his leadership signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, renouncing all recourse to war, most people would have thought that the era of German aggression was over and that peace would prevail. That very year, the Nazis, a small and nationally insignificant minor party, won a mere 2.6% of the national vote.

We should also remember that in World War I Japan and Italy were on the side of Britain, France and the USA, and thus not perceived at all as being in the enemy camp.

What changed everything was the Great Depression. In September 1930, the Nazis won 18.25% of the national vote. In the July 1932 elections they scored their greatest electoral triumph, gaining 37.27%. It is usually forgotten that in the November 1932 contest, the Nazis actually lost votes and seats in the Reichstag, going down over 4% to 33.09%.

Hitler was made chancellor of Germany in January 1933 in what must rank as one of the most foolish moves in the history of politics. The German conservatives who put him in the post thought that they could control him by making him what they felt would be a puppet chancellor. This is important to remember. While the Nazis were now a major political force in their own right, they were never elected to power by democratic mandate. Perhaps as a result of this, it took a while for Hitler to consolidate his power. But in 1934, his grip became stronger when he gained the presidency and also the loyalty of the Wehrmacht, the German army, after...