The Second World War Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Prologue

  1 Every man a soldier

  2 Fomenting world war

  Part I

  THE WAR IN THE WEST 1940-1943

  3 The Triumph of Blitzkrieg

  4 Air Battle: the Battle of Britain

  5 War supply and the Battle of the Atlantic

  Part II

  THE WAR IN THE EAST 1941-1943

  6 Hitler’s strategic dilemma

  7 Securing the eastern springboard

  8 Airborne battle: Crete

  9 Barbarossa

  10 War production

  11 Crimean summer, Stalingrad winter

  Part III

  THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC 1941-1943

  12 Tojo’s strategic dilemma

  13 From Pearl Harbor to Midway

  14 Carrier battle: Midway

  15 Occupation and repression

  16 The war for the islands

  Part IV

  THE WAR IN THE WEST 1940-1945

  17 Churchill’s strategic dilemma

  18 Three wars in Africa

  19 Italy and the Balkans

  20 Overlord

  21 Tank battle: Falaise

  22 Strategic bombing

  23 The Ardennes and the Rhine

  Part V

  THE WAR IN THE EAST 1943-1945

  24 Stalin’s strategic dilemma

  25 Kursk and the recapture of western Russia

  26 Resistance and espionage

  27 The Vistula and the Danube

  28 City battle: the siege of Berlin

  Part VI

  THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC 1943-1945

  29 Roosevelt’s strategic dilemma

  30 Japan’s defeat in the south

  31 Amphibious battle: Okinawa

  32 Super-weapons and the defeat of Japan

  Epilogue

  33 The legacy of the Second World War

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  John Keegan was for many years Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and is now Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph. He is the author of many books, including The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, Six Armies in Normandy, The Battle for History, Battle at Sea and A History of Warfare, which was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize. The Second World War is his sixth book to be published by Pimlico.

  John Keegan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received the OBE in the Gulf War Honours List.

  The Second World War

  John Keegan

  FOREWORD

  The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world’s seven continents and all its oceans. It killed fifty million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilisation.

  No attempt to relate its causes, course and consequences in the space of a single volume can fully succeed. Rather than narrate it as a continuous sequence of events, therefore, I decided from the outset to divide the story of the war into four topics – narrative, strategic analysis, battle piece and ‘theme of war’ – and to use these four topics to carry forward the history of the six main sections into which the war falls: the War in the West, 1939-43; the War in the East, 1941-3; the War in the Pacific, 1941-3; the War in the West, 1943-5; the War in the East, 1943-5; and the War in the Pacific, 1943-5. Each section is introduced by a piece of strategic analysis, centring on the figure to whom the initiative most closely belonged at that time – in order, Hitler, Tojo, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt – and then contains, besides the appropriate passages of narrative, both a relevant ‘theme of war’ and a battle piece. Each of the battle pieces has been chosen to illustrate the nature of a particular form of warfare characteristic of the conflict. They are air warfare (the Battle of Britain), airborne warfare (the Battle of Crete), carrier warfare (Midway), armoured warfare (Falaise), city warfare (Berlin) and amphibious warfare (Okinawa). The ‘themes of war’ include war supply, war production, occupation and repression, strategic bombing, resistance and espionage, and secret weapons.

  It is my hope that this scheme of treatment imposes a little order for the reader on the chaos and tragedy of the events I relate.

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  Every Man a Soldier

  The First [World] War explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far as one event causes another,’ wrote A. J. P. Taylor in his Origins of the Second World War. ‘The link between the two wars went deeper. Germany fought specifically in the Second War to reverse the verdict of the first and to destroy the settlement that followed it.’

  Not even those who most vehemently oppose Mr Taylor’s version of inter-war history will take great issue with those judgements. The Second World War, in its origin, nature and course, is inexplicable except by reference to the First; and Germany – which, whether or not it is to be blamed for the outbreak, certainly struck the first blow – undoubtedly went to war in 1939 to recover the place in the world it had lost by its defeat in 1918.

  However, to connect the Second World War with the First is not, if the former is accepted as the cause of the latter, to explain either of them. Their common roots must be sought in the years preceding 1914, and that search has harnessed the energies of scholars for much of this century. Whether they looked for causes in immediate or less proximate events, their conclusions have had little in common. Historians of the winning side have on the whole chosen to blame Germany, in particular Germany’s ambition for world power, for the outbreak of 1914 and hence to blame Germany again – whatever failing attaches to the appeasing powers – for that of 1939. Until the appearance of Fritz Fischer’s heretical revision of the national version in 1967, German historians generally sought to rebut the imputation of ‘war guilt’ by distributing it elsewhere. Marxist historians, of whatever nationality, have overflown the debate, depicting the First World War as a ‘crisis of capitalism’ in its imperialist form, by which the European working classes were sacrificed on the altar of competition between decaying capitalist systems; they are consistent in ascribing the outbreak of the Second World War to the Western democracies’ preference for gambling on Hitler’s reluctance to cross the brink rather than accept Soviet help to ensure that he did not.

  These views are irreconcilable. At best they exemplify the judgement that ‘history is the projection of ideology into the past’. There can indeed be no common explanation of why the world twice bound itself to the wheel of mass war-making as long as historians disagree about the logic and morality of politics and whether the first is the same as the second.

  A more fruitful, though less well-trodden, approach to the issue of causes lies along another route: that which addresses the question of how the two World Wars were made possible rather than why they came about. For the instances of outbreak are themselves overridingly important in neither case. It was the enormity of the events which flowed from the upheavals of August 1914 and September 1939 that has driven historians to search so long for reasons to explain them. No similar impetus motivates the search for the causes of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 or the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, critical as those conflicts were in altering the balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe. Moreover, it is safe to say that had Germany won the critical opening battle of the First World War, that of the Marne in September 1914, as she might well have done – thereby sparing Europe not only the agony of the trenches but all the ensuing social, economic and diplomatic
embitterment – the libraries devoted to the international relations of Germany, France, Britain, Austria-Hungary and Russia before 1914 would never have been written.

  However, because it was not Germany but France, with British help, who won the Marne, the First – and so the Second – World War became different from all wars previously fought, different in scale, intensity, extensiveness and material and human cost. They also came, by the same measure, closely to resemble each other. It is those differences and those similarities which invest the subject of their causation with such apparent importance. But that is to confuse accident with substance. The causes of the World Wars lay no deeper and were no more or less complex than the causes of any other pair of conjoined and closely sequential conflicts. Their nature, on the other hand, was without precedent. The World Wars killed more people, consumed more wealth and inflicted more suffering over a wider area of the globe than any previous war. Mankind had grown no more wicked between 1815, the terminal date of the last great bout of hostilities between nations, and 1914; and certainly no sane and adult European alive in the latter year would have wished, could he have foreseen it, the destruction and misery that the crisis of that August was to set in train. Had it been foretold that the consequent war was to last four years, entail the death of 10 million young men, and carry fire and sword to battlefields as far apart as Belgium, northern Italy, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Transcaucasia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Africa and China; and that a subsequent war, fought twenty years later by the same combatants over exactly the same battlefields and others besides, was to bring the death of 50 million people, every individual and collective impulse to aggression, it might be thought, would have been stilled in that instant.

  That thought speaks well for human nature. It also speaks against the way the world had gone between 1815 and 1914. A sane and adult European alive in the latter year might have deplored with every fibre of his civilised being the prospect foretold to him of the holocausts that were to come. To do so, however, he would have had to deny the policy, ethos and ultimately the human and material nature of the state – whichever state that was – to which he belonged. He would even have had to deny the condition of the world which surrounded him. For the truth of twentieth-century European civilisation was that the world it dominated was pregnant with war. The enormous wealth, energy and population increase released by Europe’s industrial revolution in the nineteenth century had transformed the world. It had created productive and exploitative industries – foundries, engineering works, textile factories, shipyards, mines – larger by far than any at which the intellectual fathers of the industrial revolution, the economic rationalists of the eighteenth century, had guessed. It had linked the productive regions of the world with a network of communications – roads, railways, shipping lanes, telegraph and telephone cables – denser than even the most prescient enthusiast of science and technology could have foreseen. It had generated the riches to increase tenfold the population of historic cities and to plant farmers and graziers on millions of acres which had never felt the bite of the plough or the herdsman’s tread. It had built the infrastructure – schools, universities, libraries, laboratories, churches, missions – of a vibrant, creative and optimistic world civilisation. Above all, and in dramatic and menacing counterpoint to the century’s works of hope and promise, it had created armies, the largest and potentially most destructive instruments of war the world had ever seen.

  The militarisation of Europe

  The extent of Europe’s militarisation in the nineteenth century is difficult to convey by any means that catch its psychological and technological dimensions as well as its scale. Scale itself is elusive enough. Something of its magnitude may be transmitted by contrasting the sight Friedrich Engels had of the military organisation of the independent North German city-states in which he served his commercial apprenticeship in the 1830s with the force which the same German military districts supplied to the Kaiser of the unified German Reich on the eve of the First World War. Engels’s testimony is significant. A father of Marxist theory, he never diverged from the view that the revolution would triumph only if the proletariat succeeded in defeating the armed forces of the state. As a young revolutionary he pinned his hopes of that victory on the proletariat winning the battle of the barricades; as an old and increasingly dispirited ideologue, he sought to persuade himself that the proletariat, by then the captive of Europe’s conscription laws, would liberate itself by subverting the states’ armies from within. His passage from the hopes of youth to the doubts of old age can best be charted by following the transformation of the Hanseatic towns’ troops during his lifetime. In August 1840 he rode for three hours from his office in Bremen to watch the combined manoeuvres of the armies of Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck free city and the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. Together they formed a force a regiment – say, to err on the side of generosity, 3000 – men strong. In the year of his death in 1895 the same cities provided most of the 17th and part of the 19th Divisions of the German Army, together with a cavalry and artillery regiment – at least a fourfold increase. That accounts for only first-line troops, conscripts enrolled and under arms. Behind the active 17th and 19th Divisions stood the 17th and 19th Reserve Divisions to which the Hanseatic cities would contribute an equal number of reservists – trained former conscripts – on mobilisation. And behind the reserve divisions stood the Landwehr of older ex-conscripts who in 1914 would provide half of another division again. Taken together, these units represent a tenfold increase in strength between 1840 and 1895, far outstripping contemporary population growth.

  This enormous multiplication of force was nevertheless in the first instance a function of demographic change. The population of most states destined to fight the First World War doubled and in some cases tripled during the nineteenth century. Thus the population of Germany, within the boundaries of 1871, increased from 24 million in 1800 to 57 million in 1900. The British population increased from 16 million in 1800 to 42 million in 1900; but for the Irish famine and emigration to the United States and the colonies, producing a net outflow of about 8 million, it would have tripled. The population of Austria-Hungary, allowing for frontier changes, increased from 24 million to 46 million; of Italy, within the 1870 frontiers, from 19 million to 29 million, despite a net outflow of perhaps 6 million emigrants to North and South America. Belgium’s population grew from 2.5 to 7 million; that of European Russia between the Urals and the western frontier of 1941 nearly tripled, from 36 to 100 million. Only two of the combatant states, France and the Ottoman empire, failed to show similar increases. The French population, once the largest in Europe, rose only from 30 to 40 million and chiefly through extended longevity; the birthrate remained almost static – the result, in Professor William McNeill’s view, of Napoleon’s returning warriors bringing home techniques of birth control learned on campaign. The population of Turkey within its present frontiers scarcely increased at all; it was 24 million in 1800 and 25 million in 1900.

  The French and Turkish cases, though falling outside the demographic pattern, are nevertheless significant in explaining it. The increased longevity of the French was due to improved standards of living and public health, the outcome of the application of science to agriculture, medicine and hygiene. The failure of the Turkish population to increase had an exactly contrary explanation: the poor yields of traditional farming and incidence of disease in a society without doctors ensured that population, despite high birth-rates, remained at a static level. Whenever increased agricultural output (or input) combined with high birth-rates and improved hygiene, as they did almost everywhere in Europe in the nineteenth century, the effect on population size was dramatic. In England, the centre of the nineteenth-century economic miracle, it was spectacular. Despite a massive emigration of the population from the countryside to the towns, overcrowded and often jerry-built, the number of the English increased by 100 per cent in the first half and by 75 per cent in the second half of the century. Sewer-bui
lding, which ensured the elimination of cholera from 1866 and of most other water-borne diseases soon after, and vaccination, which when it was made compulsory in 1853 eliminated smallpox, sharply reduced infant mortality and lengthened the life expectancy of the adult population; death from infectious disease declined by nearly 60 per cent between 1872 and 1900. Improved agricultural yields from fertilised and fallowed fields, and, in particular, the import of North American grain and refrigerated Australasian meat, produced larger, stronger and healthier people. Their intake of calories was increased by the cheapening of luxuries such as tea, coffee and especially sugar, which made grain staples more palatable and diet more varied.

  The combined effect of these medical and dietary advances on growing populations was not only to increase the size of the contingents of young men liable each year for conscription (classes, as the French labelled them) – by an average of 50 per cent, for example, in France between 1801 and 1900 – but to make them better suited, decade on decade, for military service. There is an apparently irreducible military need for a marching soldier to bear on his body about 50 lb of extraneous weight – pack, rifle and ammunition. The larger and stronger the soldier, the more readily can he carry such a load the desirable marching norm of twenty miles a day. In the eighteenth century the French army had typically found its source of such fit men among the town-dwelling artisan class rather than the peasantry. The peasant, physically undernourished and socially doltish, rarely made a suitable soldier; he was undisciplined, prone to disease and liable to pine to death when plucked from his native heath. It was these shortcomings which prompted Marx a hundred years later to dismiss the peasantry as ‘irredeemable’ for revolutionary purposes. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the peasant populations of Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia had so much improved in physique that they were regularly supplying to their national armies a proportion of new conscripts or classes large enough to give Marx the lie. His analysis may have been skewed by his standpoint in England, where large-scale emigration to the towns left only the least enterprising under the thumb of squire and parson. In the continental lands, which were industrialising more slowly than England – the German rural population in 1900 was still 49 per cent of the total – it was the countryside which yielded the classes of large, strong young men out of which the great nineteenth-century armies were built.