Black J. World War Two A Military History

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It is always helpful to explain what a book is about, not least for a

subject that is so extensively and ably covered in the available litera-

ture. This book is a military history, primarily operational in its

scope, and deliberately written with the interests of students in

mind. It draws heavily on my experience of teaching military history

at the University of Exeter, and will most appropriately be judged by

those and other students.

The audience in part shapes the approach, not least the decision

to keep notes to a minimum. The approach also owes much to a

prominent recent work, Joanna Bourke’s The Second World War: A

People’s History (Oxford, 2001). Although well written, engaged and

conceptually up-to-date, with a particularly impressive focus on the

experience of ordinary people and the remembrance of war,

Bourke’s treatment of the subject is one that I have reacted against.

Her book displays the demilitarisation of war, a tendency that is all

too frequent in the secondary literature, not least the absence of

sufficient discussion of issues such as military capability. Bourke

suggests that the treatment of the conflict as ‘just another story of

battles and strategies will dilute its horror.The sanitization of the war

in some military history is dangerous. Mass slaughter becomes a

bland recital of “body counts”…. A similar process of dehumaniza-

tion enabled atrocious behaviour to take place during the war’.

The

many who follow a different approach are explicitly compared to the

brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, a surprising view that is part of a

dangerous appropriation of the subject.

As far as ‘body counts’ are concerned, it is instructive to note

Samuel Griffith’s conclusion in his study of Guadalcanal, where he

Preface

was wounded: ‘In the cold perspective of history, the relative impor-

tance of a military campaign is not judged by statistics…it is the

ultimate effect which the battle, or connected series of battles, exerts

on the conduct and result of the war that should be considered’.

Furthermore, from the perspective of a ‘People’s History’, it might

be reasonable, as Bourke does, to consider the Eastern Front in large

part in terms of atrocities and resistance; it is also necessary to give

due weight to the course and explanation of conflict on that Front,

in particular giving due weight to recent re-evaluations of Soviet

fighting quality and operational effectiveness.

More generally, my essential approach is operational, with a stress

on war as a military activity. A focus on campaigns and battles of

course faces many problems.There is a misleading tendency in oper-

ational history to attribute to winners all the skills of vision, strategic

know-how, preparation and back-up, whereas losers tend to lose

because they lose. I hope I have made sufficient reference to chance,

and used terms such as ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybe’ enough.

A focus on campaigning can also lead to a failure to note the

constraints within which the military operated. For example, in

March 1944, the British Chiefs of Staff responded to pressure from

Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, that they plan for a year’s

campaigning to restore British power in Malaya and Singapore,

which had been conquered by Japan in the winter of 1941–2, before

British forces were switched to join the Americans in the Pacific in

attacking Japan:

This assumes a flexibility which would not, we fear, prove

practicable. The administrative preparations for whatever

operations may be decided upon, whether in the East or in

the West, will be on a vast scale, if indeed not beyond our

power, to make these preparations in both areas. There is

thus no question of retaining indefinitely an option in this

matter. It is essential to make a decision within the next

three months as to which policy is to be adopted, and to

adhere to it.

The organisation of my book is essentially chronological, and an

attempt has been made to cover all the major fields of conflict,

PREFACE

xii

although the balance between them is open to discussion. I would in

particular like to have devoted more space to the war in China. This

conflict may not have contributed greatly to the defeat of Japan, but it

is important to give due weight to the longest struggle of the war, one

that directly involved millions of combatants and civilians and that

helped mould the history of post-war China, and thus the post-war

world. Figures for Chinese casualties are particularly tentative, but they

may have been about 2.5 million military and 7.5 million civilians.

More generally, each of the chapters could have been expanded

to the length of several books with scant difficulty.Yet, compression

has its values, while I am unconvinced that long books aid compre-

hension. All too often they are read only in part, and that is

particularly true of footnotes. These have been kept to a minimum

in this book.The secondary literature should be approached through

the notes and the section on ‘Selected further reading’.

A chronological organisation has its weakness, not least the

danger of repetition, and, again, leads to issues of balance, but it helps

lessen the danger of a smoothing out of the conflict as attention is

concentrated on the major clashes. It is useful, for each year of the

war, to remember the range of combat zones, a range that, on land,

included, for example, Finland in 1939–40, Laos and Cambodia in

1940, Iraq in 1941, Madagascar in 1942, and the Norwegian Arctic

and Borneo in 1945. More centrally, a chronological approach

precludes a thematic focus that can lead to an underplaying of the

simultaneity of conflict in different spheres, with all the problems of

coordination and allocation of resources that these posed for plan-

ners and leaders.

That does not, however, end the problem of how best to priori-

tise and organise material within each chapter. Here there is a danger

of national priorities, if not prejudices, playing a role. In particular, it

is difficult for Western writers to give sufficient weight to operations

on the German Eastern Front with the Soviet Union, particularly

after German defeat by Soviet forces in the battle of Kursk in 1943,

because, thereafter, there does not appear to be comparable drama to

the battle for Moscow in 1941 or that for Stalingrad in 1942, and

the fate of the war on the Front – Soviet success – appears preor-

dained.That, however, does not lessen its importance for the course

of the war or its interest for military historians.

PREFACE

xiii

A word of explanation is necessary about the quotations from the

writings of Major General J.F.C. ‘Boney’ Fuller (1878–1966).

Although his Fascist political sympathies were reprehensible, it is

useful that one of the leading military thinkers of the age

commented on the war as it developed, and did so without the

constraints of an official position.

There is a danger in my approach that the motivation and experi-

ence of individual soldiers receives insufficient attention. However, I

am not convinced about the value of the weight some writers place

upon personal experience, whether of place or of combat. Aside

from the serious issue of selective memory, such experience can lead

to an excessive focus on what may well be an atypical perception.

Yet, at the same time, wars are fought and press upon individuals

as well as units and civilians, and loss and suffering are personal as

well as collective. When reading in works such as these about lines

being breached, or reserves deployed, flanks turned, or the struggle

in the air, or at sea, won (and lost), it is important to remember that

people’s lives were at stake and that, however trained or motivated,

individuals reacted in very different ways to the strains and pain of

conflict. More than 21 million combatants died and over 38 million

civilians, although there have been very varied figures, reflecting, in

particular, very different estimates for Soviet and Chinese casualties.

I wish to underline my conviction that this was a moral struggle,

an unfashionable statement for an historian to make, not least in an

age in which many intellectuals are in thrall to aspects of postmod-

ernism, or at least cultural relativism. Many others doubt the validity

of such a description as applied to World War Two. I am also

concerned by attempts, outside academe, to neglect or minimise Axis

responsibility for the struggle, and was much struck in Japan in 1998

when students walked out of a lecture at Tsukuba University on the

causes of war when I mentioned Pearl Harbor in terms of Japanese

aggression. I have no doubt that the Soviet regime was a vile and

genocidal dictatorship that matched that of the Nazis, and I can

understand why those who suffered Soviet conquest or Allied

bombing might feel that there was an equivalence between the sides.

They are wrong, just as those who take the same view on World War

One are wrong. It is not only that the Germans in both World Wars

and the Japanese in World War Two were aggressors who sought

PREFACE

xiv

conflict, but also that their regimes extolled war as a higher good.

Those who fought them and those who died, a multitude that

included several of my relatives, were engaged in a just and necessary

struggle and were victims of malign forces.

I would like to pay tribute to the wealth of fine scholarship I have

read while working on this book, and to thank Kristofer Allerfeldt,

Stan Carpenter, Theodore Cook, Evan Davies, David Hall, Russell

Hart, Michael Neiberg, Nick Smart and an anonymous reader for

commenting on an earlier draft. Lisa Williams has proved an exem-

plary copy-editor. I have benefited from invitations to lecture on

World War Two at Pearl Harbor and at both the Joint Forces Staff

College and the Headquarters of Atlantic Command in Norfolk,

Virginia. I would also like to recall those with whom I have travelled

when visiting wartime sites, including my father, with whom I went

round the soulless and bleak remains of a concentration camp, and

my wife and children, with whom I visited invasion beaches where

sultry skies and bathers gave no clues to lives lost in the shallows and

sands.

It is a great pleasure to dedicate this book to my colleague (and

next-door neighbour in the department at Exeter), Jeremy Noakes,

on his retirement.A justly renowned scholar, Jeremy is also a man of

great culture and wit, and as keen to open a decent bottle as to

comment wryly on the latest idiocies of politically correct cant in

our profession. He will be sorely missed.

NOTES

1 J. Bourke, The Second World War: A People’s History (Oxford, 2001), pp.

6–7.

2 S.B. Griffith, The Battle for Guadalcanal (Urbana, Illinois, 1963), p. 244.

3 See, in particular, D.M. Glantz, ‘The Red Army at War, 1941–1945:

Sources and Interpretations’, Journal of Military History, 62 (1998), pp.

595–617; A. Hill, ‘Recent Literature on the Great Patriotic War of the

Soviet Union 1941–1945’, Contemporary European History, 9 (2000), pp.

187–97.

4 L.H.Alanbrooke 6/3/9.

5 B.H. Reid, J.F.C. Fuller: Military Thinker (1987) and Studies in British

Military Thought: Debates with Fuller and Liddell Hart (Lincoln, Nebraska,

1998).

PREFACE

BBC British Broadcasting Corporation

BL British Library

GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

LH London, King’s College, Liddell Hart Centre for

Military History

MP Member of Parliament

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

PRO London, Public Record Office

RAF Royal Air Force

USAAF United States Army Air Forces

USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

WO War Office

Unless otherwise stated, place of publication is London.

xvi

Abbreviations

World War Two is an umbrella term for a number of closely related

struggles that, nevertheless, each had their own cause, course and

consequences. Seen from the perspective of Italy or Iran, Japan or

Jamaica, it can look very different.This chapter looks at two aspects

of the background: first the causes of the conflict, and, secondly, the

military background in terms both of the lessons drawn from World

War One and of inter-war developments in military capability and

doctrine on land, sea and air.

Causes of war

World War Two is commonly dated to 1939, the year in which

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, leading, in response, to

declarations of war by Britain and France on 3 September, followed

by the Dominions of the British Empire, Canada, for example, on 10

September. This is an appropriate beginning for the conflict in

Europe, but, in Asia, the parallel struggle stemming from Japanese

aggression and imperialism began in 1931 with an invasion of

Manchuria, the most industrial province of China.

-DSDQ

In the case of Germany and Japan, the essential cause of conflict was

a refusal to accept existing territorial and political arrangements, a

willingness, indeed, at times, eagerness, to use force to effect change,

and a refusal to accept multilateral and collective arrangements and

CHAPTER ONE

Background

solutions. Thus, the Japanese, who were but one of the outside

powers that had benefited from the weakness of China from the late

nineteenth century in order to seize territory and gain commercial

concessions, were not interested in discussing additional gains with

the other outside powers. Instead, they regarded them, particularly

the British, as competitors and treated them with active hostility.

Japan treated China as if the largely unconstrained imperialist

expansionism of the decades prior to 1914, which had seen the

Japanese make gains as a result of wars with China (1894–5) and

Russia (1904–5), was still in force. Right-wing nationalism became

much stronger in Japan in the 1930s, in part as a consequence of

stresses resulting from the Slump and the subsequent global economic

crisis. Such nationalism was particularly powerful in the military and

was linked to a strong racist contempt for the Chinese. Having

conquered Manchuria from its semi-independent warlord in 1931–2,

the Japanese pressed on, in large part because of the determination of

imperialists in the Kwantung army in Manchuria, who were increas-

ingly successful in pushing Japan in a militaristic direction.They were

helped by the absence of hostile foreign intervention, and by the lack

of other conflicts to absorb their attention.There was a series of oper-

ations in northern China, including the overrunning of Rehe (Jehol)

in 1935. In 1937, the Japanese launched what became an all-out war

of conquest in China, although it was formally termed an incident

and had begun as an unexpected clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near

Beijing when Japanese night manoeuvres were fired upon. Unlike in

1931, the Chinese Kuomintang (Nationalist) government (with its

capital at Nanjing) responded to subsequent Japanese moves, helping

to resolve differences over policy in Japanese policymaking circles and

ensuring that full-scale war broke out.

*HUPDQ\

In Europe, the determination to force through change was pushed

hardest by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), who became German dictator

in 1933. A megalomaniac with few inhibitions about pursuing his

goals, Hitler sought to remould Germany and Europe. This entailed

a militarisation of Germany, the discarding of the Versailles Peace

Settlement of 1919 that had followed German defeat in World War

BACKGROUND

One (1914–18), as well as of the compromises of diplomacy and

international agreements, and a willingness to resort to war in order

to create the Aryan-dominated Europe he sought. Control and

direction of foreign and military policy within Germany were

monopolised by Hitler: the system he created, as he destroyed the

democracy of the Weimar period, lacked effective institutional and

political restraints or the facility to offer any reasonable range of

policy options that might encourage restraint.

Hitler’s long-term views interacted with the short-term opportu-

nities and anxieties presented by international developments.

However, opportunities and anxieties do not exist in the abstract, but

are sensed and created, and Hitler’s views largely conditioned the

process. As a long-term goal, Hitler wanted to extirpate what he

(inaccurately) regarded as the Jewish-dominated Communist Soviet

Union, which he felt would secure his notions of racial superiority

and living space. This was to be accompanied by the annihilation of

the Jews, the two acts creating a Europe that would be dominated by

the Germans, who were to be a master race over the Slavs and others.

This agenda began with the violent suppression of political and

economic freedoms, organisations and groups within Germany,

including strikes, left-wing parties and Jews, but there was also

psychological and practical preparation for war, which Hitler saw as

a necessary, and even positive force, the last a view that looked back

to the nineteenth-century attitudes that had helped lead to World

War One. Indeed, in many respects, Hitler’s views represented the

refraction of pre-1914 right-wing nationalist and racist views

through the prism of German defeat and the disintegration of

Habsburg (Austrian) hegemony over part of Slavic Europe. Hitler

aspired to reverse the earlier defeat, and to recreate an acceptable (ie.

German-dominated) Europe, specifically by controlling Eastern

Europe, where Lebensraum (living space) was to be pursued. To

achieve his goals, Hitler sought to end the threat of a war on two

fronts, as Germany had faced for most of World War One. To him

this required not peace on one front, but rather a rapid victory.This

was to be achieved by obtaining the goal that had eluded Germany

in 1914: defeating France and reaching an agreement with Britain.

To achieve his ends, Hitler rapidly increased German military

spending and the size of the armed forces, and took control of the

BACKGROUND