World War Two

A Military History

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134405473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Cutting through over half a century of historical build-up, this new and convincing account of World War II uses a global perspective to explain the complicated course in military terms. Black, a distinguished military historian, bucks the current trend to demilitarise and gives due weight to the campaigns and battles that made up the war. In doing so he challenges common interpretations and includes new insights to make this one of the most exciting new histories of the Second World War. Covering all the main areas of conflict, the chronological approach includes analysis of attacks at land, air and sea and a comparison of military resources. The focus is always operational, but social, cultural and political aspects are also included. Providing a crucial counterweight to previous histories, Jeremy Black's World War Two offers fresh insights into operations at the Eastern Front and during the war against Japan.

CHAPTER ONE
Background

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.

Japan

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 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 increasingly 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 operations 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.¹

Germany

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 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 opportunities 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 military high command. From the low base of 100,000 troops permitted under the Versailles settlement, he, on 1 October 1934, ordered a trebling of army size, as well as the creation of an air force, which had been illegal under the Versailles terms. On 7 March 1936, troops were sent into the Rhineland, unilaterally abrogating the demilitarisation of Germany’s western frontier provided for under the Locarno Pact. The Four-Year Plan, initiated the same year, was designed to ensure self-sufficiency, by import-substitution plans, which would secure Germany’s readiness to go to war in four years and reduce her vulnerability to blockade.Yet again, this reflected the experience of World War One, in which British naval power had enforced a strict maritime blockade on Germany, harming her war economy and hitting food supplies.

Appeasement

Far from responding forcefully against the successive breaches of the Versailles settlement, Britain and France took a largely passive position. In hindsight, this encouraged Nazi expansionism, but, at the time, it was not generally seen in such a stark light. Initially, the British and French governments hoped that Hitler would be tamed by the responsibilities and exigencies of power, or that he would restrict his energies to ruling Germany. There was also a feeling in Britain that the Versailles terms had been overly harsh on Germany and that it was, therefore, understandable that Hitler should press for revision. It was anticipated that German revisionism could be accommodated, and that Hitler would prove to be just another episode in European power politics, rather like Napoleon III in the mid-nineteenth century. Both Britain and France were unsure whether the Soviet Union, the sole Communist state and also a great power, was not a more significant threat to the European system than Nazi Germany. In 1920, a Soviet invasion of Poland had only been thwarted with considerable difficulty. There was some support in conservative circles for the view that a strengthened Germany might keep the Soviet Union at bay.

Furthermore, pacifism was strong in both Britain and France, in large part in response to the massive casualties in World War One. Fiscal restraint limited rearmament, although, outside Europe, both powers used troops to sustain their imperial interests. This military commitment, however, both lessened the forces available for operations in Europe and led to priorities in force structure, doctrine, training and weaponry that were not appropriate for fighting the German military. Furthermore, the very limited nature of Anglo-French military co-operation over the previous decade and their lack of military and political preparedness for war with Germany were understood by contemporaries as a poor basis for joint action, and neither felt that it was in a position to act on its own.

Hitler pressed on to occupy Austria on 12 March 1938, uniting it with Germany in the Anschluss (union) of the following day. This was seen as more than a revision of the Versailles settlement. It was a fundamental redrawing of the map of Europe, and one that opened the way for more radical changes. Opposition to Anschluss in Austria had been limited, but Hitler’s subsequent goals were ones that could only be achieved by serious intimidation, if not conflict.

Hitler then turned on Czechoslovakia (modern Czech Republic and Slovakia). Created out of the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War One, it included parts of Bohemia and Moravia where there was a majority of ethnic Germans–the Sudetan Germans. This was unacceptable to Hitler, who sought the union of all Germans in one state, although, for him, that was only a prelude to further gains. He was also determined to destroy Czechoslovakia, a democratic state that looked to other great powers for support. France, in particular, had followed an active policy of negotiating agreements in Eastern Europe that were designed to support the states of the region against Germany and the Soviet Union. Hitler’s threat to attack Czechoslovakia, and the concern that this would cause a major war, led to the satisfaction of his territorial demands in a settlement negotiated with Britain, France and Italy, the Munich agreement of 29 September 1938. This was seen as the apogee of the policy of appeasement, the term used to describe the satisfaction of the demands of the dictatorships.

The policy of appeasement rested on the belief that it was possible to reach mutually acceptable settlements with the dictators. There was a muted response to Japanese aggression in Manchuria and to the Italian dictator Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935–6. The British government thought it both necessary and feasible to negotiate with Hitler, and it took time for the government to appreciate that this was both impossible and, indeed, dangerous. Hitler wanted Germany to be a superpower, was happy to destroy both the balance of power and collective security in order to achieve this goal, and aimed at a new world order.

Nevertheless, it is too easy in hindsight to criticise the British and French leaders of the period and, in condemning appeasement, to underrate their difficulties, not least their genuine and understandable fear of causing a second ‘Great War’. Even if mobilised, Britain could do little in Central or Eastern Europe to stop Hitler. Commenting on the German threat to Austria, Harold Nicolson had noted in 1934, ‘We cannot send the Atlantic fleet to Linz [in Austria]’. In 1938, the British service chiefs urged caution. They were conscious of Britain’s numerous global commitments and warned about the dangers of becoming entangled in major military action on the Continent. Concern about German aerial capability, particularly the threat of bombing, reinforced this caution, as did warnings from British and French intelligence about German military capabilities.

Dominion leaders, such as the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, also urged caution, while the American government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt made clear its unwillingness to play a role in limiting German expansion: American policy towards Europe was resolutely isolationist and this gravely weakened the option of collective security as the USA was the world’s leading economy. Lesser European powers, including Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, also failed to lend support to the opposition to Hitler.

Anglo-French fears may have been excessive given the weaknesses of the Nazi regime, not least a lack of enthusiasm among the German generals for either Hitler or war. Lieutenant-General Ludwig Beck, the Chief of the General Staff, who had protested without success at the occupation of Austria, prepared a coup in the event of war breaking out, and felt undermined by the Munich agreement: he had resigned in August. The German army and air force (Luftwaffe) were not prepared for a major war, and were far less powerful than they were to be a year later. As yet, developments in German tank capability were limited. Indeed, the strength of German armour when Poland was attacked in 1939 owed much to the seizure of Czech tanks and military-industrial capacity.

The ability of Czechoslovakia to resist successfully in 1938 would have been lessened by the hostility towards the Czech-dominated government of much Slovak opinion, as well as that of other minority groups, particularly Germans and Hungarians. Furthermore, the country’s elongated shape and the length of its common border with Germany made it vulnerable to a bisecting attack. There were good fortifications along much of the common border, but they did not extend to cover adequately its extension following the Anschluss. A successful defence of the country would have depended on international support, not only attacks by Britain and France on Germany’s as yet poorly fortified western frontier, but also backing from Poland and, even more, the Soviet Union. The latter two, however, were not in a situation to mount a major offensive against Germany, Poland had aggressive goals towards Czechoslovakia of its own, and Anglo-French forces were not ready to attack.

The Munich agreement led to a great increase in German influence in Eastern Europe, as other powers responded to the apparent weakness of Britain and France. France had supported Yugoslavia and Romania, and provided arms for their military, but, after Munich, both powers moved towards Germany. Eventually, on 15 March 1939, Hitler destroyed his Czech victim, seizing Bohemia and Moravia, and was able to do so without encountering armed resistance, because Czechoslovakia had been much weakened by internal dissent between Czechs and Slovaks, and by the Munich agreement, which resulted in its loss of frontier fortifications in the areas annexed by Germany.

The Germans also benefited greatly from the failure of the Eastern European powers to unite against her. This disunity was the result of attempts to gain the territories they felt they had lost unfairly, or should have gained, as part of the Versailles settlement. Hungary and Poland had used the Munich crisis to make gains at Czechoslovakia’s expense in 1938, and, in March 1939, Hungarian forces occupied Ruthenia, the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia, overcoming popular opposition. Similarly, a failure of Scandinavian unity was seen in 1939–40, in response, first, to growing German power and, subsequently, to the German attack on Denmark and Norway: Sweden provided assistance to neither.

Also in March 1939, the Germans bullied Lithuania into ceding the city of Memel (Klapeida), where there was a vocal German minority, plus the surrounding area. In intimidating the other powers in 1938, Hitler benefited from their fear of war. In many respects, the Munich agreement was part of the legacy of World War One and the desire to avoid a repetition of its heavy casualties.

The coming of war

Germany may have been weaker than was thought, but Hitler, nevertheless, was determined to gain his objectives. Once he seized Bohemia and Moravia and renounced all the guarantees he had earlier made in the Munich agreement, the situation was transformed. It was now clear that Hitler’s ambitions were not restricted to bringing all Germans under one state. Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister from 1937 until 1940, and the architect of Munich, lost confidence in negotiating directly with Germany.

Instead, at the prompting of Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, Chamberlain sought to create a collective-security alliance system capable of intimidating Hitler and of deterring him from further aggression. Despite the resulting guarantees of British support to Poland and Romania, Hitler persisted with his plan for an attack on Poland, which blocked German expansion to the east. He believed that Britain and France would not fight, especially after he secured a non-aggression pact with the Soviet leader Josef Stalin, signed on 23 August 1939, that reflected the failure of Britain and France to negotiate an alliance with the Soviet Union. Such an alliance would have been incompatible with the anti-Soviet policies of the Polish government, and this reflected, and, in turn, exposed, the weakness of the British diplomatic offensive in Eastern Europe. The Nazi–Soviet Pact made it unlikely that, should deterrence fail, Poland would be able to resist attack successfully, and it encouraged Hitler to press forward with his plans for Poland. He was keen on conflict and determined not to be thwarted of it, as he had allowed himse...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• CHAPTER ONE: BACKGROUND
• CHAPTER TWO: INITIAL ATTACKS
• CHAPTER THREE: THE WAR WIDENSS
• CHAPTER FOUR: ATTACKS HELD, 1942
• CHAPTER FIVE: MOUNTING ALLIED PRESSURE, 1943
• CHAPTER SIX: DEFEATING THE AXIS, 1944
• CHAPTER SEVEN: THE FALL OF THE AXIS
• CHAPTER EIGHT: CONTEXTS
• CHAPTER NINE: STRUGGLE REVIEWED
• SELECTED FURTHER READING