AMU Aspects of Leadership In Development of WWII Essay

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(1.) Identify three key aspects of leadership in World War II based on the reading Then, reflect on how leadership in each case was effective or ineffective (or both.) Also, consider what we can learn about leadership from each event. Do not merely tell the reader what happened.

Your essay must be at least 250 words in length and must include a topic sentence and a closing sentence. Include at least two meaningful quotations from the text with specific page numbers placed in parenthetical citations. DO NOT include outside sources. DO NOT merely write about what happened. 75% of the response should be your analysis and reflection, with the other 25% quotes or facts from the textbook.

3/4 of the essay should contain your analysis of the factual information. Essays predominately comprised of facts will be penalized significantly. Facts should support, but not dominate, the essay response. Quote from the textbook ONLY.
(2.) Identify three key developments in World War II based on the readings. Do not merely tell the reader what happened but reflect on the ramifications or impacts of each key development.

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A WA R TO B E W O N
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W I L L I A M S O N M U R R AY
ALLAN R. M I LLETT
A WAR TO BE WON
Fighting the Second World War
Copyright © 2000. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
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the print version of this title.]
T H E B E L K N A P P R E S S O F H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
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Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Third printing, 2001
Maps by Malcolm Swanston
Title page illustrations: U.S.S. Bunker Hill, 10 May 1945 (background);
American soldiers in Wernberg, Germany, April 1945 (inset).
U.S. National Archives.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Copyright © 2000. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
Murray, Williamson.
A war to be won : ﬁghting the Second World War / Williamson Murray,
and Allan R. Millett.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-00163-x (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-00680-1 (pbk.)
1. World War, 1939–1945. I. Millett, Allan Reed. II. Title.
D767.98.M87 2000
940.53—dc21
99-086624
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This book is dedicated to the memory of the men and women who served and
sacriﬁced in World War II to enlarge the possibilities of freedom—
Copyright © 2000. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom
from fear—as the human race enters the twenty-ﬁrst century.
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P R E FA C E
P R E FA C E
Copyright © 2000. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
P R E FA C E
World War II was the deadliest conﬂict in modern history. It continued
World War I’s slaughter of soldiers but then added direct attacks against civilians on a scale not seen in Europe since the Thirty Years’ War three centuries earlier. On the Eastern Front, its horrors surpassed the worst battles
of the ﬁrst global war. At times the death struggle between the forces
massed by the German Wehrmacht and Red Army never seemed to stop.
From the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 to the Crimea in early May 1944,
military operations involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers continued
day in and day out. Then, after a pause lasting barely a month and a half,
Soviet forces attacked the German Army at the end of June 1944, and
the ferocious ﬁghting in the east continued without letup until the collapse
of Hitler’s regime. After 6 June 1944, a similar war began on the Western Front. The amphibious assault of the Anglo-American forces on the
beaches of Normandy on D-Day initiated military operations in northern
Europe that would not end until May 1945.
The ferocity of the war among the world’s great—and small—nations
mounted with the addition of racial ideology to the nationalism, lust for
glory, greed, fear, and vindictiveness that have characterized war through
the ages. Nazi Germany espoused an ideological world view (Weltanschauung) based on belief in a “biological” world revolution—a revolution that
Adolf Hitler pursued with grim obsession from the early 1920s until his suicide in the Berlin Führerbunker in early May 1945. The Nazis’ aim was to
eliminate the Jews and other “subhuman” races, enslave the Poles, Russians, and other Slavs, and restore the Aryan race—meaning the Germans—to its rightful place as rulers of the world. By the end of the war, the
Nazis had murdered or worked to death at least 12 million non-German civilians and prisoners.
In Asia, the Japanese did not adopt so coherent an ideology of racial superiority as the Nazis, but their xenophobic nationalism, combined with
dreams of empire and deep bitterness at the dominance of much of Asia by
vii
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viii
P R E FA C E
the Western colonial powers, also led to vast atrocities. With the invasion
of China in summer 1937, the Japanese embarked on a war that involved
murder, rape, and devastation to a degree not seen since the Mongol conquests in the early thirteenth century. The Japanese added a new dimension to the slaughter when they used bacteriological weapons and poison
gas against the Chinese people as well as soldiers.*
Faced with this unprecedented aggression by the Axis powers, nations
espousing other ideologies, particularly Soviet Communism and liberal
capitalist democracy, responded with a fury of their own. By the time the
war was over, civilian deaths inﬂicted by both sides outnumbered combat
deaths by a margin of two to one. The West’s ideological and moral imperative to punish the Germans for their many crimes culminated in the Combined Bomber Offensive waged by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army
Air Forces. Four years of battering air attacks, followed by invasion on the
ground, destroyed virtually every major city in Central Europe except
Prague and Vienna. Dresden, Hamburg, Warsaw, Berlin, and Cologne,
among others, lay in rubble. Race-tinged revenge may have shaped the
United States’ decision to ﬁrebomb Tokyo and to detonate atomic bombs
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan—killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and leaving those cities in ruins. Yet as distasteful as these bombing
campaigns are today to most citizens of the liberal democracies under sixty
years of age, the Combined Bomber Offensive in Europe and the bombing
of Japan reﬂected not only a sense of moral conviction on the part of the
West but a belief that such air attacks would end a war that daily grew
more horrible for soldiers and civilians alike.
Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy could not, in the ﬁnal
analysis, be defeated except by ﬁghting. The United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and their allies had to ﬁght their opponents in air, ground, and
naval contests across the globe. Moral righteousness alone does not win
battles. Evil causes do not necessarily carry the seeds of their own destruction. Once engaged, even just wars have to be won—or lost—on the battleﬁeld. Because of the Axis’ operational and tactical skill, stiffened in battle
by ﬁerce nationalism and ideological commitment, as well as the controls
of police states, winning the “Good War” proved a daunting task.
*Just when World War II began is a matter of interpretation. Western Europeans and
Americans tend to ignore the Japanese incursion into China and to mark the war’s beginning
with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. For Austrians, Czechs, and Slovaks, the war also commenced two years earlier, when the Third Reich used military force to
swallow up sovereign nations in Central Europe that the Western European democracies had
abandoned.
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P R E FA C E
Waging World War II required more than the mobilization and equipment of huge military forces. It required the deployment of those forces
over enormous distances—in the case of the United States, across two vast
oceans. And it required the creation of military power in three dimensions:
in the air over both land and sea; across great land masses; and on and beneath the sea. The Germans led the way toward combined arms warfare
with their Blitzkrieg of air and ground forces in May 1940, an assault of
weeks that enslaved Western Europe for four years. But the Allies adapted
and developed their own forces for air-ground warfare that eventually
proved superior. Equally impressive, Allied amphibious forces—a fusion of
air, land, and sea units—made possible the landings in Africa, Italy, and
France. The air-sea-undersea-amphibious naval campaign in the Paciﬁc
doomed Japan.
Logistical superiority was crucial to the Allies’ victory, and America’s role
as the “Arsenal of Democracy” made a critical difference. Not only did the
United States carry most of the burden of the naval campaign in the Paciﬁc
and an increasing load of the combat in Europe as the war progressed, but
its Lend-Lease program was essential to the military operations of its allies
and to the functioning of their wartime economies. In contrast, the Germans and the Japanese, undoubtedly misled by the successes their military
forces initially achieved, did not mobilize their own economies until the
tide had already turned against them in 1942–43. Their desperate efforts to
match the Allies soon attracted the assaults on their economic systems
launched by Allied air and sea forces.
While the Allies’ economic strength weighed heavily in their eventual
victory, reinforcing and accelerating the tempo of military operations in
1943–45, material superiority never by itself proved decisive. Intelligence
about the capabilities and intentions of their opponents became increasingly important to the belligerents as the conﬂict deepened. In the contest
of intelligence, the Allied powers won handily. A complete misestimate of
the capabilities of the Royal Air Force cost the Luftwaffe what little chance
it had of achieving its objectives in the Battle of Britain. Worse was to
come. In planning the invasion of the Soviet Union, Germany misjudged
the Soviet ability to absorb defeats. The result was a catastrophic stalemate
in front of Moscow, despite a series of impressive earlier victories in Operation Barbarossa. This failure was followed by Hitler’s decision to declare
war on the United States—an unnecessary strategic error based on a complete misunderstanding of America’s economic and military potential to
wage war against two enemies. The Allies slowly achieved an intelligence
advantage over their opponents as the war continued. With information
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x
P R E FA C E
gained by breaking German and Japanese codes, Anglo-American commanders were able to shape battles to their advantage and to mount deception campaigns that misled their opponents. The Russians used secret
agents and signals intelligence to the same result.
With all their advantages in combined arms, logistics, and intelligence,
the Allies still confronted the grim task of destroying their enemies town by
town, island by island, in terrible killing battles that exhausted victor and
vanquished alike. In that struggle, the greatest advantage the Allies enjoyed over the Axis was the capacity to make strategic decisions that balanced ends against means. At ﬁrst the Allies were no better at strategic decision-making than their opponents. Perhaps the shock of their initial
defeats provided the sobering learning the Allies needed to guide their
strategy as the war continued. The Germans, by contrast, never questioned
their conﬁdence in their planning superiority—a bit of hubris that proved
fatal.
In this book, we have concentrated on the conduct of operations by the
military organizations that waged the war. We have not ignored the strategic and political decisions that drove the war, but what interests us most are
issues of military effectiveness. We have attempted to explain the battleﬁeld performance of armies, navies, and air forces; the decisions made
by generals and admirals in the face of extraordinary difﬁculties; the underlying factors that shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns; and
the interrelationships among battles separated by hundreds or thousands
of miles. Thus, we have written a history of World War II that examines the
reciprocal inﬂuence of strategy and operations. We try to explain how military decisions were made, and how those decisions made a difference to
the outcome of the ﬁghting. We are aware that as historians, with access to
documents and accounts from both sides, we can understand events as
they unfolded in a way that the participants could not. In every case, we
have attempted to judge the decisions of military leaders and statesmen on
the basis of what they could reasonably have known at the time that they
had to act.
We also believe that individuals at every level of leadership made a difference. From Lieutenant Richard Winters, whose squad-sized force captured a German battery and its protecting company behind Utah Beach, to
the German panzer commanders like Erwin Rommel and Hans von Luck
who destroyed the French Army in little over three weeks, to Dwight Eisenhower who kept a strong-willed group of senior commanders focused
on defeating the Wehrmacht, individuals guided the course of events. We
have attempted to identify and discuss those who made the decisions that
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xi
P R E FA C E
turned the tide of the war. Although we have not written an everyman’s
history of the conﬂict, we have not overlooked the hundreds of thousands
of men in arms who bore the terrible burden of carrying out those decisions.
To the best of our ability, we have incorporated the expert research that
has become available over the last thirty years into a full analysis of the
war. The revelations of Ultra intelligence in the early 1970s and its operational implications have only recently achieved a balanced place alongside
other factors that contributed to the Allied victory. The partial opening of
the Soviet archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union has altered
the West’s understanding of the war on the Eastern Front—a historical
event too long told from the German perspective. As students and teachers
of military history for much of the postwar period and as veterans who
proﬁted from our own modest military experiences, we believe that we
have written a history of World War II that does justice to that war’s complexity and meaning. This, then, is our account.
Copyright © 2000. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
Williamson Murray
Allan R. Millett
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CONTENTS
CONTENTS
C O N T E N TS
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1 Origins of a Catastrophe
1
2 The Revolution in Military Operations, 1919–1939
18
3 German Designs, 1939–1940
44
4 Germany Triumphant, 1940
63
5 Diversions in the Mediterranean and Balkans, 1940–1941
91
6 Barbarossa, 1941
110
7 The Origins of the Asia-Paciﬁc War, 1919–1941
143
8 The Japanese War of Conquest, 1941–1942
169
9 The Asia-Paciﬁc War, 1942–1944
196
10 The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1943
234
11 Year of Decision for Germany, 1942
262
12 The Combined Bomber Offensive, 1941—1945
304
13 The Destruction of Japanese Naval Power, 1943–1944
336
14 The Killing Time, 1943–1944
374
15 The Invasion of France, 1944
411
16 The End in Europe, 1944–1945
446
17 The Destruction of the Japanese Empire, 1944–1945
484
18 The End of the Asia-Paciﬁc War, 1945
509
19 Peoples at War, 1937–1945
527
20 The Aftermath of War
554
Epilogue: In Retrospect
575
xiii
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xiv
C O N T E N TS
Appendixes:
1. Military Organization
579
2. The Conduct of War
583
3. Weapons
592
4. Exploring World War II
606
Notes
613
Suggested Reading
622
Acknowledgments
638
Illustration Credits
641
Index
642
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Illustrations follow pages 112, 240, 400, and 496
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MAP S
German Expansion in Europe, 1935–1939
6–7
German Invasion of the West, May 1940
67
Axis Gains in the Mediterranean, 1940–1941
Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941–1942
Japanese Expansion, 1920–1941
116
154–155
Further Japanese Conquests, 1941–1942
Battle of Midway, 4–5 June 1942
93
170–171
193
Japanese Attack on Midway, 27 May–5 June 1942
The South Paciﬁc, February 1943–April 1944
Battle of the North Atlantic, 1940–1943
202–203
237
Allied Advance in the Mediterranean, 1942–1943
The Eastern Front, November 1942–June 1943
Combined Bomber Offensive, 1944–1945
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The Italian Campaign, 1943–1945
308–309
342–343
367
376
The Eastern Front, July 1943–April 1944
389
The Normandy Campaign, June–August 1944
The Western Front, August–November 1944
The Eastern Front, June–October 1944
414–415
435
449
Battle of the Bulge, 16–24 December 1944
466
Collapse of Nazi Germany, February–May 1945
End of Empire, 1944–1945
264–265
274
Allied Advance in the Paciﬁc, to January 1945
The Philippines Campaign, 1944
193
473
486–487
The Burma Campaign, December 1944–May 1945
490
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A WA R T O B E W O N
O R I G I N S O F A C ATA S T R O P H E
1
ORIGINS
OF A
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CATA ST R O P H E
High in the Bavarian Alps in August 1939, a group of Germans looked toward the heavens and beheld a spectacular display of the aurora borealis
that covered the entire northern sky in shimmering blood-red light. One of
the spectators noted in his memoirs that “the last act of Götterdämmerung
could not have been more effectively staged.” Another spectator, a pensive
Adolf Hitler, commented to an adjutant: “Looks like a great deal of blood.
This time we won’t bring it off without violence.”1 Hitler, the author and
perpetrator of the coming catastrophe, knew full well of what he spoke, for
he was about to unleash another terrible conﬂict, ﬁrst on Europe and eventually on the world. How had Europe again come to the brink of hostilities
barely a quarter century after the start of World War I—a clash of nations
that had tumbled empires and destroyed a generation? It was indeed a sad
tale of fumbled hopes and dark dreams.
The war that Hitler was soon to begin brought a new dimension to the
cold, dark world of power and states, for it combined the technologies of
the twentieth century with the ferocious ideological commitment of the
French Revolution. The wreckage of 1918 had certainly suggested the possibilities. But the democracies chose to forget the harsh lessons of that war
in the comfortable belief that it all had been a terrible mistake; that a
proper dose of reasonableness—the League of Nations along with paciﬁst
sentiments—would keep the world safe for democracy. Instead, the peace
of 1919 collapsed because the Allies, whose interest demanded that they
defend it, did not, while the defeated powers had no intention of abiding
the results. The United States, weary of European troubles, withdrew into
isolationism, and Britain followed to the extent geography allowed. Only
France, vulnerable in its continental position, attempted to maintain the
peace.
1
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A WA R TO B E W O N
From the ﬁrst, the Germans dreamed of overturning the Treaty of Versailles, which had codiﬁed their humiliation. The Italians and then the Japanese, both disappointed by their share in the spoils, displayed little interest in supporting the post–World War I order, while the revolutionaries in
Russia focused on winning their own civil war and then on establishing socialism in the new nation. The ingredients for the failure of peace were
present from the moment the armistice was signed; the inconclusive end to
World War I, with the German Army still on foreign territory, made another European war inevitable. The appointment of Hitler as chancellor of
Germany in January 1933 and the ensuing Nazi revolution ensured war on
a major scale, involving nothing less than a bid for German hegemony over
the entire continent.
Adolf Hitler was crucial to the rise of National Socialism. Beyond his
political shrewdness, he possessed beliefs that ﬁt well with German perceptions and prejudices. Ideology was central to his message. Above all, he rejected the optimistic values of the nineteenth century, in favor of a worldview that rested on race and race alone. On one side were the Aryans, best
typiﬁed by the Germans, who had created the great civilizations of the past;
on the other side were the Jews, degenerate corrupters of the social order,
who had poisoned societies throughout history. In Hitler’s view, Marxism,
socialism, and capitalism were all ills that ﬂowed from the effort of Jews to
destroy civilization from within. Hitler believed that he had uncovered in
his race theories the fundamental principles on which human development and human history turned. He had no more evidence for his system
than Marx and Engels and their successors, Lenin and Stalin, had for their
illusions, but ideologies, like religions, do not rest on facts or reality; they
rest on beliefs, hopes, and fears.
The “biological world evolution” to which the Nazis aspired married
other nasty quirks to anti-Semitism. According to Hitler, a lack of “living
space” (Lebensraum) thwarted Germany’s potential; great nations require
territory on which to grow. Consequently, Germany would have to either
seize the economic and agricultural base required to expand or else wane
into a third-rate power. Russia’s open spaces beckoned; in Hitler’s view,
they were inhabited by worthless subhumans, whom the Germans could
enslave. German conquest would begin with the elimination of the educated elites in Slavic lands. The remaining population would then be killed,
expelled, or enslaved as Helots. On these conceptions rested everything
that Hitler and his Germans, military and civilians, would do in the coming
ﬁve and a half years of war. The success or failure of Hitler’s program would
depend on the ruthlessness with which the leadership acted and how effec-
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O R I G I N S O F A CATA ST R O P H E
tively Hitler fused his ﬁerce ideology to a civilian administrative structure
and military machine capable of executing his wishes. In both endeavors
he was all too successful.
It has become popular among some historians to suggest that the “internal” contradictions of Nazism would eventually have resulted in the regime’s collapse. Such views are questionable. Admittedly, internal dynamics and economic strains pushed the Third Reich toward war, but saying
that is only to underline that war and the destruction of other nations were
part and parcel of Nazi ideology. Had Hitler won, his regime had already
proved it could ﬁnd and motivate the people required to keep the system
working.
Most leaders and observers on the Left missed the demonic nature of the
Nazi threat. Leon Trotsky contemptuously remarked that the Fascist movement was human dust, while Joseph Stalin argued that Fascism represented capitalism’s last stage. The Communists busily attacked the Social
Democrats as “Social Fascists” in the early 1930s, thereby shattering the
unity of the Left, especially in Germany. Stalin’s German stooges were as
much the enemies of the Republic as the Nazis, just less skilled.
There were, of course, many who prepared the way for Nazism. A massive disinformation campaign by the Weimar Republic’s bureaucracy persuaded most Germans that the Reich had not been responsible for the last
war and that in November 1918 the army had stood undefeated in the ﬁeld
until Jews and Communists stabbed it in the back. A national mood of selfpity and self-indulgence fueled the Nazi Party’s attractiveness.
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Initial Moves
In strategic terms Germany had won the Great War. Its industrial base remained intact; it lost little territory of value; it now fronted on one major
power (a debilitated France) rather than three (France, Austria-Hungary,
and Russia). Its industrial strength, its geographic position, and the size of
its population gave it the greatest economic potential in Europe, while the
small states of Eastern Europe and the Balkans were all open to German
political and economic domination.
However, these advantages remained opaque to a nation that felt humiliated by defeat in 1918. For the Nazis, Germany’s postwar economic situation offered a considerable stumbling block to regaining the Reich’s great
position of power. The Versailles Treaty’s restrictions on arms manufacturing left even the Krupp industrial empire with little capacity for military production. In 1933 the aircraft industry, for example, possessed only
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A WA R TO B E W O N
4,000 workers divided among a group of bankrupt manufacturers known
more for their quarrels than for the quality of their products. The only raw
material the Reich possessed in abundance was coal; oil, rubber, iron,
nickel, copper, and aluminum were in short supply or nonexistent. Consequently, Germany had to import these materials, and in the 1930s imports
required foreign exchange, which Germany did not have. As with all armament efforts, German production did not immediately rise to meet expectations.
Hitler did warn the German generals in February 1933 that France, if it
possessed true leaders, would recognize the German threat and immediately mobilize its forces. If that did not happen, Germany would destroy
the European system, not make minor changes to the Versailles Treaty. Hitler’s intuition was right; France did not have leaders willing to make a
stand. In the years of preparation for war, Hitler managed German diplomacy with consummate skill despite the Third Reich’s military weaknesses.
In 1933 Germany withdrew from the League of Nations and then in the
following year signed a nonaggression pact with Poland, removing the
Poles as a threat in the east. These diplomatic moves thoroughly confused
Hitler’s opponents. With few exceptions, Europeans hoped that the Führer
was reasonable and that they could accommodate the new Nazi regime.
In Britain, most were deceived. Only Churchill warned: “‘I marvel at the
complacency of Ministers in the face of the frightful experiences through
which we have so newly passed. I look with wonder upon our thoughtless crowds disporting themselves in the summer sunshine,’ and all the
while, across the North Sea, ‘a terrible process is astir. Germany is arming.’”2
It was indeed a lonely ﬁght that Churchill waged. Well might John Milton’s
words in Paradise Lost about the angel Abdiel have been applied to Churchill: “Among the faithless, faithful only hee; Among innumerable false,
unmov’d / Unshak’n, unseduc’d, unterriﬁ’d.”3
More in tune with the European mood was the London Times’s response
to Hitler’s purge of the SA (Sturmabteilung), the Nazi Party’s paramilitary
arm, when ﬁring squads executed several hundred Nazi storm troopers:
“Herr Hitler, whatever one may think of his methods, is genuinely trying to
transform revolutionary fervor into moderate and constructive efforts and
to impose a higher standard on National Socialist ofﬁcials.”4
The political Left warned of the danger of Fascism, but regarded the
threat as internal rather than external. In Britain, the Labour Party urged
aid for the Spanish Republic, which was ﬁghting for its life, but voted
against every defense appropriation through 1939. In France, the Popular
Front government of Léon Blum denounced Charles de Gaulle’s proposals
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O R I G I N S O F A CATA ST R O P H E
for an armored force as a gambit to create an army of aggression. If Germany attacked, Blum argued, no armored force was required; the working
class would rise as one man to defend the Republic. His government undermined France’s defense industry with social legislation and kept the lid on
defense spending so that even Italy outspent France in the 1935–1938
period.
Soviet foreign policy was equally irrelevant; Stalin encouraged formation of “popular-front” movements against Fascism, but his policy aimed
more at encouraging a war among the capitalists than at stopping Hitler. A
savage purge in 1937 which decimated the Soviet military was further evidence of Stalin’s belief that war with Nazi Germany was unlikely.
In 1935 Benito Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and added that country to
Italy’s colonial domain. Using the Italian war in Africa as cover, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936, thus ﬂouting one of the most important provisions of the Versailles Treaty. A political crisis in France that
led to the fall of the government rendered French protests against the Germans meaningless. And all the British could manage to mobilize was vague
talk about the Germans moving into their own backyard.
In July 1936 the civil war broke out in Spain, and that conﬂict furthered
Hitler’s interests by distracting Europeans from the German threat. While
Hitler provided some help to Francisco Franco, the rebellion’s leader, German aid remained limited. In December 1936 Hitler ﬂatly refused Spanish
requests for three divisions and remarked that it was in the Reich’s interest
that Europe’s attention remain focused on Spain. The Spanish Civil War
dragged on, living up to Hitler’s expectations. Franco deliberately drew out
the conﬂict to kill the maximum number of his loyalist opponents.
In addition to the suffering inﬂicted on the Spanish people, the war exercised a baneful inﬂuence on Germany’s potential opponents, particularly
France, which was almost torn apart by the war’s political fallout. The British government moralized, but did little to prevent the rush of arms and
men to both sides. Stalin provided military equipment but remained more
interested in exporting the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) and Soviet paranoia than in defeating Fascism. Aside from Spain, Italy lost the most, however. By providing “volunteers” and arms to Franco, Mussolini retarded the
modernization of his own military. All that Italy got in return was promises
which, in the harsh world of the 1940s, Franco failed to keep.
After his Rhineland success, Hitler’s planning proceeded for two years
without a major crisis. The performance of German Army units in autumn
1937 maneuvers, however, indicated that the day of reckoning was not
far off. Observers such as Mussolini and Britain’s General Edmund Iron-
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5
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UNITED
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AL
Marseilles
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Morocco
Rome
Sardinia
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(to France)
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Murray, Williamson, and Allan R. Millet. A War to Be Won : Fighting the Second World War, Harvard University Press, 2000. ProQuest
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Tunis
Tu n i s i a
(to France)
a
n
Y
32°
24°
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GERMAN EXPANSION IN EUROPE
1935–1939
German territory in 1935
5
Czech territory to Poland
March 1939
1
Reoccupation of the Rhineland
March 1936
6
Slovak territory to Hungary
March 1939
2
Anschluß (union with Austria)
March 1938
7
Memel territory to Germany
March 1939
3
Occupation of Sudetenland
October 1938
8
4
Slovak territory to Hungary
November 1938
9
E
N
FINLAND
Leningrad
E
D
Helsinki
Estonia
a
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Stockholm
Latvia
Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia
become German Protectorate
March 1939
Albania occupied by Italy April 1939
S
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40°
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Lithuania
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East
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Sicily
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(to Britain)
Alexandria
Tripoli
Libya
(to Italy)
Benghazi
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(to Italy)
E G Y P T
Cairo
Suez
Canal
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Palestine
Tra
nsJo
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A
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ALBANIA
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A WA R TO B E W O N
side left East Prussia impressed with the German Army’s efﬁciency. But
the Germans were having serious economic difﬁculties. There was simply
not enough foreign exchange to pay for the imports of raw materials required to fulﬁll the massive rearmament programs. From September 1937
through February 1939, these shortages prevented German industry from
completing over 40 percent of orders on schedule.
In November 1937 Hitler met with his chief advisers to discuss these strategic and economic problems. The minutes of the meeting emphasize the
Führer’s belief that the Reich must soon embark on an aggressive foreign
policy. His predictions about possible future wars were far-fetched, but
the immediate targets, Austria and Czechoslovakia, were clear enough.
However, Hitler ran into opposition from General Werner von Fritsch (the
army’s commander-in-chief), Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg (the
war minister), and Konstantin von Neurath (the foreign minister). All
three agreed that Germany was not ready for war and that a premature
move could lead to disaster. Discussions were inconclusive, although
within the month, Blomberg ordered contingency plans recast.
The hesitation of his senior advisers upset Hitler deeply. At the end of
January 1938 he made his move; Blomberg’s misalliance with a woman
who had “a past” provided the excuse. The generals demanded Blomberg’s
removal, and Hitler gladly accommodated them. Then, using trumped-up
charges of homosexuality, he turned on Fritsch and ﬁred him as well. To
complete the purge, Hitler replaced Neurath with his protégé Joachim von
Ribbentrop, at the same time that he retired or transferred a number of
other senior ofﬁcers. Hitler then assumed control at the War Ministry himself and appointed General Wilhelm Keitel—remarkable even among German generals for obsequiousness—as his chief military assistant.
The purge presaged a major turn in policy. Hitler now controlled both
the military and the diplomatic bureaucracies. However, the triumph was
short-lived. The case against Fritsch dissolved due to the incompetence of
the SS (Schutzstaffel, the Nazi Party’s security and secret police). By March
1938, shortly before the opening of Fritsch’s court-martial, Hitler and the
ofﬁcer corps appeared headed for collision.
The confrontation never took place, because at the same time the SS
case against Fritsch was unraveling, Hitler was pursuing his dream of
Anschluß—union with Austria. At a mid-February meeting with Austrian
Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, Hitler demanded concessions that undercut
Austrian independence. In response, Schuschnigg declared a plebiscite to
determine whether Austrians were for a “free, independent, and Christian
Austria.” Enraged, the Führer ordered mobilization against Austria; at the
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O R I G I N S O F A CATA ST R O P H E
same time, the Nazis placed great diplomatic pressure on Vienna to capitulate. Austria collapsed, its destruction abetted by its indigenous Nazi movement and Europe’s indifference. Schuschnigg surrendered to Hitler’s demands that he resign and allow the Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart to assume
the position of chancellor. A hastily mobilized German Army then marched
into Austria. Ecstatic crowds welcomed their new masters, while others
desperately sought to escape. Hitler, his emotions thoroughly aroused by
the enthusiasm of his Austrian fellow countrymen, almost immediately
announced the union of Austria and Germany. For the next seven years
Austria disappeared from Europe’s maps, more willingly than those who
were to follow.
The Anschluß ended the furor over Fritsch’s removal. The German Army
had accomplished its ﬁrst major operation since World War I with no substantial problems. Nevertheless, military weaknesses did show up: careless
march discipline, mechanical and logistical problems with the armored
forces, and inadequate mobilization measures. As in the past, the army
readily set out to learn from its experiences.
Although the Anschluß failed to solve Germany’s long-range strategic
problems as a resource-poor nation, it did bring short-term help. The Austrians possessed considerable foreign currency holdings which immediately
aided the Reich’s rearmament programs. One estimate at the time calculated that ﬁnancial gains from the Anschluß underwrote the costs of rearmament for the rest of 1938, while by 1939 Austrian factories were turning
out Bf 109 ﬁghters and contributing considerably to the Reich’s production
of high-grade steel. The Austrian campaign netted military and strategic
gains as well. Germany now surrounded Czechoslovakia on three sides and
possessed direct frontiers with Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Italy. The Austrian
Army, though of mixed quality, added ﬁve divisions to the German Army
(two mountain, two infantry, and one motorized).
The self-serving memoirs of German generals such as Heinz Guderian
describe the atmosphere in which “their Austrian comrades” joined the
new “Greater German” Army as being happy and light. In fact, the heavy
hand of National Socialism fell on anti-Nazi Austrians, military and civilian
alike. Thirty senior Austrian ofﬁcers were incarcerated in Dachau, while
the Gestapo (Ge[heime] Sta[ats]po[lizei], or secret state police) murdered
General Wilhelm Zehner, Secretary of War in Schuschnigg’s cabinet. However, all too many Austrians enthusiastically accepted the changes; the SS
German paper Schwarzer Korps delightedly commented on the “honest joy”
with which Austrians were managing to “do in a fortnight what we have
failed to achieve in this slow-moving ponderous north up to this day.”5
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A WA R TO B E W O N
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The Czech Crisis and Munich
The major European powers greeted the Anschluß with indifference.
Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister, admitted to his cabinet that
Germany’s methods had shocked the world as “a typical illustration of
power politics.”6 Nevertheless, three days later he told the Foreign Policy
Committee that there was no reason for Britain to alter its diplomatic
course. With Austria now ﬁrmly under German control, Czechoslovakia
was obviously Hitler’s next target. But here the strategic niceties were different: the Czechs possessed alliances with France and the Soviet Union.
Thus, a sudden German move might precipitate a major conﬂict.
In spring 1938, gorged on Austria’s loot and the bullying of defenseless
Jews in Vienna, the Germans turned on the Czechs. A minority of over
3 million Czech citizens of German descent (close to 20 percent of Czechoslovakia’s population) were living along the Czech frontier. Geography
had placed this minority solidly within districts where the Czechs sited
their defenses. Moreover, recent history provided a useful issue with which
Hitler could berate British and French liberals: that of self-determination
and minority rights. Hitler immediately began preparations to undermine
Czechoslovakia, while isolating it from external support.
On the military side, the armed forces high command (Oberkommando
der Wehrmacht, OKW) began work on 28 March to deploy German units
against the Czechs from newly acquired Austrian territory. In mid-May the
Czechs, alarmed by intelligence reports of German troop movements, mobilized and occupied their fortiﬁcations to protect the Sudetenland from a
sudden German incursion. Hitler was furious, while the major powers took
stock. Chamberlain and the French premier, Édouard Daladier, determined
to appease the Germans, even if they had to abandon the Czechs, while the
Führer decided to destroy the Czech Republic in a military campaign in fall
1938. Nine days after the crisis, Hitler signed new deployment plans that
clearly indicated his intention to smash Czechoslovakia. On the same day
he ordered army engineers to accelerate construction of the Westwall—
fortiﬁcations to protect Germany’s frontier in the west.
Hitler’s aggressive policy met serious objections from Ludwig Beck, chief
of the general staff, who insisted that a German attack on Czechoslovakia
would start a European war that Germany could not win. However, Beck
received scant support for his position from the new commander-in-chief
of the army, General Walther von Brauchitsch, who was already deeply
compromised by the fact that Hitler had bought him out of an unhappy
marriage. Part of the problem lay in the fact that no mechanism existed in
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O R I G I N S O F A CATA ST R O P H E
the German system of government for the military services to evaluate
the strategic situation—a state of affairs that accorded not only with the
Führer’s wishes but with those of the services as well. Thus, the summer of
1938 found the German Air Force (the Luftwaffe) and Army hard at work
preparing plans to destroy the Czechs, while Beck’s resignation at the end
of August occasioned no response from the generals.
By mid-September, Nazi preparations had moved so far along that
Chamberlain embarked on a personal intervention to prevent war. On 14
September he ﬂew to Germany to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden. After listening to the Führer’s monologue, Chamberlain asked for the German
terms. The prime minister then returned to London, where he persuaded
his British colleagues, the French, and ﬁnally the Czechs that surrender of
the Sudetenland represented the only hope for peace. The French acceded
because they had no desire to ﬁght, while in despair the Czechs surrendered the territory—an understandable attitude given their nation’s size
but a signiﬁcant contrast with the behavior that the Poles and Finns would
display under similar circumstances a year later.
On his return to Germany to settle terms, however, Chamberlain discovered that Hitler had little sincere interest in peace. The Führer’s refusal to
slow the pace of military preparations angered many in Britain and France,
but Chamberlain and Daladier had no intention of taking a strong stand.
Despite Hitler’s rejection of a settlement, the British prime minister argued
that the Western powers should continue on the path of appeasement. As
he told his countrymen on 27 September, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying gas masks on here,
because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we
know nothing.”7
While England and France dithered, Hitler’s September had been busy.
Despite disquiet in the ofﬁcer corps, he had driven Germany toward military confrontation. His diplomatic efforts had attempted to separate the
West from the Czechs, and within Germany he had manipulated public
opinion through the lies of the Nazi propaganda ministry, run by his evil
deputy Joseph Goebbels. Nevertheless, on the brink of war—probably due
to Allied mobilization measures and a lack of enthusiasm among the German population—Hitler drew back and with Mussolini’s help agreed to a
conference of the major powers (the Soviet Union excepted) to achieve a
settlement. At Munich on 29 September 1938, his minions and Mussolini
bullied Chamberlain and Daladier into accepting all the German demands.
Chamberlain, with an agreement in hand, returned to London a hero.
Churchill alone stood ﬁrmly opposed. In early October before a hostile
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A WA R TO B E W O N
House of Commons, he savagely summed up Chamberlain’s appeasement:
“Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”8
Munich was a strategic disaster for the West. An attack on Czechoslovakia in 1938 would have involved the Wehrmacht in a major European
war for which it was unprepared. Admittedly, German forces would have
crushed Czechoslovakia, while the French would have done little. But a
campaign against the Czechs would have destroyed stocks of Czech weapons (all of which fell undamaged into German hands in March 1939) and
might have destroyed the Skoda Works—the giant arms complex in Czechoslovakia. The real problem for Germany, however, was not the conquest
of Czechoslovakia but what options lay open after Czechoslovakia. In the
air the Luftwaffe was incapable of conducting a strategic bombing campaign against the British Isles, while on the ground the army was equally
unready for war. Its mechanized force consisted of only three panzer (armored) divisions equipped with tanks that were already obsolete. The Eastern European situation was murky, but generally hostile to German interests. Finally, the pressures of rearmament had placed the Reich’s economy
in a desperate situation. Dislocations caused by mobilizations in the spring
and fall, the massive costs of rearmament, and shortages of foreign exchange led German economists to note that in the last half of 1938 “the
German economy had faced unheard of difﬁculties. The strong box was
empty.”9
With little prospect of a quick victory for Germany, a European war
beginning in fall 1938 would have turned on the economic strength and
staying power of the opposing sides. Allied economic resources, industrial
capacity, and naval forces were overwhelmingly superior, whether Germany faced only Britain or France, or a larger coalition that included Poland and perhaps the Soviet Union. Even so, a war against Germany in
1938 over Czechoslovakia would not have been easy, but it would have
been a lot less disastrous than the conﬂict that ensued over Poland in
September 1939.
The Road to War
Chamberlain and the appeasers had not surrendered Czechoslovakia because of fear that Britain might lose a war against Germany. Rather, they
pursued appeasement because of a desperate fear of war itself. Not surprisingly, Chamberlain refused to speed up the tempo of rearmament after
Munich. The Royal Navy received an increase of a few destroyers. The government extended the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) contract for ﬁghters but or-
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O R I G I N S O F A CATA ST R O P H E
dered no additional ﬁghters for the next two years. The army received
nothing. Across the Channel, the French proved no more willing than the
British to address the fundamental weaknesses in their military forces.
With the West ﬂoundering, Hitler moved to secure his gains in Eastern
Europe. Within three weeks of Munich, he ordered the OKW to prepare
plans to occupy the remainder of Czechoslovakia. At the same time, he
lambasted the ofﬁcer corps for its lack of faith and demanded that ofﬁcers
exhibit a higher degree of obedience to his leadership. The generals, having
seen Hitler at work in Munich, abdicated strategic responsibility to the
Führer. Beck retired, and the emerging leadership largely consisted of technocrats rather than strategists. Instead of being pleased about his diplomatic successes, Hitler was furious at losing his opportunity to smash the
Czechs. Within the month he made a slashing attack on British anti-appeasers and warned that Germany would brook no interference in Southeastern Europe.
The economic difﬁculties that continued to plague Nazi rearmament provided a major incentive to seize the remaining territory of Czechoslovakia.
When a political crisis erupted there in March 1939, Hitler struck. By
seizing Prague, Germany gained Czechoslovakia’s resources, industry, and
military establishment. The Germans also acquired substantial foreign exchange with the occupation, and if that were not enough, the British facilitated the process by transferring Czech gold from the Bank of England to
Berlin. Of particular value were the Skoda and Brünn armament complexes, while the booty from Czech arms dumps was immense. The Germans acquired 1,231 aircraft, 1,996 anti-tank guns, 2,254 ﬁeld artillery
pieces, 810 tanks, 57,000 machine guns, and 630,000 riﬂes—all of considerable help in furthering the Wehrmacht’s rearmament.
Germany’s seizure of the remainder of Czechoslovakia had serious strategic consequences, however. For the ﬁrst time the West responded to German actions with anger. The reaction stemmed more from public outrage
than from any governmental recognition that Germany had stepped beyond the pale. Chamberlain himself commented to his cabinet that Hitler’s
action was mostly symbolic. However, a storm of public protest in Britain
forced the government to rethink Britain’s diplomatic course. Unfortunately, that reevaluation did not change the basic premise that war was
avoidable. Chamberlain turned to active diplomacy to fence Germany in;
appeasement never died, and as late as the summer of 1939 the British
were offering diplomatic concessions and major industrial loans, if Germany would only behave.
The seizure of Prague did force Chamberlain to address the unprepared-
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14
A WA R TO B E W O N
ness of Britain’s armed forces. The government at last fully funded rearmament programs and recognized the army’s continental role as essential. By
May the British had introduced conscription (a measure still opposed by
Labour) and had decided on an army of over 30 divisions. That recognition,
however, had come too late; the British Army would have a relatively minor role in the drama of May 1940. Britain’s commitment to the continent,
however, delighted the French. That alone explains their willingness to
join the British in extending guarantees to virtually every Eastern European nation.
Hitler’s reaction to Britain’s guarantee of Polish independence (given in a
moment of panic) was incredulity at ﬁrst and then outrage. Coloring his
perceptions was a general contempt for Western leaders. He commented to
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, director of German intelligence, that he would
cook the British a stew on which they would choke. To others he remarked
that he had seen his enemies at Munich and they were worms. Hitler now
determined to eliminate the Poles.
On 3 April he ordered the OKW to draw up invasion plans for Poland
under the codename Case White. Military operations were to commence
on or about 1 September; this time Hitler refused all opportunities to negotiate. As he told his generals in August: “Now Poland is in the position in
which I want her . . . I am only afraid that some swine or other will submit
to me a plan of mediation.”10 The new chief of the general staff, General
Franz Halder, enthusiastically endorsed the Führer’s decision. In the meantime, the British, urged on by the French, dithered in dealing with the Soviets, and by July Hitler himself had reached out to Stalin. His overtures
were warmly received.
From the Soviet perspective, the German occupation of Prague and the
Anglo-French guarantee of Polish independence fundamentally altered the
strategic situation. Now Stalin had an opportunity to play Germany and
the West against each other, and in this game, for now, the Germans possessed important advantages. Hitler could promise Stalin not only Finland,
the Baltic states, and chunks of Poland and Romania but peace as well. The
Western powers, ostensibly protecting the rights of smaller nations, could
not even offer Stalin territory. In the Kremlin in late August 1939, Stalin
and Ribbentrop concluded the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The British foreign minister, Lord Halifax, immediately discounted the agreement
as being of little strategic importance, although he admitted its impact on
public opinion in the world would be enormous.
For the second time in 25 years Germany was ready to embark on war.
On 1 September 1939, Hitler launched the Wehrmacht against Poland in
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O R I G I N S O F A CATA ST R O P H E
the belief that Britain and France, given the strategic situation, would not
honor their obligations. He was, of course, willing to face the consequences
if he had misjudged the West. His comments to his generals at the end of
August suggest his line of thinking. He argued that the Reich had no need
to fear a blockade, because the Soviets would deliver everything the German economy needed. Outside such simplistic calculations, there is no indication that anyone in Germany had calculated German options should
war continue after the Polish campaign. The German generals were happy
to equate the conduct of military operations with strategy and then to
leave strategic matters entirely to the Führer.
The British and French did possess a strategy—one that attempted to
weigh the military, political, and economic balance between Germany and
themselves. The Western powers aimed at imposing a close blockade on
the Germans which over the long run would strangle the German war
economy. However, such a strategy demanded the undertaking of serious
military actions that would force their enemy to expend scarce resources in
marginal theaters. In the end, that strategy failed because of the unwillingness of British and French statesmen and generals to undertake any military action. Their inaction ensured that the Wehrmacht possessed maximum military capability in spring 1940.
There were in fact three areas—Italy, Norway, and the Western Front—
where Allied pressure could have affected the Germans signiﬁcantly. Even
before the war began, Britain and France had botched the Italian opportunity. With Mussolini’s concern delicately balanced between his obligations
to Germany and Italy’s strategic vulnerabilities, the Allies pursued appeasement. For one of the few times in his career, Chamberlain had calculated
the strategic equation correctly, but the chiefs of staff persuaded him to
maintain a course of appeasement toward Italy. He had argued in late June
1939 that Britain should not allow Italy to remain neutral in a future war
but should push it into Hitler’s arms. However, the chiefs argued that Italy’s
neutrality would be preferable to its hostile participation in any gathering
conﬂict. They won the argument. The Italians would remain neutral until
June 1940, when the desperate situation of the Allies would entice Mussolini to join the war on Germany’s side. In passing up the opportunity to add
the Italian albatross to Germany’s responsibilities in 1939, the Allies also
missed the opportunity to ﬁght the Italians at a time when little German
help was available.
On the morning of 1 September 1939, Chamberlain met with his cabinet
to discuss the invasion of Poland. He remarked that “the event against
which we had fought so long and earnestly had come upon us.”11 One min-
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15
16
A WA R TO B E W O N
ister went so far as to suggest that Britain should avoid a declaration of war.
Not surprisingly, it required a political revolt in the House of Commons to
force the government to declare war two days later. The French declaration
followed.
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Conclusion
By late August 1939 the strategic balance had swung signiﬁcantly against
the Allies. The German military were ﬁnally beginning to realize the potential of serious military innovation coupled with the input of enormous
resources for over a decade. On the other side, by contrast, Allied rearmament had hardly begun. The Germans also possessed signiﬁcant mechanized forces which the great Polish plain, where the ﬁrst battles of World
War II would be fought, would favor. Moreover, Hitler’s run of military and
diplomatic successes had solidiﬁed the support of the German people behind his regime to a degree that had not been true in 1938.
The German strategic advantage was further helped by the Nazi-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact. The two powers could now enthusiastically cooperate in the looting of Eastern Europe—the ﬁrst step to bigger and better
things for both. For Hitler, destruction of the Eastern European states
would open the gates to invading the Soviet Union itself and seizing Germany’s Lebensraum, after he had disposed of the Western powers. For the
Soviets, the agreement represented the opening salvo in the great war
among the capitalist powers that would inevitably lead to European and
perhaps world revolution.
The rise of Nazi Germany represented a threat to the survival of Western
civilization. Yet the shadow of World War I’s slaughter exercised a powerful
inﬂuence over statesmen guiding Western policy. On one hand, their analysis of the intentions and aims of the Third Reich minimized the threat of
Nazi ideology. On the other hand, from 1935 to 1938 their military advisers wildly exaggerated Germany’s capabilities on the battleﬁeld, a misjudgment that undermined Allied conﬁdence and buttressed a policy of appeasement. But in 1939, when British armed forces received substantially
greater funding, British military advisers became more optimistic. There is
some irony in this change of mood, because before 1939 the German military did not possess the capability to break out from the Reich’s constrained
position. But 1939 was the year when the Wehrmacht gained signiﬁcant
beneﬁt from its massive rearmament, as well as the looting of Austria and
Czechoslovakia. Allied policy, pressed by inﬂamed anti-Nazi public opinion, could not avoid the implications of the Nazi seizure of Prague. Thus, in
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O R I G I N S O F A CATA ST R O P H E
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unfavorable circumstances the Western powers took a stand over Poland.
While the outbreak of World War II was a direct result of Hitler’s aggressive
policies, the date on which it began reﬂected as well the choices and mistakes made by Western statesmen, military leaders, and diplomats. The
long road to 1 September 1939 was paved with good intentions, but in a
world of Hitlers and Stalins, good intentions were not enough. Now only
cold steel and the battleﬁeld could defend the interests and hopes of Western nations.
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A WA R T O B E W O N
T H E R E V O L U T I O N I N M I L I TA R Y O P E R AT I O N S
2
T H E R E VO LU T I O N
I N M I L I TA RY O P E R AT I O N S
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1919–1939
From the perspective of the late twentieth century there is a starkness to
the period between 1919 and 1939. Coldly and with malice aforethought,
the powers that history would term the Axis (Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy) prepared for war, while the democracies pursued
idle dreams. Yet even the German military could not perceive the magnitude of the war their leader would unleash in 1939. To those preparing military forces, the future appeared opaque, while the lessons of the past remained unclear. And when the war began, even the Germans discovered
weaknesses in their preparations. Their opponents, the Western powers
(Britain and France), were less well prepared, partially due to the constraints placed on rearmament by political leaders, partially as a result of
the professional weaknesses of their ofﬁcer corps. And it would be the military preparations and conceptual thinking that determined much of the
outcome in the ﬁrst clash of arms.
World War I had seen the invention of modern war. A battalion commander on the Western Front in 1918 would have understood the concept
of combined arms—the coordinated use of infantry, tanks, artillery, and
aircraft—that still framed the conduct of military operations in the Gulf
War of 1991. But a battalion commander from 1914 would have barely
recognized the battleﬁelds of 1918. In the air and at sea, as on land, much
of what formed the conduct of operations in World War II had made its appearance in the war of 1914–1918.
In the air, operations had seen ﬁghter duels, air reconnaissance, close air
support of the ground battle, interdiction (attacks on the enemy’s lines of
supply and communications), and even strategic bombing. Moreover, the
air war had taught one unambiguous lesson: without air superiority, all
other air operations resulted in unacceptable losses in pilots and aircraft.
18
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T H E R E VO LU T I O N I N M I L I TA RY O P E R AT I O N S
Similarly, at sea, the submarine underlined that there were alternatives to
the great naval battle strategy advocated by Alfred Thayer Mahan. Even in
conventional naval combat, aircraft had gained a role by 1918; in October
of that year, British aircraft, ﬂying off the carrier Glorious, had attacked targets on land. By summer 1918 tanks had become an integral part of Allied
ground operations.
The continuities between 1918 and 1939 are striking; to a historian, the
lessons of the Great War pointed unambiguously to the future. Yet what
is obvious today was not obvious in 1919. Few at the time, except among
the defeated, could imagine that Europe would initiate another world war
within two decades. The dark shadows of the Marne, Champagne, Verdun,
the Somme, the Isonzo, Passchendaele, and 1918’s climactic battles lay
across Europe. As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hero noted in Tender Is the Night: “See
that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a
month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front
and pushing forward behind . . . No European will ever do that again in this
generation . . . This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes.”1
Reﬂecting their societies, most ofﬁcers could not imagine reliving the
horror through which they had so recently passed. Most looked elsewhere
for answers and sought to return war to the Napoleonic brilliance they had
diligently studied at staff colleges. In the democracies, the political leaders
made clear they would not tolerate a replication of the last war. The pain
and losses their nations had suffered were too great and the people too
weary. The British refused to commit an army to the continent until March
1939, while French politicians argued against offensive capabilities, such as
those proposed by Charles de Gaulle.
Success on the battleﬁeld in World War I had depended on tactical, not
operational, expertise.* For all General Erich Ludendorff’s genius as the architect of tactical reform in the German Army in 1917 and 1918, his comment when asked the goal for the March 1918 offensive—“we will punch a
hole in their lines and see what turns up”—speaks volumes for the lack of
strategic vision and operational insight in the conduct of war. Effective
generalship in World War I had more to do with managing great organizations and supporting tactical and mechanical innovations than with the
*In this volume we define tactics as the means and methods of using weapons on the battlefield to attack or defend against the enemy. We define operations as the use of tactical engagements to achieve larger goals; examples of operations would be exploiting a break in the
enemy’s front lines or encircling large enemy forces. For further explanations of these and
other military terms, see the appendixes.
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A WA R TO B E W O N
conduct of operations. The emphasis on management was particularly
marked in the British and French armies as the war drew to a close. It
reﬂected their narrow focus on the Western Front. Admittedly, Field Marshal Lord Allenby, the British commander in the Middle East, conducted
operations involving sweeping maneuvers that took Jerusalem in 1917 and
broke the Turkish armies in 1918. Nevertheless, T. E. Lawrence’s adventures and the 1915 debacle at Gallipoli received far more attention in Britain than Allenby’s solid operational achievements. And while much of the
German Army’s exceptional performance in World War II rested on a thorough reading of what had actually happened in the battles on the Western
Front, their experiences in the East from 1914 to 1918 focused German attention on the possibilities inherent in using tactical successes to pursue
larger goals, such as encircling and destroying enemy forces.
In the interwar period the Soviets displayed the most imagination
in thinking about future operational possibilities. Perhaps it was the Red
Army’s relative independence from the past that allowed thinkers such as
M. N. Tuchachevsky and V. K. Triandaﬁllov to imagine mechanized battles
conducted over hundreds of kilometers in what they termed “deep battle”—operations waged to wreck the enemy’s equilibrium as much as to
destroy his army. Deep battle would create greater potential for crippling
the enemy’s frontline forces by driving deep into his rear areas. The Soviets
realized that great states possessed reserves of manpower and materiel that
would make single battles, however triumphant, no longer decisive. Instead, armies would have to conduct a series of battles to erode the enemy’s
strength. However, in 1937 Stalin instigated a devastating purge of the military that not only liquidated much of the Red Army’s leadership but attacked any imaginative ideas about warfare that were not associated with
the great leader himself. Yet even after the defeats of 1941, enough of the
innovative operational thinking remained for the next generation of Soviet
military leaders to wage the most impressive ground campaigns of World
War II.
For the navies involved in the Great War, the dismal stalemate in the
North Sea, broken only by the inconclusive Battle of Jutland in 1916, offered little guidance for thinking about campaigning in the next war. The
most imaginative thinking in Germany lay in appreciating the bankruptcy
of Grand Admiral Tirpitz’s maritime strategy, which had focused all of Germany’s resources on creating a great battle ﬂeet. In European waters, the
next war seemed to offer only blockade. But in the Paciﬁc, the United
States and Japan confronted new logistical and spatial problems just in positioning their ﬂeets to ﬁght. The result, particularly in America, was the
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T H E R E VO LU T I O N I N M I L I TA RY O P E R AT I O N S
development of revolutionary innovations in carrier operations, ﬂeet logistics, and amphibious warfare. World War I had provided the tactical possibilities, some of which, like Gallipoli, were failures, but the requirements in
the Paciﬁc demanded that naval planners address fundamentally new issues.
The interwar period saw strides in the conceptualization of tactics and
operations, but progress was uneven and planners could rarely predict
what would work in the next war and what would not. Some military organizations turned their backs on the past, some distorted the lessons of the
past, and only a few made progress in bringing to fruition revolutionary
changes. What made World War II so devastating was the tactical improvements that enlarged operational possibilities well beyond anything that
had taken place in the last conﬂict. Improved technology certainly had a
role, but intellectual conceptualizations that combined many tactical pieces
into complicated operational capabilities were the key element in successful innovation. And at the heart of that intellectual process lay professional
military education and honest experimentation.
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Ground Forces
Over the course of World War I, constant technological innovation ﬁnally
broke the territorial deadlock on the Western Front in 1918 and returned
maneuver to the battleﬁeld. Crucial to the invention of modern war was
the development of indirect ﬁre techniques—the use of artillery to attack
and destroy enemy positions not in sight. That innovation allowed artillery—the dominant weapon of World War I—to support the infantry at
much greater distances, while suppressing enemy artillery. But these increasingly sophisticated offensive tactics consistently ran up against increasingly sophisticated defensive tactics, leading to continued stalemate.
The conceptual breakthrough of 1918 involved rapidly penetrating weak
points in the enemy’s defenses, while leaving isolated strong points for
later. The aim was to disrupt the enemy’s defensive scheme through ﬁre
and maneuver. All four major combatants on the Western Front were using such tactics by late summer 1918. But when the British added the tank
to the equation on 8 August, their forces swept to a devastating victory that
Ludendorff characterized as the German Army’s “blackest day” of the war.
With the advent of an uneasy peace in 1919, armies on two continents
set about preparing for the next war in a climate of uncertainty. For the
Germans, the explanation of defeat was not a ﬂawed national strategy but
the Dolchstoß (stab-in-the-back) legend, which received both ofﬁcial and
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22
A WA R TO B E W O N
unofﬁcial support in a massive disinformation campaign sponsored by the
Weimar Republic. This campaign argued that the German Army had stood
unbroken and undefeated in the ﬁeld as of November 1918, until the
machinations of Jews and Communists, or what Hitler termed the “November criminals,” brought about the nation’s downfall. Supposedly, the
outbreak of revolution in the army’s rear areas and on the home front had
caused the defeat by denying the front the moral and material support it
required. German ofﬁcers came to believe that the Nazi Party would guarantee the underlying support at home that the Frontsoldaten had supposedly lacked in the last war.
But while ordinary German citizens and ofﬁcers accepted these distortions of military history, the Reichsheer (the German Army) undertook to
examine honestly the revolutionary nature of the 1918 battleﬁeld, and
therein lay the great danger for Europe. Two factors aided this analysis. The
ﬁrst was the demand of the victorious powers that the Weimar Republic reduce its army to a total of 100,000 men, including an ofﬁcer corps of no
more than 5,000. The second was the appointment of General Hans von
Seeckt to oversee the army’s downsizing. In reducing the ofﬁcer corps,
Seeckt chose the new leadership from the best men of the general staff,
with ruthless disregard for other constituencies, such as war heroes and the
nobility. The resulting emphasis on the serious study of the military profession, including its history, and on honest communication between different levels of command ensured that the new ofﬁcer corps would not repeat
the errors of the last war. General staff ofﬁcers had been central to developing the revolutionary tactical conceptions of 1917 and 1918, and the new
German ofﬁcer corps accepted the values of the general staff in a way that
it had not before 1914. Thus, by 1939 the Germans had developed impressively effective tactics and operational concepts based on their thorough
study of World War I.
One of the great myths of military history is that military organizations
prepare for the next war by studying the last war and that is why they perform badly. In fact, Seeckt established no less than 57 different committees
to study the war. As he stressed: “It is absolutely necessary to put the experience of the war in a broad light and collect this experience while the impressions won on the battleﬁeld are still fresh and a major portion of the
experienced ofﬁcers are still in leading positions.”2 Those committees produced the ﬁrst edition of Leadership and Battle with Combined Arms in 1923.
The 1933 edition, Die Truppenführung, written by Generals Werner von
Fritsch and Ludwig Beck (soon to become the army’s commander and chief
of staff), provided the doctrine for the coming war. A military organi-
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T H E R E VO LU T I O N I N M I L I TA RY O P E R AT I O N S
zation’s “doctrine” spells out the conceptual framework that determines
how the organization will ﬁght. By 1933 the Germans possessed a military
doctrine of combined arms that fully took into account the lessons of the
last war.
The most radical aspect of this German approach to war was to reject
the concept of hierarchical, top-down leadership on the battleﬁeld. Die
Truppenführung stated explicitly: “Situations in war are of unlimited variety. They change often and suddenly and only rarely are from the ﬁrst
discernable. Incalculable elements are often of great inﬂuence. The independent will of the enemy is pitted against ours. Friction and mistakes are
everyday occurrences.”3 The new German approach to combined arms
would emphasize surprise, judgment, speed, and exploitation of an enemy’s momentary weaknesses.
Thus, in the 1930s German ofﬁcers understood the principles of mobile,
armored war long before they received their ﬁrst tanks. Fritsch and Beck
were the key players in the development of the panzer forces. In 1935 Beck
conducted a general staff tour on how a panzer division might be employed, and by the next year the general staff was examining the potential
of a panzer army. While the Germans drew heavily from the British armor
experiments in the interwar period, tank innovators emphasized that panzer units must have more than armor; they must consist of an integrated
force of motorized infantry, artillery, engineers, and signal troops. More
important, armored divisions must operate within a combined-arms team,
if the enemy’s weaknesses were to be rapidly exploited. Thus, the new panzer divisions represented an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary development, by merely extending the basic principles on which the German
way of war rested. The panzer forces remained solidly within the army’s
overall tactical framework.
The bulk of the German Army remained, however, an infantry force,
patterned on 1918. This conservatism had several sources. First, the leadership could not risk all its scarce resources on a new, untested form of war.
Germany possessed neither the industrial base nor the petroleum reserves
to motorize, much less mechanize, more than a small portion of the army.
As it was, the great program of rearmament nearly bankrupted the country
in the late 1930s and drove Hitler to attack Poland and risk a major war in
1939. But whatever the incomplete mix of technology and equipment, the
Wehrmacht went to war in 1939 with a modern doctrine that had prepared
its ofﬁcers to ﬁght a war of maneuver, decentralized authority, and exploitation.
The British Army was not nearly so modern in its outlook, owing to a
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24
A WA R TO B E W O N
number of political and institutional blocks to developing ground forces for
the next war. First, the politicians and voters wholeheartedly rejected any
idea of training an army for the purpose of ﬁghting on the continent. A
wave of antiwar literature heightened the public’s bitter disillusionment
with the sacriﬁces of World War I. Consequently, until February 1939 the
British government was still refusing the army any role beyond policing
Britain’s colonies. Even military reformers like Basil Liddell Hart enthusiastically supported this strategic policy, and it is hard to see where innovative
tank forces might have ﬁt in a defense policy focused on protecting the colonies. As one army bureaucrat put it: “[There] is, of course, the salient difference between us and Germany . . . They know what army they will use
and, broadly, how they will use it and can thus prepare . . . in peace for
such an event. In contrast we here do not even know what size of army we
are to contemplate for purposes of supply preparations between now and
April 1939.”4
Nevertheless, under the leadership of the CIGS (chief of the imperial
general staff) Field Marshal Lord Milne (1926–1933), the British carried
out a series of innovative experiments with armor that suggested paths for
future development. Unfortunately, these efforts occurred in isolation from
the rest of the army. Ironically, the Germans may have learned more in the
long run from these experiments than did the British, since they watched
the exercises with great interest and disseminated the results widely.
A real weakness in the British Army lay in the peculiar tribal culture of
its regimental system, in which each regiment was a law unto itself. But
the army’s most serious problem was failing to develop a coherent combined-arms doctrine based on a thorough study of the last war. It was
not until 1932 that Milne established a committee to study the lessons of
World War I and to suggest whether those lessons had been incorporated
into the army’s manuals and training procedures. Unfortunately, the subsequent CIGS, Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, suppressed the committee’s report because it was too critical of the army’s performance.
The story in France is equally sad. The French too failed to study history
carefully and to develop a framework based on a thorough examination of
the issues confronting armies in the interwar period. Wishing to avoid the
level of casualties they had suffered in World War I, the French veered
away from combined-arms concepts altogether, whether based on armor
or more conventional tactics, when thinking about a future conﬂict. Their
approach to war rested on the so-called methodical battle, aimed at maximizing ﬁrepower and preventing heavy casualties by tightly controlling
the movements of the relatively untrained draftees and reservists who
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T H E R E VO LU T I O N I N M I L I TA RY O P E R AT I O N S
made up the bulk of the army. Those responsible for developing this doctrine—particularly in the École Supérieure de Guerre (the French War College)—focused their retrospective gaze on a narrow set of battles in 1918
that conﬁrmed what the French military leadership already believed. The
French ofﬁcer corps studied World War I for lessons that reﬂected credit on
the army; it did not study the past to discover unpleasant truths. Moreover,
there was a Cartesian tendency toward deductive reasoning in the approach of French military leaders, as well as a willingness to cook the books
whenever empirical evidence from the last war or from results of recent
military exercises did not agree with current doctrine and practices. The
leadership was inclined to press on and “hope” that things would turn
out well.
Yet, to understand France’s military weakness in the face of the upcoming war, one must look beyond the doctrinal weaknesses of the army to the
sheer complacency it exhibited in preparing for war. Its exercises provided
little training and even less food for thought. The French trained lackadaisically, while their German opponents prepared with the Teutonic thoroughness that they brought to war.
In contrast with the French Army, the Red Army made a distinct effort in
the 1920s to break with the past. Despite the backwardness of Russia’s
economy in the interwar period, exacerbated by World War I and the civil
war, the Soviet state and its military pushed actively to address their difﬁculties. Enjoying an international climate that represented relatively little
threat in the 1920s and that grew even more benign in the early 1930s
with the collapse of European defense budgets during the Depression, Stalin embarked on a massive program of industrialization, the Five Year Plan,
to provide the Soviet Union with the economic wherewithal to build a
great military force.
At the same time, Soviet military thinkers displayed considerable imagination in pushing for innovations in the ground forces. There were, of
course, traditionalists who held to the doctrine of mass armies, as in the
past. But the Soviets established their ﬁrst mechanized corps in fall 1932,
three years before the ﬁrst German panzer divisions, and Red Army paratroopers made the ﬁrst mass jump in the 1936 Soviet maneuvers, again
well ahead of the Germans. The weakness of this emerging modern army
lay in a lack of education among the bulk of its forces. Nevertheless, by the
mid-1930s Soviet industry was already producing vast amounts of materiel. When the Germans invaded in 1941, the Red Army’s tank park contained well over 17,000 armored ﬁghting vehicles.
Then in May 1937 Stalin’s heavy hand fell on the Red Army, as the polit-
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26
A WA R TO B E W O N
ical purges that had already savaged the Soviet Union’s professional elites
arrived at the army’s doorstep. Stalin ordered approximately half of his
70,000 ofﬁcers either shot or sent to the Gulag. The NKVD, the Soviet secret police, liquidated 3 of 5 marshals, 14 of 16 army commanders, 60 of 67
corps commanders, 136 of 199 division commanders, all 11 deputy defense
commissars, and all the commanders of military districts—in effect destroying the professional ofﬁcer corps. The purge of the Red Army eliminated
not only most of the competent operational and tactical expertise from the
ofﬁcer corps but it also savaged the ranks of the technical experts, such as
the engineering ofﬁcers, the experts in mobilization, and those who knew
how to manage the Soviet Union’s primitive rail system to the army’s
beneﬁt. The Soviet destruction of a reinforced Japanese division at
Nomonhan in August 1939 proved that some of the ofﬁcers who survived
the purge were skilled. But most of the Red Army fell into a pattern of
mindless obedience. Moreover, Stalin’s military advisers drew the same erroneous conclusion from the Spanish Civil War as did the French: armored
formations would not play a signiﬁcant role in the future. Beginning in August 1939, the Red Army disassembled most of its armored units. It would
take the catastrophes of 1941 to awaken the regime to the importance of
military competence in a world that the Wehrmacht also inhabited.
If military ineptitude was the driving force behind the future defeat of
the French, and political ineptitude was responsible for Soviet defeats, the
Italians displayed both military and political incompetence. The difﬁculties
of the Italians were not the result of a lack of courage among individuals;
Italian dead in World War I had numbered over 600,000. The problem lay
with an ofﬁcer corps that by and large did not take its profession seriously.
As one commentator has noted: “The Duce’s problem—which admittedly,
he was slow to recognize and unable to remedy—lay in what one might
term the Italian general staff tradition: Custozza, Lisa, Adua, Caporetto. On
those occasions the military . . . distinguished itself by the lack of the sort of
diligent study, careful planning, and scrupulous attention to detail which
characterized the Germans, and by a tendency to confusion of responsibilities and of incessant intrigue among senior ofﬁcers.”5
Italy’s strategic vulnerability, economic weaknesses, and lack of natural
resources all made it a dubious ally. Although the Italians matched French
defense spending over the last half of the 1930s, much of that effort went
to support the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–36 and Franco’s struggle to
overthrow the Republican government in Spain, neither of which did anything to improve Fascist Italy’s strategic situation. The resources Mussolini
provided the army were misspent attempting to support a force struc-
Murray, Williamson, and Allan R. Millet. A War to Be Won : Fighting the Second World War, Harvard University Press, 2000. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3300332.
Created from apus on 2021-12-30 18:53:01.
Copyright © 2000. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
T H E R E VO LU T I O N I N M I L I TA RY O P E R AT I O N S
ture Italy could not afford. The army itself lacked a realistic military doctrine commensurate with its means, and this problem was compounded by
sloppy training and exercises. Summing up the Italian approach to war,
which was to cost the Axis powers dearly, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani announced in the last prewar meeting of the Italian chiefs of staff: “When the
cannon sounds, everything will fall into place automatically.”6
Separated from their European counterparts and from each other by
thousands of miles, the armies of the United States and Japan shared some
similarities and some striking contrasts. They certainly suspected that they
would eventually ﬁght one another and assumed that a Paciﬁc war would
turn on air and naval strength. Neither army had in modern times lost a
war, but neither had experienced the full impact of modern war that had so
traumatized their European allies. Japan and the United States might have
global inﬂuence, but the military power they exercised was regional, far
away from the mass armies of Europe. Both assumed they would have
plenty of time and resources to mobilize a land army before a world crisis
arrived at their doorstep.
Stung by what its ofﬁcers regarded as European duplicity in depriving
Japan of its conquests in China and of the opportunity to eliminate Russia
from Asian affairs after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Japanese Army prepared for a war to gain control of China and Manchuria in the 1920s. Ultimately, Japanese strategists aimed at breaking the grip of the Europeans
and Americans on Asia and the Western Paciﬁc. In 1930 the Japanese
Army numbered 200,000 ofﬁcers and men in seventeen divisions, but the
number of men with predraft and reserve military training was approximately four million. Military training was a requirement in secondary
schools, technical institutes, and universities. The training combined military skills with nationalist and martial indoctrination. Every Japanese soldier believed that he owed his life to the Emperor and the yamato, the chosen people of his homeland.
The chain of command below the Emperor had less clarity. The army
(much like the Prussian Army) had three professional leaders in Tokyo: the
war minister, the chief of the general staff, and the inspector general of
training. Although in theory the Emperor headed an Imperial General
Headquarters, the service staffs existed in entirely segregated spheres of
the army and the navy. The war minister and the naval ministers had
equal status with the chiefs of staff, so it was never entirely clear who was
in charge. Moreover, the army had developed strong regional centers of
power in the territories occupied by Japan. The Kwantung Army of Manchuria was the best known, but the Formosan and Korean armies also had
Murray, Williamson, and Allan R. Millet. A War to Be Won : Fighting the Second World War, Harvard University Press, 2000. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3300332.
Created from apus on 2021-12-30 18:53:01.
27
Copyright © 2000. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
28
A WA R TO B E W O N
near-feudal autonomy. The Kwantung Army even had its own auxiliary,
the Manchukuo Army, manned by Chinese and Koreans eager to ﬁght the
Soviets and their Communist countrymen.
In the 1930s Japan accelerated its defense spending, both in volume of
Yen and percentage of public spending and national income, and the Japanese Army modernized its ﬁeld forces, shifting from riﬂes to machine guns
and artillery pieces to tanks. The weapons it chose often resembled European models but were already a generation behind their Western counterparts. While these weapons were rugged and easily maintained, their most
obvious characteristic was their cheapness and simplicity of production.
Supposedly the skill and élan of the Japanese soldier would provide the
battleﬁeld superiority his weapons would not. Japanese doctrine stressed
night operations, inﬁltration, ambushes, sniping, camouﬂage, ﬁeld fortiﬁcations, and advantageous use of terrain. Although their tactics were simple, Japanese commanders sought surprise with high-risk schemes of maneuver. Such training made the Japanese formidable foes when on the
defensive, but vulnerable when on the attack. Since t…

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