A Patriot's History of the Modern World (55 page)

Between the absence of long-range reconnaissance in Hawaii in the summer of 1941 and General Walter Short's reversal of the alert codes (moving 3 as the highest level to lowest, and vice versa—and
not
informing Washington), Pearl Harbor was even more of a sitting duck than the one the Japanese expected to find on December 7, 1941. Japan's sneak attack turned what would have been a debilitating strike into a full-blown, humiliating, bloody disaster, but one that would rouse the American colossus from its slumber.

The bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor on December 7 ended the hope among many Americans that the United States, somehow, could avoid the world conflagration. Hitler's declaration of war on the United States on December 11 extinguished the last embers of optimism that America could contain its fight to Asia. That a rearmed and more powerful U.S. military would have affected many calculations made from 1932 to 1941 by the Axis seems unlikely given the widespread isolationist sentiment in the United States. But it is certain that a better-prepared America would have shortened the war. In one of the ironies of history, for all his strengths, Calvin Coolidge had allowed the Japanese war machine to gain its footing while at the same time permitting the American military to atrophy; and for all his egregious faults, Franklin Roosevelt would over the next four years work tirelessly to rein in the Japanese and rebuild the U.S. armed forces.

Time Line

H
as any conflict in history so severely reoriented all of the civilizations on the planet as the Second World War? Not only did many consider it unfathomable that a war of such epic proportions could follow just twenty years after another devastating conflict had torn the world asunder, but the reasons why this happened are still pondered by historians. Nonetheless, many of the outcomes of World War II are irrefutable and their effects last to this day. Fascism in the Hitlerian model as an ideology was permanently crushed; Japan as an expansionist military power was vanquished; Britain and France lost massive imperial holdings; untold numbers of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern states were born into chaos and bloodshed; and in the end only the United States and the USSR remained standing as genuine superpowers.

Yet it is the First World War that history labels “the Great War,” while (to Americans at least) World War II was “the Good War.” These descriptors in part reflect the fact that, however noble its causes, the Second World War left Europe in second-tier status. Much of its power loss emanated from the separation of the world into two armed camps headed by superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and Europe's impending loss of its empires as a result of wartime destabilization and liberation. This hardly explains Europe's characterization of the conflict. For Americans, who saw themselves as “rescuing” both Europe and Asia (or, at least, parts of it) from tyranny, the fight had brought out the finest in American ideals. Europeans, on the other hand, emerged from the war with well-deserved guilty consciences: the Germans for allowing the Nazis to seize power; the French for their dismal military performance followed by the Vichy regime's cowardly subservience to Hitler; and the British for their consistently bad assessments of military capabilities of friend and foe alike. Piled on top of the guilt was the gnawing reality that Britain and Continental Europe owed their survival to either the crude Americans (with their money and manpower) or the brutal Soviets and their unrelenting, high-cost offensives. Although the British Empire could point to a handful of successes in North Africa (Medenine, El Alamein)
and India (Imphal), the bulk of the war effort after 1942 was carried by Yanks and Reds.

Expansion and Extermination

Japan's incursion into China and Germany's march eastward were both driven by a near-psychotic fear of running out of raw materials, most notably oil, in the run-up to war. Illustrating this perceived urgency, a 1939 telegram from the German Foreign Office to its Yugoslavian minister begged for new supplies with the words “Copper is a life and death matter…. A life and death matter!” but the phrase could have applied to oil, iron, or any of a dozen other raw materials.
¹
As early as 1935, Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank and German economic minister, insisted, “Germany must have access to more raw materials and have it soon…. Nothing can stop [the deterioration of Germany's standard of living] except much freer world trade, especially the acquisition by Germany of foodstuffs and raw materials.”
²
Of course, Schacht did not mean free trade—in which Germany would have been the loser—but a managed trade in which Britain, France, and the United States would permit Germany to acquire more colonies. In the mid-1930s, Hitler had extracted favorable trade terms with Franco's Spain, at one point even acquiring the lion's share of Spanish iron ore, but, unable to provide credit, Germany lost that advantage to the British in 1939.

Thanks again to Smoot-Hawley, Germany and other exporting nations like England saw access to American markets shut during the 1930s. Only through “harsh and discriminatory curtailment” of American imports could Germany pry open the U.S. market again, but this strategy risked much greater retribution by America.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, trade had drawn the United States ever closer to Japan and China. In the 1920s, American trade in China was about $22 million, eclipsing Sino-Japanese trade, while Asian markets accounted for over half of the raw materials imported into the United States. Britain compensated for losses incurred thanks to Smoot-Hawley by increasing imports from her empire, while France likewise extracted trade from her colonies. But Germany possessed no such alternative. She could bully the Balkan states, but only after achieving a position of military superiority. Both America and Britain were hurt in trade on the Continent as the doors closed, but Germany and Japan were hurt far worse by their inability to trade with these giant economic blocs.

Increasingly, Hitler's obsession with raw materials and
Lebensraum
marched Germany toward war. “The final solution,” he argued, “lies in the expansion of living space with respect to the raw material and food supply of our people.”
³
This dovetailed perfectly with the position—accepted across almost all strata of German society, not just among the Nazis—that Poland's existence was illegitimate and unacceptable. Poland had not existed for 124 years, from 1795 to 1919, when it was carved out at Versailles from German and Russian territory. As early as 1922, General Hans von Seeckt, who had concealed the banned German General Staff under a new organization called the Truppenamt (“troop office”), was a radical anti-Pole. Seeckt worked without the knowledge of the Weimar government to negotiate with the Soviets to partition Poland in the future.
⁴
As head of the army, he saw Poland as the linchpin of the Versailles agreement and as “France's advance post of power.”
⁵
“Poland's existence,” he insisted, “is intolerable, and incompatible with Germany's vital interests.”
⁶
Nine years later, he repeated the sentiment, saying “Poland should be regarded as a principal and unconditional enemy.”
⁷
Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, later the ambassador to Moscow, echoed Seeckt's comments: “Poland has to be finished off.” Germany had attempted economically to do just that. From 1924 to 1930, Polish exports to Germany declined from 34.5 percent to 27 percent, but the Poles proved resilient and adapted their trade policies. Poland, like Germany, suffered from shortages of raw materials and began to look hungrily at the coal-producing state of German Silesia as a potential zone of annexation. Any thoughts of expansion, however, were hampered by Poland's unsecurable borders, particularly with respect to their corridor through German territory to the Baltic Sea. The Locarno Pact (1925), which guaranteed French borders, said nothing about Poland's borders, becoming a source of anxiety for the new Polish government and a window of opportunity for Germany.

Within hours after the August 31, 1939, Gleiwitz incident—a phony attack staged by Germans posing as Poles on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia—Hitler launched
Fall Weiss
(“Plan White”), the invasion of Poland. Wehrmacht forces crashed in on the north, south, and west of Poland. According to Allied defense plans, Poland should have been able to defend itself for two to three months, and the Poles estimated they could hold out at least twice that long. But that was against one enemy. As the Poles retreated to more defensible positions, expecting support from Britain and France (and indeed both declared war on Germany on September 3),
they were smashed from the east by the Red Army on September 17. Britain and France did not declare war on Russia, and Polish forces were quickly crushed between two superior armies. On the first day of fighting, the Luftwaffe destroyed most of the Polish air force on the ground, and drove the remainder from the skies. Only 98 Polish planes survived and fled to friendly Romania. Polish mounted infantry proved no match for the panzers (tanks, which at the time were small and lightly gunned—but still superior to infantry without heavy weapons). By September 13, the Germans had eliminated most resistance in the west, and two weeks later Soviet armies mopped up the remaining eastern forces. On September 28, the Polish government collapsed (though it never officially surrendered), and administration of the former Second Polish Republic was divided up between the USSR and Nazi Germany. Throughout it all, the British and French, in what was deemed the “Phony War,” offered little assistance to Poland. Instead, they hunkered down to wait for the invasion of France they expected to come next.

Myths of the Nazi War Machine

In retrospect—especially after the fall of France in 1940—the German blitzkrieg took on an aura of inevitability that in fact was not warranted. Hitler had ramped up his arms program dramatically in the late 1930s, but it still had fallen far short of what was necessary to carry on aggressive warfare. Once the initial stimulus of employment through conscription washed through, the Nazi economic “miracle” stalled. Production fell short of the demands of all military branches, even the vaunted Luftwaffe. Only thirty U-boats, including coastal units, were operational and on station when war broke out in September 1939, dropping to twenty-two in February 1941. The rate of delivery of new boats during the first half of 1940 was only two per month, increasing only to six per month during the second half.
⁸
War arrived far too quickly for the German Navy, or Kriegsmarine, and the “Z” naval expansion plan of 1939, calling for ten battleships, four aircraft carriers, and effective striking abilities in the Atlantic Ocean by 1946, was scrapped the instant the shooting started.

The Luftwaffe was little better off, in spite of Herman Göring's holding the position of “minister without portfolio” since 1933. As such, Göring headed both the Luftwaffe and, after 1936, directed the Four-Year Plan, allowing him to give special consideration to his air force's matériel needs. Yet at the time of the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, not
a single German fighter plane was truly operational—some planes had no ammunition and those that did lacked synchronization gears to fire through propellers.
⁹
Bad luck followed the Luftwaffe; General Walther Wever, Germany's main proponent of strategic bombers and the man responsible for the Luftwaffe's rapid buildup under Göring, was killed in an airplane crash in 1936. His successor Ernst Udet, the highest-scoring ace to survive World War I, hated paperwork, and as chief of the Technical Office, began sixteen aircraft production programs, all of which failed. Greatly depressed and holding himself responsible for the Luftwaffe's lack of development, he committed suicide in 1941. After the fall of France, the Luftwaffe was dropped to fifth in the priority list in armament planning, and would decline steadily as a functional force in comparison to the Allies.

Shortages took their toll across service lines. Production of machine guns was curtailed in 1939, as was production of tanks. The Luftwaffe saw its aircraft goals cut by over two thousand in 1940. At various times, German industry suffered from severe shortages in steel and nonferrous metals (particularly copper); production of all mortar shells stopped in the spring of 1939; and output of heavy artillery was cut almost in half, to 460 guns per year. Even Hitler's pet ammunition production project had fallen woefully short of its quotas to the point that the General Staff calculated that the army's ammunition was sufficient for only two weeks' worth of fighting. Many of the deficiencies arose because the eternal meddler, Hitler, kept changing priorities to pet projects. The ammunition crisis of World War I was seared in the memory of the former infantry corporal, and he increasingly micromanaged production planning. One month after the invasion of Poland, Hitler's
Führerforderung
(Leader's Challenge) gave priority to ammunition, raising production of some types of howitzer shells eightfold, and most ammunition production was to be increased by an average of 500 percent.
¹⁰
Such reallocations came at the expense of other weapons programs, including tank development. Many higher-ranking German officers privately referred to the army as a
Schaufensterarmee
(store window or display army), one that looked good from the outside, but lacked substance. Critical equipment was in short supply—machine guns, artillery, transport, tanks, proper clothing—everything needed to keep a modern army in the field. The German economy was simply not large enough to outfit an army going from 150,000 men with no heavy equipment to two million completely mechanized troops in five years.