All Hell Let Loose (107 page)

British officials returning to Burma were appalled to find destitution: public services and transport had collapsed, many people were starving and traumatised by their experiences. In Rangoon, civil servant T.L. Hughes found ‘old friends so changed as to be unrecognisable; many were emaciated and shrunken; many were white-haired prematurely and many continued to cast an anxious eye over their shoulder on the look-out for the Japanese Gestapo’. British onlookers at the Burmese capital’s victory parade watched uneasily as Aung San’s nationalist troops goosestepped down the central avenue in Japanese-style uniforms. It was plain to all but the most stubborn imperialists that the clock could not be set back to 1941, that the British must soon leave for good, just as they would also have to quit India. In the Philippines, too, radicalism had taken hold. A Huk communist guerrilla said of the period following the Japanese surrender: ‘I knew we’d have to have our peasant groups because landlords would be coming back. Life was still difficult and … there had been so much destruction. But I think people were hopeful. I know I was. And we little people had become stronger; we were more organised.’

Each of the three principal victorious nations emerged from the Second World War confident in the belief that its own role had been decisive in procuring victory. Not for many years did a more nuanced perspective emerge, in Western societies at least. Hitler was correct in anticipating that his enemies’ ‘unnatural coalition’ must collapse and give way to mutual antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West, although this occurred too late to save the Third Reich. The Grand Alliance, the phrase with which Churchill ennobled the wartime relationship of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, was always a grand charade; it was a necessary fiction to pretend that the three powers fought the war as a shared enterprise directed towards common purposes.

Some modern historians have sought to argue that the entire conflict might have been avoided if in the early years of Nazism Britain and France had forged a united front with Russia against Hitler. This view seems untenable, as well as supremely cynical: how could the Western democracies have agreed common political objectives with a Soviet regime as brutal and imperialistic as that of the Nazis? Stalin’s tariff for any deal with the French and British would have been identical with that he presented in exchange for the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact: a free hand for his own expansionist ambitions. This was unacceptable to the Western democracies until the tumult of war enforced unforeseen obligations and realities. Powerful elements of British, French and American conservative opinion deplored communism even more than fascism, and would have resisted appeasement of Stalin with more vigour than they displayed towards appeasement of Hitler.

France, Britain and its dominions were the only major Allied nations to enter World War II as an act of principle, rather than because they sought territorial gains or were themselves attacked. Their claims upon the moral high ground were injured, however, by the fact that they declared support for embattled Poland without any intention of giving this meaningful military effect. There was little French popular appetite for a battlefield showdown with Germany in September 1939, and less in June 1940, while the British Expeditionary Force could play only a marginal role. Following France’s defeat, informed British and American soldiers and politicians asserted, with truth, that many Frenchmen disliked Churchill’s nation more than Germany. Even allowing for the significant role of French troops in the final campaigns in north-west Europe, the statistical fact remains that Vichy’s armies and domestic security forces made a more numerous contribution to Axis interests than those Frenchmen who later joined the Gaullists, other Resistance groups or Eisenhower’s armies provided to the Allied cause.

Most French people persuaded themselves in 1940 that the Pétain regime constituted a lawful government; however uncomfortably, they accepted its rule until the eve of liberation. Once defeat in 1940 had denied the French a heroic role in the struggle against Nazism, many remained confused for the remainder of the war about the least ignoble part their nation might play. After the liberation in 1944, France indulged in an orgy of domestic recrimination, reflecting rancour about the 1940 defeat, together with a settling of national and local accounts between former collaborationists and resisters which prompted several thousand killings during
l’épuration
– the purification, as it was ironically known. Forrest Pogue wrote after a visit to Paris, ‘I soon found that the old bitterness against Jews and labor remained.’ Communist factions emerged from the war strengthened in France, as also in Italy and Greece, and for some years there were fears for the survival of democracy in all three countries. Bourgeois capitalism eventually prevailed, but political stability proved slow to achieve. To this day, France has not produced an official history of its war experience, and probably will never do so, because consensual support for any version of events would be unattainable. It is striking that the most persuasive modern studies of the French wartime era have been written by American and British authors: relatively few indigenous scholars wish to address it.

It is hard to imagine that Britain would have continued to defy Hitler after June 1940 in the absence of Winston Churchill, who constructed a brilliant and narrowly plausible narrative for the British people, first about what they might do, and later to persuade them of what they had done. The Nazi leaders, land creatures, lacked understanding of the difficulty of achieving hemispheric hegemony against a formidable sea power while themselves lacking an effective navy. Churchill owed a large debt to Hitler for a succession of unforced errors. First, by launching the Luftwaffe against the RAF’s Fighter Command, Germany’s leader offered Britain its only conceivable opportunity to salvage a victory from the ashes of strategic defeat in the summer of 1940. He then failed to reach agreements with Mussolini and Franco that should have enabled him to evict British forces from the Mediterranean and Middle East in 1941. After fumbling confrontation with Britain, Hitler’s invasion of Russia transformed the struggle, and ensured that Stalin’s nation would bear the principal burden of combating Nazism. Seventy-nine million Germans challenged 193 million Soviet citizens from an economic base much weaker than the Allies recognised.

Churchill displayed the highest wisdom by embracing the Soviet Union as a co-belligerent in 1941, but both he – briefly – and later Roosevelt – persistently – were foolish to suppose that a real partnership was possible. Stalin, with his usual icy clarity of vision, recognised that the common commitment of Britain, Russia and the US to defeat Hitler did nothing to bridge the yawning divide between their respective national objectives. He intended to sustain a tyranny which denied any vestige of freedom to his own people, and to secure territorial gains for the Soviet Union which the Western Allies would never willingly approve. Russia’s vast blood sacrifice spared the lives of hundreds of thousands of British and American soldiers, but in consequence the Red Army secured physical possession of an East European empire. The Americans and British had no choice save to acquiesce in this, since they lacked both military means and domestic support for a new war to expel the Soviet Union from its conquests. The Russians reaped the rewards for doing most of the fighting necessary to defeat Nazism. Western material aid contributed importantly to the Soviets’ 1943–45 war effort, but seems trifling alongside the destruction and slaughter they experienced.

Stalin committed many blunders in the first year after
Barbarossa
was launched, but thereafter learnt quickly, as Hitler did not. The Soviet Union revealed an industrial and military capability that would have enabled it to complete the destruction of Hitler’s war machine even had the Western Allies never landed in Italy or France, though their interventions hastened the end. There is a powerful argument that only a warlord as bereft of scruple or compassion as Stalin, presiding over a society in which ruthlessness was even more institutionalised than in Germany, could have destroyed Nazism. Stalin proved a supremely effective tyrant, as Hitler was not. The Western Allies’ manner of fighting, hampered by bourgeois sensitivity about casualties, was a chronic impediment to overcoming the Wehrmacht. In 1944, when Italian officer Eugenio Corti first met British troops socially, he enjoyed their company, but observed in some puzzlement that ‘They are more like civilians than soldiers, which may account for the sluggishness of their advance.’ So indeed it did.

Because German and Japanese soldiers displayed high courage and tactical skill, the principal Axis powers were overrated by their enemies. From June 1940 onwards, both Berlin and Tokyo made strategy with awesome incompetence. Japan’s early victories in 1941–42 reflected local Allied weakness, not real Japanese strength; it is extraordinary that Hirohito’s government entered the war without taking any convincing steps to protect its maritime lifelines from a US submarine offensive. It became clear within months that Japan’s gamble had failed, because its success was dependent on a German victory in Europe which was no longer attainable.

Once the British and American war efforts gained traction, the Western Allies conducted their affairs much better than the Germans and Japanese at every level save local ground combat. Whether or not the leaders of Germany and Japan were stupid men, they did many stupid things, often because their understanding of their opponents was so poor. Most of the men close to Hitler – Himmler and Goering notable among them – would have seemed to posterity ridiculous figures, save that they had licence to shed so much blood. Where Stalin’s Russia was indeed a totalitarian state, a monolith, the Nazi leadership was riven by personal ambitions, its war effort weakened by competition among rival fiefdoms as well as by Hitler’s persistent blunders.

The democracies mobilised the finest brains and empowered clever men to exploit their nations’ scientific genius and industrial capacity. America and Britain fulfilled their strategic aims at relatively low human cost, by imaginative mobilisation of resources to generate firepower and exploit superior technologies, especially at sea and in the air. For this their governments, and above all Roosevelt and Churchill, richly earned the gratitude they received from their peoples.

Britain’s defiance in 1940–41 was critical in averting Nazi triumph; but thereafter Churchill’s people made only a subordinate contribution to victory. They paid a price in blood and treasure which seemed to them heavy enough, but was modest in comparison with the horrors that befell the Continental nations. Even Britain’s leaders were slow to realise that, while the war accelerated the nation’s loss of global power, this was anyway inescapable. The British people developed a sense of grievance about their post-war privations, which included the maintenance of some food rationing until 1952. Having had an exaggerated sense of Britain’s strength and wealth in 1939, their descent to diminished importance and relative impoverishment was correspondingly more painful, after achieving a place among the victors of 1945.

The war became a proud national folk memory, because the British came to regard it as the last hurrah of their greatness, a historic achievement to set against many post-war failures and disappointments. Their lone stand against Nazism in 1940–41 was indeed their finest hour, for which they were empowered by Winston Churchill, the towering personality of the forces of light. Throughout the war, Britain was governed with impressive efficiency; its leaders harnessed civilian brains and scientific genius to dazzling effect, symbolised by the epic of Bletchley Park’s codebreakers, the nation’s greatest single achievement of the war. The Royal Navy and the RAF did many things bravely and well, though always straining to match their strengths to their commitments. The British Army’s overall performance, however, seldom surpassed adequacy, and often fell short of it. As an institution, and as Alan Brooke readily acknowledged, it was deficient in competent commanders, imagination, appropriate transport and armour, energy and professional skill, its artillery alone displaying excellence. Its shortcomings would have been even more cruelly exposed had it been obliged to bear a larger share of the burden of beating the Wehrmacht.

America’s industrial might contributed more to victory than did its armies. It was apparent to German economic managers as early as December 1941 that victory was beyond Hitler’s reach because of events in Russia and the accession of the United States to the Allied cause. This was long before the RAF’s and USAAF’s strategic air offensives attained maturity: Allied bombing of Germany hastened the end, but did not decide the outcome. Nonetheless, it is important to stress the importance of close air support, and absolute command of the skies, to the western war in 1943–45. The Western Allies created superb tactical air forces, and used them with all the skill and flair their ground operations lacked. Every man who glimpsed the armies, their convoys crowding the roads of Italy and later north-west Europe nose-to-tail without intervention from the Luftwaffe, recognised the critical contribution of air power in conferring freedom of movement, while denying it to the Wehrmacht.

The United States Navy and Marine Corps were chiefly responsible for the defeat of Japan. In pursuing that end, many battles were fought, notably in Burma and the Philippines, which were strategically redundant. But the momentum of war imposed its own imperatives, and such a judgement is much easier for historians than it was for contemporary national leaderships – as might also be said about the arguments against dropping the atomic bombs.

The United States was the only belligerent which emerged from the war without a sense of victimhood. Most of its people took pride both in their contribution to Allied victory, and in their new status as the richest and most powerful nation on earth. It was characteristic of American romanticism that a war which the United States joined only because it was attacked by Japan evolved during the ensuing forty-five months into a ‘crusade for freedom’. Thanks to Pearl Harbor, fewer of Roosevelt’s people questioned the justice of their cause than in any other war their country has fought. ‘It was the last time most Americans thought they were innocent and good, without qualification,’ said Pfc Robert Lekachman.