The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (69 page)

While the “phony war” did not put Germany’s economic vulnerability to the test, it did allow Germany to perfect those elements of national strategy in which the Wehrmacht was so superior—that is, operational doctrine, combined arms, tactical air power, and decentralized offensive warfare. The Polish campaign in particular confirmed the efficacy of Blitzkrieg warfare, exposed a number of weaknesses (which could then be corrected), and strengthened German confidence in being able to overun foes by rapid, surprise assaults and the proper concentration of aerial and armored power. This was again easily demonstrated in the swift overrunning of Denmark and the Netherlands, although geography made Norway both inaccessible to German panzer divisions and subject to the influence of British sea power, which is why that campaign was touch-and-go for a while until the Luftwaffe’s dominance was established. But the best example of the superiority of German military doctrine and operational tactical ability came in the French campaign of May-June 1940, when the larger but less well organized Allied infantry and armored forces were torn apart by Guderian’s clusters of tanks and motorized infantry. In all of these encounters, the attacker enjoyed a considerable air superiority. Unlike the 1914–1916 battles, therefore, in which neither side showed much skill in grappling with the newer condition of warfare, these 1940 campaigns revealed German advantages which seemed to obviate Germany’s long-term economic vulnerability.
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What was more, by winning so decisively in 1939–1940 the German
war machine greatly expanded its available sources of oil and raw materials. Not only could it (and did it!) plunder heavily from its defeated foes, but the elimination of France and Britain’s obvious incapacity to launch a major military campaign also meant that there would be no serious drain upon the Wehrmacht’s stocks through extensive campaigning. A land line had been made to Spanish raw materials, Swedish ores were now safe from Allied expeditions, and Russia, secretly appalled at Hitler’s swift successes, was increasing its supplies. In these circumstances, Italy’s entry into the war just as France was collapsing was not the economic embarrassment it might have been—and, indeed, distracted British resources away from Europe to the Near East, even if Italy’s spectacularly unsuccessful campaigning showed how overrated it had been throughout the 1930s.
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Had the war continued simply with these three belligerents, it is difficult to say how long it might have gone on. The British Empire under Churchill was determined to continue the struggle and was mobilizing large numbers of men and stocks of munitions—outbuilding Germany both in aircraft and tank production in 1940, for example.
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And while Britain’s own holdings of gold and dollars were by then insufficient to pay for American supplies, Roosevelt was managing to undo the damaging neutrality legislation and to persuade Congress that it was in the country’s own security interests to sustain Britain—by Lend-Lease, the “destroyers for bases” deal, convoy protection, and so on.
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The overall result was to leave the two major combatants in the position of being unable to damage the other decisively. If the Battle of Britain had rendered impossible a German cross-Channel invasion, the imbalance of land forces made a British military entry into Europe quite out of the question. Bomber Command’s raids upon Germany were good for British morale, but did little real damage at this stage. Despite occasional raids into the North Atlantic, the German surface fleet was in no position to take on the Royal Navy; on the other hand, the U-boat campaign was as threatening as ever, thanks to Doe-nitz’s newer tactics and additional boats. In North Africa, Somalia, and Abyssinia, British Empire forces found it easy to take Italian-held positions, but extremely difficult to cope with the explosive form of warfare practiced by Rommel’s Afrika Korps or by the German invading forces in Greece. The second year of what has been termed “the last European war” was, therefore, characterized by defensive victories and small-scale gains rather than by epic encounters and conquests.
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Inevitably, then, Hitler’s fateful decision to invade Russia in June 1941 changed the entire dimensions of the conflict. Strategically, it meant that Germany now had to fight on several fronts and thus revert to its dilemma of 1914–1917—this being a particularly heavy strain for the Luftwaffe, which had its squadrons thinly spread between the west, the east, and the Mediterranean. It also ensured that the British Empire’s
position in the Middle East—which could surely have been overrun had Hitler dispatched there one-quarter of the troops and aircraft used for Operation Barbarossa—would remain, like the home islands, as a springboard for an enemy counteroffensive in the future. Most important of all, however, the sheer geographical extent and logistical demands of campaigning hundreds of miles deep into Russia undermined the Wehrmacht’s greatest advantage: its ability to launch shock attacks within limited confines, so as to overwhelm the enemy before its own supplies began to run out and its war machine slowed down. In contrast to the stupendous array of front-line strength assembled by Germany and its allies in June 1941, the supporting and follow-on resources were minimal, especially in the light of the poor road system; no thought had been given to winter warfare, since it was assumed that the struggle would be over within three months; German aircraft production in 1941 was significantly smaller than that of Britain or Russia, let alone the United States; the Wehrmacht had far fewer tanks than Russia; and the supplies of petroleum and ammunition were quickly run down in the extensive campaigning.
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Even when the Wehrmacht was spectacularly successful in the field—and Stalin’s inept deployment orders in the face of the impending attack allowed the Germans to kill or capture three million Russians in the first four months of fighting—that did not of itself solve the problem. Russia could suffer appalling losses of men and equipment, and cede a million square miles of territory, and still not be defeated; the capture of Moscow, or perhaps even of Stalin himself, might not have forced a surrender, given the country’s extraordinarily large reserves. In sum, this was a limitless war, and the Third Reich, for all its imposing successes and operational brilliance, was not properly equipped to fight it.

Whether Russia could have survived the German army at the gates of Moscow
and
a heavy attack by Japan upon Siberia in December 1941 is quite another matter, fascinating to speculate upon and impossible to answer. In signing both the Tripartite Pact (September 194Ö) with Germany and Italy and the later (April 1941) neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union, Japan had hoped to deter the USSR while concentrating on its southern expansion; but many in Tokyo were tempted again to a war against Russia at the news of the German advance upon Moscow. If indeed the Japanese army had struck against its traditional foe in Asia instead of agreeing to the southern operations, it might still have been difficult for Roosevelt to persuade the American people to enter fully into such a war, and the assistance which the British could have given Russia in the Far East (had Churchill alone entered that conflict) would have been minimal. Instead of facing that dreadful two-front scenario, Stalin was able to switch his well-trained, winter-hardy divisions from Siberia in late 1941 to help blunt the German offensive and then to drive it back.
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Seen from Tokyo’s viewpoint,
however, the decision to expand southward was utterly logical. The West’s embargo on trade with Japan and freezing of its assets in July 1941 (following Tokyo’s seizure of French Indochina) made both the army and the navy acutely aware that unless they gave in to American political demands
or
attempted to seize the oil and raw materials supplies of Southeast Asia, they would be economically ruined within a matter of months. From July 1941, therefore, a northern war against Russia became virtually impossible and southern operations virtually inevitable—but since the Americans were judged hardly likely to stand by while Japan helped itself to Borneo, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies, their military installations in the western Pacific—and their fleet base at Pearl Harbor—also needed to be eliminated. Simply to keep up the momentum of their “China incident,” the Japanese generals now found it necessary to support large-scale operations thousands of miles from home against targets they had scarcely heard of.
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December 1941 marked the second major turning point in a war which had now become global. The Russian counterattacks around Moscow in the same month confirmed that here, at least, the Blitzkrieg had failed. And if the stunning array of Japanese successes in the first six months of the Pacific war dealt heavy blows to the Allies, none of the territories lost (not even Singapore or the Philippines) was really vital in grand-strategical terms. What was much more important was that Japan’s actions, and Hitler’s gratuitous declaration of war upon the United States, at last brought into the conflict the most powerful country in the world. To be sure, industrial productivity alone could not ensure military effectiveness—and German operational skills in particular meant that simple man-to-man and dollar-to-dollar comparisons were foolish
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—but the Grand Alliance, as Churchill fondly called it, was so superior in matériel terms to the Axis and its productive bases were so far away from the German and Japanese armed forces that it had the resources and the opportunity to build up an overwhelming military strength which none of the earlier opponents of fascist aggression could have hoped to possess. Within another year, in fact, de Tocqueville’s forecast of 1835 concerning the emergence of a bipolar world was at last on the point of being realized.

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t the news of the U.S. entry into the war, Winston Churchill openly rejoiced—and with good reason. As he later explained it, “Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.”
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Yet such confidence must have seemed wildly misplaced to more cautious minds on the Allied side during 1942 and until the first half of 1943. For six months after Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces had run rampant in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, overwhelming the European colonial empires, encircling China from the south, and threatening India, Australia, and Hawaii. In the Russo-German war, the Wehrmacht resumed its brutal offensives once the winter of 1941–1942 had passed and battled its way toward the Caucasus; at almost the same time, the far smaller German force under Rommel in North Africa had pushed to within fifty-five miles of Alexandria. The U-boat assault upon Allied convoys was proving deadlier than ever, with the highest losses of merchantmen occurring in the spring of 1943; yet the Anglo-American “counterblockade” of the German economy by means of strategic bombing was failing to achieve its purpose and was leading to severe casualties among the aircrews. If the fate of the Axis Powers
was
sealed after December 1941, there was little indication that they knew it.

Nevertheless, Churchill’s basic assumption was correct. The conversion of the conflict from a European war to a truly global War may have complicated Britain’s own strategical juggling act—as many historians have pointed out, the loss of Singapore was the result of the British concentration of aircraft and trained divisions in the Mediterranean theater
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—but it totally altered the overall balance of forces
once the newer belligerents were properly mobilized. In the meantime, the German and Japanese war machines could still continue their conquests; yet the further they extended themselves the less capable they were of meeting the counteroff ensives which the Allies were steadily preparing.

The first of these came in the Pacific, where Nimitz’s carrier-based aircraft had already blunted the Japanese drive into the Coral Sea (May 1942) and toward Midway (June 1942) and showed how vital naval air power was in the vast expanses of that ocean. By the end of the year, Japanese troops had been pulled out of Guadalcanal and Australian-American forces were pushing forward in New Guinea. When the counteroffensive through the central Pacific began late in 1943, the two powerful American battle fleets covering the Gilberts invasion were themselves protected by
four
fast-carrier task forces (twelve carriers) with overwhelming control of the air.
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An even greater imbalance of force had permitted the British Empire divisions to crash through the German positions at El Alamein in October 1942 and to drive Rommel’s units back toward Tunisia; when Montgomery ordered the attack, he had six times as many tanks as his opponent, three times as many troops, and almost complete command of the air. In the month following, Eisenhower’s Anglo-American army of 100,000 men landed in French North Africa to begin a “pincer movement” from the west against the German-Italian forces, which would culminate in the latter’s mass surrender in May 1943.
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By that time, too, Doenitz had been compelled to withdraw his U-boat wolf packs from the North Atlantic, where they had suffered very heavy losses against Allied convoys now protected by very-long-range Liberators, escort carriers, and hunter-killer escort groups equipped with the latest radar and depth charges—and alerted by “Ultra” decrypts as to the U-boats’ movements.
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If it was to take longer for the Allies to achieve “command of the air” over Europe to complement their command of the sea, the solution was being swiftly developed in the form of the long-range Mustang fighter, which first accompanied the USAAF’s bomber fleets in December 1943; within another few months, the Luftwaffe’s capacity to defend the airspace above the Third Reich’s soldiers, factories, and civilian population had been weakened beyond recovery.
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