The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (70 page)

Even more ominous to the Wehrmacht high command was the changing balance of advantage along the eastern front. As early as August 1941, when many observers felt that Russia was in the process of being finished off as a Great Power, General Haider was gloomily confiding in the War Staff diary:

In this sort of mass, reckless, brutalized fighting, the casualty figures were making even First World War totals seem modest. In the first five months of campaigning, the Germans claimed to have killed, wounded, or captured well over 3 million Russians.
⁸
Yet at that particular moment, when Stalin and the Stavka were planning the first coun-teroffensive around Moscow, the Red Army still had 4.2 million men in its field armies, and was numerically superior in tanks and aircraft.
⁹
To be sure, it could not match the professional expertise of the Germans either on land or in the air—even as late as 1944 the Russians were losing five or six men for every one German soldier
¹⁰
—and when the fearful winter of 1941–1942 passed, Hitler’s war machine could again commence its offensive, this time toward Stalingrad and then disaster. After Stalingrad, in the summer of 1943, the Wehrmacht tried again, pulling together its armored forces to produce the fantastic total of seventeen panzer divisions for the encirclement of Kursk. Yet in what was to be by far the greatest tank battle of the Second World War, the Red Army countered with thirty-four armored divisions, some 4,000 vehicles to the German’s 2,700. While the numbers of Soviet tanks had been reduced by over one-half within a week, they had smashed the greater part of Hitler’s
Panzerarmee
in the process and were now ready for the unrelenting counteroffensive toward Berlin. At that point, news of the Allied landing in Italy provided Hitler with the excuse for withdrawing from what had been an unmitigated disaster, as well as confirming the extent to which the Reich’s enemies were closing the ring.
¹¹

Was all this, then, merely the “proper application of overwhelming force”? Clearly, economic power was never the
only
influence upon military effectiveness, even in the mechanized, total war of 1939–1945; economics, to paraphrase Clausewitz, stood in about the same relationship to combat as the craft of the swordsmith to the art of fencing. And there were far too many examples of where the German and Japanese leadership made grievous political or strategical errors after 1941 which were to cost them dear. In the German case, this ranged from relatively small-scale decisions, like pouring reinforcements into North Africa in early 1943, just in time for them to be captured, to the appallingly stupid as well as criminal treatment of the Ukrainian and other non-Russian minorities in the USSR, who were happy to escape from the Stalinist embrace until checked by Nazi atrocities. It ran from the arrogance of assuming that the Enigma codes could never be broken to the ideological prejudice against employing German women in
munitions factories, whereas all Germany’s foes willingly exploited that largely untapped labor pool. It was compounded by rivalries within the higher echelons of the army itself, which made it ineffective in resisting Hitler’s manic urge for overambitious offensives like Stalingrad and Kursk. Above all, there was what scholars refer to as the “polycratic chaos” of rivaling ministries and subempires (the army, the SS, the Gauleiter, the economics ministry), which prevented any coherent assessment and allocation of resources, let alone the hammering-out of what elsewhere would be termed a “grand strategy.” This was not a serious way to run a war.
¹²

While Japanese strategical mistakes were less egregious and counterproductive, they were nonetheless amazing. Because Japan was carrying out a “continental” strategy in which the army’s influence predominated, its operations in the Pacific and Southeast Asia had been implemented with a minimum of force—only eleven divisions, compared with the thirteen in Manchuria and the twenty-two in China. Yet even when the American counteroffensive in the central Pacific was under way, Japanese troop and aerial reinforcements to that region were far too tardy and far too small—especially as compared with the resources allocated for the massive China offensives of 1943–1944. Ironically, even when Nimitz’s forces were closing upon Japan in early 1945, and its cities were being pulverized from the air, there were still 1 million soldiers in China and another 780,000 or so in Manchuria—now incapable of being withdrawn because of the effectiveness of the American submarine campaign.

Yet the Imperial Japanese Navy, too, needs to take its share of the blame. The operational handling of key battles like Midway was riddled with errors, but even when the aircraft carrier was proving itself supreme in Pacific warfare, many Japanese admirals after Yamamoto’s death were wedded to the battleship and still looked for the chance to fight a second Tsushima—as the 1944 Leyte Gulf operation and, even more symbolically, the one-way suicide trip of the
Yamato
revealed. Japanese submarines, with their formidable torpedoes, were utterly misused as scouts for the battle fleet or in running supplies to beleaguered island garrisons, rather than being deployed against the enemy’s lines of communication. By contrast, the navy failed to protect its own merchant marine, and was quite backward in developing convoy systems, antisubmarine techniques, escort carriers, and hunter-killer groups, although Japan was even more dependent than Britain upon imported materials.
¹³
It was symptomatic of this battle-fleet obsession that while the navy was allocating resources to the construction of giant
Yamato-
class vessels, it built
no
destroyer escorts between 1941 and 1943—in contrast to the Americans’ 331 ships.
¹⁴
Japan also completely lost the battle of intelligence, codes, and decrypts.
¹⁵
All of this was about as helpful to the preservation
of a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere as German mistakes were to the maintenance of the Thousand-Year Reich.

There is, obviously, no known way of “factoring out” those errors (to use the economists’ inelegant term) and thus discovering how the Axis Powers might have fared had such follies been avoided. But unless the Allies for their part had committed equally serious strategical and political mistakes, it is difficult to see how their productive superiority would not have prevailed in the long term. Obviously, a successful German occupation of Moscow in December 1941 would have been damaging to Russia’s war effort (and to Stalin’s regime); but would the USSR’s population have surrendered then and there when its only fate would have been extermination—and when it still had large productive and military reserves thousands of miles to the east? Despite the economic losses dealt by Operation Barbarossa—coal production down by 57 percent, pig iron by 68 percent, and so on
¹⁶
—it is worth noting that Russia produced 4,000 more aircraft than Germany in 1941 and 10,000 more in 1942, and this was for one front, as opposed to Germany’s three.
¹⁷
Given its increasing superiority in men, tanks, artillery, and planes, by the second year of the conflict the Red Army could actually afford to sustain losses at a rate of five or six to one (albeit at an appalling cost to its own troops) and still push forward against the weakening Germans. By the beginning of 1945, on the Belorussian and Ukrainian fronts alone, “Soviet superiority was both absolute and awesome, fivefold in manpower, fivefold in armor, over sevenfold in artillery and seventeen times the German strength in the air.”
¹⁸

Since the Anglo-American forces in France a few months earlier were enjoying “an effective superiority of 20 to 1 in tanks and 25 to 1 in aircraft,”
¹⁹
the amazing fact is that the Germans did so well for so long; even at the close of 1944, just as in September 1918, they were still occupying territories far larger than the Reich’s own boundaries at the onset of war. To this question military historians have offered a virtually unanimous response: that German operational doctrine, emphasizing flexibility and decentralized decision-making at the
battlefield
level, proved far superior to the cautious, set-piece tactics of the British, the bloody, full-frontal assaults of the Russians, and the enthusiastic but unprofessional forward rushes of the Americans; that German “combined-arms” experience was better than anybody else’s; and that the caliber and training of both the staff officers and the NCOs was extraordinarily high, even in the final year of the war.

Yet our contemporary admiration for the German operational performance, which seems to be rising book by book,
²⁰
ought not to obscure the obvious fact that Berlin, like Tokyo, had overstretched itself. In November 1943, General Jodl estimated that 3.9 million Germans (together with a mere 283,000 Axis-allied troops) were trying to hold off 5.5 million Russians on the eastern front. A further 177,000
German troops were in Finland, while Norway and Denmark were garrisoned by 486,000 men. There were 1,370,000 occupation troops in France and Belgium. “Another 612,000 men were tied down in the Balkans, and there were 412,000 men in Italy.… Hitler’s armies were scattered the length and breadth of Europe and were inferior in numbers and equipment on every front.”
²¹
The same could be said of the Japanese divisions, spread thinly across the Far East from Burma to the Aleutian Islands.

Even in those campaigns which seemingly “changed the course of the war,” one wonders whether an Axis victory rather than an Allied one would not merely have postponed the eventual outcome. Had, say, Nimitz lost more than one carrier at Midway, they would have been replaced, in that same year, by three new fleet carriers, three light fleet carriers, and fifteen escort carriers; in 1943, by five fleet carriers, six light fleet carriers, and twenty-five escort carriers; and in 1944, by nine fleet carriers and thirty-five escort carriers.
²²
Similarly, in the critical years of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Allies lost 8.3 million tons of shipping overall in 1942 and 4 million tons in 1943, but those frightening totals were compensated for by Allied launchings of 7 million and 9 million tons of new merchant ships respectively. This was chiefly due to the fantastic explosion in American shipbuilding output, which by mid-1942 was already launching vessels faster than the U-boats could sink them—causing one notable authority to conclude, “In World War II, the German submarine campaign may have postponed, but did not affect the outcome.”
²³
On land, also—and the Second World War in Europe was preeminently a gunner’s war and a tank crew’s war—Germany’s production of artillery pieces, self-propelled guns and tanks was considerably less than Russia’s, let alone the combined Allied totals (see
Table 33
).

Table 33. Tank Production in 1944
²⁴

But the most telling statistics of all relate to aircraft production (
Table 34
), for everyone could see that without command of the air it was impossible for armies and navies to operate effectively;
with
command of the air, one could not only achieve campaign victories, but also deal heavy blows at the foe’s wartime economy.

Such figures, moreover, disguise the fact that the Anglo-American totals include a large number of heavy four-engined bombers, so that the Allied superiority is even more marked when the number of engines or the structure weight of the aircraft is compared with the Axis
totals.
²⁶
Here was the ultimate reason why, despite extraordinary efforts by the Germans to retain command of the air,
²⁷
their cities and factories and railway lines were increasingly devastated—as was, even more so, the almost totally unprotected Japanese homeland. Here, too, was the reason why Doenitz’s U-boats had to keep below the surface; why Slim’s Burma Army could reinforce Imphal; why American carriers could launch repeated attacks upon Japanese bases all over the western Pacific; and why Allied soldiers, whenever stopped by a stubborn German defense, could always call for aircraft to crush the enemy and get the offensive going again. On D-Day itself (June 6,1944), it may be worth noting, the Germans could muster 319 aircraft against the Allies 12,837 in the west. To turn Clausewitz’s phrase around, the art of fencing (like the art of war) indeed required skill and experience; but that would avail the fighter little if he ran out of stocks of swords. In the battle of the swordsmiths, the Allies were very clearly winning.