The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (122 page)

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In 1938 Mussolini’s government passed legislation which forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews and banned Jewish teachers from schools. However, Italians were generally reluctant to assist the Germans with their wartime policies of deportation and mass murder. Between 1939 and 1943 many thousands of Jews sought refuge in Italy and Italian-occupied territory. Thischanged radically when the Germansoccu-pied Italy in the autumn of 1943. Nevertheless, despite German efforts to round up and deport the Italian Jews, 40,000 out of a pre-war population of around 50,000 survived the war. Less well known is the story of the approximately 21,000 Jewswho found sanctuary under Japanese rule. For example, thousands of refugees who had fled to Lithuania in 1939 were provided with exit visas by the Japanese diplomat Sugihara Chiune. In all, around 4,500 Jewsfrom Nazi-occupied countriesfled eastwards by such means, of whom all but a thousand succeeded in proceeding to safe destinations. Those left behind were moved to Shanghai, where there was already a large community of around 18,000 ‘stateless’ Jewish refugees. The Jews were confined to the Hongkew area of Shanghai in February 1943, but survived the war, despite German pressure for their extermination.

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The fighting strength of the Chinese army was around 2.9 million, divided into 246 divisions and 44 independent brigades. However, each division had just 324 machine-guns between nine and a half thousand men. In all, the Chinese army had little more than one million riflesand just 800 piecesof artillery.

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Because of the poor quality of the roadsand rampant theft, it wasestimated that 14,000 tonshad to leave Lashio in Burma for 5,000 tonsto arrive in Chungking. At most 30,000 tonsgot through each month.

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Liaison conferences (
Daihon’ei Seifu Renraku Kaigi
) were an innovation dating back to 1937. They brought together representatives of the government and of the High Command. Those present generally included the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, the War Minister, the Navy Minister and the two Chiefs of Staff. They were relatively informal, with no individual formally presiding. Decisions had to be ratified at an Imperial Conference (
Gozen Kaigi
), which included membersof the Liaison Conference, the President of the Privy Council and the Emperor himself, who sat – usually silently – on a dais in front of a gold screen. His ratification made any decision reached on these occasions binding and all but irrevocable.

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The Japanese force comprised more than 50 ships, including 4 large and 2 light carriers(each with a complement of around 70 aircraft), 2 battleships, 2 cruisers, 9 destroyers, 8 fuel tankersand 30 submarines, five of which were equipped with midget submersibles and three of which were sent ahead as an advance guard.

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The Japanese forced some 78,000 survivors of the Bataan campaign to walk the 65 milesfrom Marivelesto San Fernando. The majority died en route asa result of physical violence, malnourishment and disease.

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Orwell’s essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ epitomizes the subtle demoralization of the British in Asia in the 1930s. When an elephant runs amok, Orwell is expected to shoot it. He finds the task intensely distasteful and only does so out of a fear of ‘looking a fool’: ‘With the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it wasquite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.’

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Reder wasa trained chemist who wasdeported from Lwów in August 1942. He worked asa member of the ‘death crew’, digging gravesand dragging bodiesout of the gaschambers. After four monthshe wassent to Lwów to help fetch a consignment of sheet metal for the camp. While his guard slept, he made his escape.

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Ironically, Hitler said the same about the Japanese in May 1942: ‘The present conflict is one of life or death, and the essential thing is to win – and to that end we are quite ready to make an alliance with the Devil himself.’

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‘We must at all costs advance into the plains of Mesopotamia and take the Mosul oilfields from the British,’ declared Hitler on August 5, 1942. ‘If we succeed here, the whole war will come to an end.’ But three-quartersof total world oil production in 1944 came from the United States, compared with just 7 per cent from the whole of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf.

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It is seldom acknowledged that for most of the period from 1940 until D-Day, black Africansconstituted the main elementsof the rank and file in the Free French Army. Even aslate asSeptember 1944, they still accounted for 1 in 5 of de Gaulle’sforce in North-West Europe.

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Nearly three-quartersof the men in the four US divisions that took part in the Normandy landings became casualties within seven weeks of going ashore. Mortality ratesamong American riflemen were between 16 and 19 per cent. More than a quarter of the officers in some British rifle battalions were killed. Nearly half of Bomber Command crews ended up killed or missing in action. Only German submarine crews had a higher fatality rate (82 per cent).

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Alan Brooke was contemptuous of Churchill’sinability to ‘grasp the relation of various theatres of war to each other’. In 1943 he wasdriven to distraction by the Prime Minister’s hobbyhorse, an occupation of northern Sumatra. Churchill was ‘temperamental like a film star, and peevish like a spoilt child’. By early 1944 Brooke wasconvinced that Churchill’sage and alcohol consumption were impairing hisjudge-ment; he went so far as to wish he would ‘disappear out of public life… for the good of the nation and… hisown reputation’. ‘The wonderful thing’, he wrote on September 10, 1944, ‘isthat ¾ of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the great Strategists of History… and the other ¼ have no conception what a public menace he is.’ Brooke was, admittedly, a bitter man. He felt that he, not Eisenhower, should have led the invasion of France, but this was to underestimate the rapidly growing disparity between the US and UK contributions to the war.

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‘For years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa,’ Charles Wilson famously told the Senate Armed Services Committee before hisappointment asSecretary of Defense wasconfirmed.

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Soviet losses during the Second World War are estimated to have been around 25 million. Thisbreaksdown asfollows: at least 8.7 million military deaths, though the number may have been ashigh as10.2 million if German rather than Soviet figures are accepted for prisoners who died in captivity; 13.7 million victimsof German occupation, of whom 7.4 million were executed, 2.2 million worked to death in Germany and the remaining 4.1 million succumbed to starvation or disease. Yet at least two million and probably more Soviet citizensdied in placesbeyond the reach of Germans. It would be an error to blame Hitler for all the Soviet war victims.

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The Sovietsgot their intelligence from Bletchley by two routes, one official and one illicit. Among those working at Bletchley was John Cairncross, the ‘fifth man’ of the Cambridge spy ring, who supplied information about German operations to his NKVD controller in London, Anatoli Gorsky. German deserters confirmed the British prediction about the timing of the planned German offensive.

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The Japanese still had 169 infantry divisions, 4 tank divisions and 15 air divisions – around 5.5 million men – and the air force had 9,000 operational aircraft.

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It is not easy to say precisely how many people the Germans killed. Suffice to say that the ratio of Allied to Axis military deaths was 3.0:1 and the ratio of Allied to Axis civilian deaths was 5.8:1.

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The incendiary bombs were filled with highly combustible substances such as magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly. After the target was burning, the hot air above it began to rise rapidly, sucking in colder air from the surrounding area. The effect wasgreatly magnified if the wind wasin the right direction, aswasthe case in both Hamburg and Dresden.

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A number of the Doolittle airmen were captured and executed, inspiring the film
Purple Heart
. Shortly before his execution one of the pilotstellshiscaptors: ‘You can kill us– all of us… But if you think that’sgoing to put the fear of God into the United States of America and stop them from sending other fliers to bomb you, you’re wrong – dead wrong. They’ll blacken your skies and burn your cities to the ground and make you get down on your kneesand beg for mercy. Thisisyour war – you wanted it – you asked for it. And now you’re going to get it – and it won’t be finished until your dirty little empire iswiped from the face of the earth!’

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That was not lost on the Moscow cinema-goers in whose company I watched the film
Schindler’s List
in 1993. At the moment towards the film’s denouement when a Red Army soldier on horseback shouts to the surviving prisoners: ‘You are being liberated by the forcesof the Soviet Union,’ the audience erupted into derisive laughter. A Russian audience understood only too well that this was a contradiction in terms.

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The ‘Single Integrated Operations Plan’ would have retaliated to a Soviet attack by unleashing all 3,267 American nuclear weapons against the entire Eastern bloc.

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Attempts to uncover a conspiracy involving Pentagon hawks, to say nothing of the Mafia, have been unsuccessful, though the Kremlin was certain such a plot existed. Other theories point the finger of blame at the KGB itself.

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Admittedly, the Americans liked nothing better than to think of themselves as the plucky underdogs. They exulted when Van Cliburn, a Texan boy, won the 1958 International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. They went into ecstasies when Bobby Fischer beat the Russian chess grandmaster Boris Spassky in 1972. And nine years later they could scarcely contain themselves when their ice hockey team narrowly beat the Soviet world champions. The Soviets, for their part, showed no sign of wishing to challenge American dominance in the realms of country music, surfing or baseball.

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Jacques Poos, the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, declared that ‘the hour of Europe’ had dawned, as if Brussels could somehow halt the killing. In fact, European diplomatic initiatives did nothing to stop ethnic cleansing and European troops acting under the auspices of the United Nations all but aided and abetted the massacre of 8,000 unarmed Muslim men at Srebrenica in July 1995. It took American firepower and the defection of the Croats to halt the killing in Bosnia – just as it was American firepower that stopped and then reversed the ethnic cleansing Milo evick also attempted in the province of Kosovo.

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Spengler is now seldom read; his prose is too turgid, his debt to Nietzsche and Wagner too large, his influence on the National Socialists too obvious. Yet with his idiosyncratic seasonal theory of cultural rise and fall, he expressed better than almost anyone that inter-war revulsion against all that had been achieved by the West before 1914. ‘The last century’, he wrote, ‘was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. But in this century blood and instinct will regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them.’ This was not a bad prediction. In particular, Spengler saw that the backlash he foresaw would manifest itself partly as a war on big cities, the embodiments of a decadent civilization.

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The Soviet figures are famously problematic. Total Soviet demographic losses have been put as high as 43–47 million by some recent scholars (i.e. including thwarted normal reproduction). The Times Atlas of World History’s total of 21.5 million includes around 7 million deaths of Soviet citizens deported to the gulag and 1 million Soviet citizens deported as members of ‘suspect’ nationalities. The official Soviet figure for total excess mortality was 26.6 million, but this may include 2.7 million wartime and post-war emigrants as well as normal natural mortality. On the other hand, it may underestimate the number of Soviet prisoners who died in Germany captivity.

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Rüdiger Overmans has substantially revised upwards the estimates for German military losses. His total figure for losses of 5.3 million includes just under 400,000 men who did not have German citizenship in 1939 but nevertheless were recruited or conscripted into the Wehrmacht or SS.

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France and Italy – both 0.9 per cent; United Kingdom – 0.7 per cent; United States – 0.2 per cent.

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The Mongols habitually and systematically slaughtered the entire populations of cities in the path of their advance. According to Muslim historians, more than one and a half million people were butchered at Nishapur in 1221. Almost as many were put to the sword at Herat and Merv.