The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

One task of the U-boats was to place magnetic mines in the sea-lanes around the British Isles; this could also be done by parachute by low-flying Heinkel He-111s and by E-boats (motor torpedo boats) and destroyers. By the end of November these had sunk twenty-nine British ships, including the destroyer HMS Gipsy, and had also put the brand-new cruiser HMS Belfast out of action for three years. Through the immense bravery of bomb-disposal experts Lieutenant-Commanders R. C. Lewis and J. G. D. Ouvry, who removed the two detonators, one of which was ticking audibly, from a mine spotted in the Thames Estuary, the secrets of the steel-hull-activated device were discovered. Within a month, Admiralty scientists had discovered a way of counteracting the mines by fitting electric cables around ships’ hulls, to create a negative magnetic, or ‘degaussed’, field. Soon afterwards a means of blowing up the mines, using wooden-hulled trawlers towing buoyant electrical cables, was also invented.

Another aspect in which Britain did not stand alone in 1940–41 was in the vital help afforded her by foreign pilots. Of the 2,917 pilots who fought with Fighter Command during the battle of Britain, no fewer than 578 – one-fifth – were not British. On that roll of honour there were 145 Poles, 126 New Zealanders, 97 Canadians, 88 Czechs, 33 Australians, 29 Belgians, 25 South Africans, 13 French, 10 Irish, 8 Americans, 3 Rhodesians and a Jamaican.48

At the heart of the Second World War lies a giant and abiding paradox: although the western war was fought in defence of civilization and democracy, and although it needed to be fought and had to be won, the chief victor was a dictator who was as psychologically warped and capable of evil as Adolf Hitler himself.

almost two million Polish Jews in less than two years between early 1942 and late 1943, they needed to use units such as the Reserve Police Battalion 101, which was alone responsible for shooting, or deporting to their deaths, 83,000 people.16 The battalion was mainly made up of middle-aged, respectable working-and middle-class citizens of Hamburg, rather than Nazi ideologues. Peer pressure and a natural propensity for obedience and comradeship, rather than political fervour, seem to have turned these people into mass murderers. Since no fewer than 210 members of the battalion were interviewed in depth in the 1960s, it was possible to ascertain that the recruits of Battalion 101 were not selected for their ideological ardour – only one-quarter were even Nazi Party members – and many joined up largely to avoid active service abroad. They represented a cross-section of German society and no one was coerced into killing Jews or ever punished for refusing to do so. Only a relatively small number of Germans approved of what was happening ‘out east’, yet the rest did not actively disapprove in any way. The vast majority were simply indifferent, and did not want to know. Yet when called upon specifically to help in the genocide, between 80 and 90 percent of Battalion 101 acquiesced without undue complaint. After some initial squeamishness, recounts the historian Christopher Browning, they ‘became increasingly efficient and callous executioners’.17 Only twelve of the battalion’s 5...

Seven tons of human hair were left, which otherwise would have been used in the German textile industry.

The human nature of even the most noble people was warped in the struggle for existence. ‘Only those prisoners could keep alive who . . . had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves,’ recalled Frankl. ‘The best of us did not return.’55 Primo Levi, who somehow survived Auschwitz, likewise explained why it was useless to befriend the weak there, because ‘one knows they are only here on a visit, that in a few weeks nothing will remain of them but a handful of ashes in some nearby field and a crossed-out name on a register.’56

Anything approaching human dignity was next to impossible to retain; as Frankl recalled: It was a favourite practice to detail a new arrival to a work group whose job it was to clean the latrines and remove the sewage. If, as usually happened, some of the excrement splashed into his face during its transport over bumpy fields, any sign of disgust by the prisoner or any attempt to wipe off the filth would only be punished by a blow from the capo. And thus the mortification of normal relations was hastened.58 It was because of experiences like this that another survivor, Elie Wiesel, later a Nobel laureate, was to say in 1983: ‘Auschwitz defies perceptions and imaginations, it submits only to memory. Between the dead and the rest of us there exists an abyss that no talent can comprehend.’59

The Holocaust could not have been carried out without the willing co-operation of scientists, statisticians, demographers and social scientists supporting this ‘radical experiment in social engineering’, all operating in an utter moral vacuum.

The Führer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a deposit [Ablagerung] of the Jewish race. Both have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed. The Führer is a convinced vegetarian, on principle . . . He has little regard for homo sapiens. Man should not feel so superior to animals. He has no reason to.63 The destinies of Europe were therefore being run by a man who – when alone with his closest colleague – predicted that both Christianity and Judaism ‘will be destroyed’ because of their lack of regard for animals, and who had ‘little regard’ for the human race. For those Christians who looked the other way during the Holocaust, or who tacitly supported it because of the supposed collective guilt of the Jews for the death of Christ – who was anyway crucified by Gentiles, in the shape of the Romans – there is some irony in the fact that, had Hitler prevailed, Christianity would eventually have faced its worst purges in Europe since the days of Ancient Rome. (As for Hitler’s love of animals, some half a million horses died during his Operation Barbarossa.)

The Ghetto Uprising

Overall, however, Montgomery husbanded the lives of his men extremely carefully, indeed to the point that he is often criticized for over-caution. ‘Casualties are inevitable in war,’ he would say, ‘but unnecessary casualties are unforgivable.’39

It was about practice, practice, practice (for they knew not what). Then, on the day, it was about the constant monitoring of data–glide paths, magnetic compass deviations, dead reckoning pinpoints, calculations of fuel according to atmosphere and so on. These men were not just beefy brave chaps; they had real brains. Lancasters cannot take off at night in formation and fly low for hundreds of miles, drop an enormous bomb that is spinning at 500 revolutions per minute from exactly the right height and then move on to another target before returning home–all the time under fire from enemy anti-aircraft batteries–without a particular kind of steady, unblinking courage, tenacity and will that is out of the ordinary.29

Alan Brooke was chairing the Chiefs of Staff meeting at the Yusupov Villa the day after the opening session when the Russian Deputy Chief of Staff Alexei Antonov and the Soviet air marshal Sergei Khudyakov ‘pressed the subject of [bombing German] lines of communication and entrainment, specifically via Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden’. In the view of one of those present at Yalta, Hugh Lunghi, who translated for the British Chiefs of Staff during these meetings with the Russians, it was this urgent request ‘to stop Hitler transferring divisions from the west to reinforce his troops in Silesia, blocking the Russian advance on Berlin’ that led to the bombing of Dresden only two days after the conference ended.59 (Of course this did not prevent the Soviets denouncing the bombing as an inhumane Anglo-American war crime forty years later during the Cold War, until it was pointed out to them that it had been they who had requested it.) At the time, however, the bombing of Dresden was not a major issue.

The 2,680 tons of bombs dropped laid waste to over 13 square miles of the city, and many of those killed were women, children, the old and some of the several hundred thousand refugees fleeing from the Red Army, which was only 60 miles to the east. ‘They were . . . suffocated, burnt, baked or boiled,’ writes the military historian Allan Mallinson.61 Nor was ‘boiled’ an exaggeration: piles of corpses had to be pulled out of a giant fire-service water tank where people had jumped to escape the flames but instead were boiled alive.

By February 1945 the Allies had discovered the means to create firestorms, even in cold weather very different from that of Hamburg in July and August 1943. Huge ‘air mines’ known as ‘blockbusters’ were dropped, designed to blow out doors and windows so that the oxygen would flow through easily to feed the flames caused by the incendiary bombs. High-explosive bombs both destroyed buildings and just as importantly kept the fire-fighters down in their shelters. ‘People died not necessarily because they were burnt to death,’ records one writer, ‘but also because the firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the atmosphere.’65 In Dresden, because the sirens were not in proper working order, many of the fire-fighters who had come out after the first wave of bombers were caught out in the open by the second.

‘Why is it legitimate to kill someone using a weapon’, one historian has asked, ‘and a crime to kill those who make the weapons?’66

With his honed political instinct, Churchill could see that the Combined Bomber Offensive would provide a future line of attack against his prosecution of the war, and on 28 March 1945 he wrote to the Chiefs of Staff to put it on record that: It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provisions would have to be made for the Germans themselves. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing . . . I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives . . . rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.68

When Herr Hitler escaped his bomb on July 20th he described his survival as providential; I think that from a purely military point of view we can all agree with him, for certainly it would be most unfortunate if the Allies were to be deprived, in the closing phases of the struggle, of that form of warlike genius by which Corporal Schickelgruber has so notably contributed to our victory. Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, 28 September 19441

‘I salute the brave fighting man of America; I never want to fight alongside better soldiers,’ Montgomery told a press conference at his Zonhoven headquarters on 7 January. ‘I have tried to feel I am almost an American soldier myself so that I might take no unsuitable action to offend them in any way.’40 This encomium made no mention of his fellow generals, however, and his press conference served to inflame tensions among the Anglo-American High Command. Patton and Montgomery had long mutually loathed one another – Patton called Monty ‘that cocky little limey fart’, Monty thought Patton a ‘foul-mouthed lover of war’ – and as the United States overhauled Great Britain in almost every aspect of the war effort, Montgomery found himself unable to face the new situation, and became progressively more anti-American as the United States’ preponderance became more evident. So when on 7 January SHAEF lifted the censorship restrictions it had imposed nearly three weeks before, Montgomery gave his extensive press briefing to a select group of war correspondents. It was a disgraceful performance by anyone’s estimation, including that of his personal staff who were shocked by his ineptitude, or some thought his malice. ‘General Eisenhower placed me in command of the whole northern front,’ boasted Monty. ‘I employed the whole available power of the British group of armies. You have this picture of British troops fighting on both sides of American forces who had suffered a hard blow. Th...

As the V-1’s maximum range was 130 miles, London and south-east England were its main targets, and they suffered heavily. Flown by autopilot from a preset compass, the flying bomb contained in its nose propeller a log which measured the distance flown. Once it reached the correct range, the elevators in the wings were fully deflected and it dived, cutting out the engine as it did so. Part of the terror that V-1s inspired came from the sinister way that the noise of their propulsion suddenly stopped at this preset moment, meaning that they were about to fall on the people below. To hear the noise continue meant that the V-1 would carry on flying overhead, but to hear it stop brought the certainty of an imminent, devastating explosion. It is estimated that about 80 percent of V-1s landed within an 8-mile radius of their targets.

Churchill used the occasion of the destruction of Army Group Centre to make another quip at Hitler’s expense in the House of Commons, saying on 2 August, the tenth anniversary of Hindenberg’s death and thus of Hitler becoming undisputed master of Germany, ‘It may well be that the Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of Herr Hitler – of Corporal Hitler. Even military idiots find it difficult not to see some faults in some of his actions . . . Altogether, I think it is much better to let officers rise up in the proper way.’33

With the Red Army firmly in occupation of Poland, and Soviet divisions threatening Berlin itself when the conference opened, there was effectively nothing that either FDR or Churchill could have done to safeguard political freedom in eastern Europe, and both knew it. Roosevelt certainly tried everything – including straightforward flattery – to try to bring Stalin round to a reasonable stance on any number of important post-war issues, such as the creation of a meaningful United Nations, but he overestimated what his undoubted aristocratic charm could achieve with the homicidal son of a drunken Georgian cobbler.

on Monday, 16 April 1945 around 22,000 guns and mortars rained 2,450 freight-car loads of shells at the German lines, which were also blinded by a mass of searchlights shone at them.80 The Russian gunners had to keep their mouths open when they fired, in order to stop their eardrums bursting.

Although the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not among them, some war crimes were committed by the Allies on the Japanese. George MacDonald Fraser, who fought in the 17th (Black Cat) Indian Division at the siege of Meiktila and the battle of Pyawbwe in Burma, described in his autobiography Quartered Safe Out Here how between twenty and fifty wounded Japanese soldiers had had rocks dropped on them in cold blood by an Indian unit, and explained his own feeling that ‘the notion of crying for redress against the perpetrators (my own comrades-in-arms, Indian soldiers who had gone the mile for us, and we for them), on behalf of a pack of Japs, would have been obnoxious, dishonourable even.’5 American Marines had to face the sight of their dead comrades’ penises having been cut off by the Japanese and stuffed into the corpses’ mouths. This kind of atrocity invited occasional barbaric reprisals, for even those fighting in a good cause can be brutalized by war, but in the view of the military historian Victor Davis Hanson there was ‘a certain American exceptionalism that such barbarism should and usually was to be condemned as deviance rather than accepted as the norm – quite different from the Japanese’.6

‘Wars begin when you will,’ wrote Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince, ‘but they do not end when you please.’

George MacDonald Fraser’s views on the morality of what had happened at Hiroshima echoed those of the vast majority of Britons and Americans at the time, both civilian and military. He pointed out that: We were of a generation to whom Coventry and the London Blitz and Clydebank and Liverpool and Plymouth were more than just names; our country had been hammered mercilessly from the sky, and so had Germany; we had seen the pictures of Belsen and of the frozen horror of the Russian Front; part of our higher education had been dedicated to techniques of killing and destruction; we were not going to lose sleep because the Japanese homeland had taken its turn. If anything, at the time, remembering the kind of war it had been, and the kind of people we, personally, had been up against, we probably felt that justice had been done. But it was of small importance when weighed against the glorious fact that the war was over at last.26

Paul von Kleist even came out with the classic line, ‘I can only say that some of my best friends were Jews’;

it is impossible to divorce Axis strategy from the centrality of Adolf Hitler: of the 650 major legislative orders issued during the war, all but seventy-two were decrees or orders issued in his name or over his signature.17

Yet it should not be for the unhinged dispositions of his troops in the last ten months of his life that the Führer should be principally arraigned, so much as for the disastrous decisions he took when he was (relatively speaking) rational. These were so heinous that he should have committed suicide out of sheer embarrassment over his myriad errors, rather than out of fear of being humiliated by the Russians before his execution.

In all, the United Kingdom lost 379,762 military killed and 475,000 military wounded in the war, with around 65,000 civilians killed.30 ‘For every American who died, the Japanese lost 6 people, the Germans 11, and the Russians 92.’ The figures for every Briton killed are four Japanese, seven Germans and sixty Russians.31 Far from being a cause of embarrassment, of course, it should be a cause of congratulation to Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Brooke that they ended the war with such little (relatively speaking) carnage among their countrymen.

Yet whereas Churchill was fighting for an empire in which by 1945 very many senior British decision-makers besides himself no longer believed, and Stalin for an equally doomed system, before deliberately initiating a Cold War that his country was eventually to lose, Roosevelt fought for a future which actually came to pass, that of United States ‘soft’ hegemony, with military bases around the world, generally unfettered access to global markets, and a Pax Americana that has lasted to the present day. When Churchill told the V-E Day crowds in London ‘This is your victory!’ and they roared back ‘No, it’s yours!’ they would both be proved wrong: in fact it turned out to be the recently deceased President Roosevelt’s.

Analyses of Hitler’s defeat have tended to portray him as a strategic imbecile – ‘Corporal Hitler’ – or otherwise as a madman, but these explanations are clearly not enough. The real reason why Hitler lost the Second World War was exactly the same one that caused him to unleash it in the first place: he was a Nazi.