Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

German savagery reconciled Stalin’s nation to the savagery of its own leaders:

Hitler’s invasion united tens of millions of Russians who had hitherto been alienated by ideological and racial differences, purges, famines, institutionalised injustice and incompetence. The “Great Patriotic War” Stalin had declared became a reality that accomplished more for the cohesion and motivation of his peoples than any other event since the 1917 revolution.

THE BRITISH PEOPLE, awed by Russian resistance, embraced the Soviet Union as an ally with an enthusiasm that dismayed and even frightened their own ruling caste.

Whatever the merits of the Russian people’s struggle to expel the invaders from their country, Stalin’s war aims were as selfish and inimical to human liberty as those of Hitler. Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust.

There was limited animosity towards the Axis, and some active support for Hitler in German ethnic communities. A Princeton poll on 30 August 1939 found that while 68 percent of Americans thought that U.S. citizens should not be permitted to enlist in the Wehrmacht, 26 percent believed they should retain that option.

A Roper poll in September 1939 asked how the U.S. should frame policy towards the warring nations. Among respondents, 37.5 percent favoured eschewing partisanship, but continuing to sell goods to all parties on a cash-and-carry basis; some 23.6 percent opposed any commercial traffic with any combatant; just 16.1 percent favoured a modification of neutrality to offer aid to Britain and France if they were threatened with defeat. Interventionism enjoyed most support in the southern and western states.

Posterity is assured that no American was better qualified to direct the nation through the greatest emergency in world history, but an insistent minority of Roosevelt’s countrymen, notably including the business community, rejected this proposition at the time. Donald Nelson, who later became overlord of America’s industrial mobilisation, wrote: “Who among us except the President of the United States really saw the magnitude of the job ahead? … All the people I met and talked to, including members of the General Staff, the Army and Navy’s highest ranking officers, distinguished statesmen and legislators, thought of the defensive program only as a means of equipping ourselves to keep the enemy away from the shores of the United States.”

Many intellectuals disdained Europe’s war because they perceived it as a struggle between rival imperialisms, a view reflected in Quincy Howe’s 1937 tract England Expects Every American to Do His Duty. They found it easier to contemplate an explicitly American crusade against fascism than one that allied them with the old European nations, recoiling from association with the preservation of the British, and for that matter French and Dutch, empires. They disliked the notion that the honour and virtue of the United States should be contaminated by association. They questioned whether a war fought in harness with old Tories could be dignified as a moral undertaking. The left-wing Partisan Review asserted: “Our entry into the war, under the slogan of ‘Stop Hitler!’ would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here.”

Meanwhile, the Tripartite Pact signed by Germany, Italy and Japan strengthened American public perceptions of a common evil threatening the world: the United States and Britain now found themselves two among only a dozen surviving democracies. An October opinion poll showed 59 percent American support for material aid to Churchill’s people, even at the risk of war. But isolationism remained a critical force in the 1940 presidential race. Though Republican candidate Wendell Willkie was at heart an interventionist, during the campaign his rhetoric was stridently hostile to belligerence.

blood spared many British and American lives. The March 1941 Lend-Lease Act authorised credit deliveries: only 1 percent of munitions used by Churchill’s forces that year was Lend-Lease material, but thereafter the programme provided most of the island’s food and fuel, together with a large part of its armed forces’ tanks, transport aircraft and amphibious operations equipment. The British focused their own industrial production on combat aircraft, warships, army weapons and vehicles. From 1941 onwards, they were almost wholly dependent upon American credit to pay for their war effort. Though

A much higher proportion of people favoured stern action against the Japanese, a policy most conspicuously manifested in the July 1941 freeze on Japanese assets and embargo on all exports, which was decisive in committing Tokyo to fight, since 80 percent of its oil supplies came from the United States and the Dutch East Indies. The embargo was far more popular at home than Roosevelt’s escalation of the U.S. Navy’s role in the Battle of the Atlantic

Even after war was declared in December 1941, and indeed until the end of hostilities, few Americans felt anything like the animosity towards Germans that they displayed against the Japanese. This was not merely a matter of racial sentiment. There was also passionate sympathy for the horrors China had experienced, and continued to experience, at Japanese hands. Most Americans deplored what the Nazis were doing to the world, but would have remained unenthusiastic or indeed implacably hostile about sending armies to Europe, had not Hitler forced the issue.

Though the Japanese dominated the China war against the corrupt regime and ill-equipped armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, they suffered debilitating attrition, including 185,000 dead by the end of 1941. Even a huge deployment of manpower—a million Japanese soldiers remained in China until 1945—proved unable to force a decisive outcome upon either Chiang’s Nationalists or the communists of Mao Tse-tung, whose forces they confronted and sometimes engaged across a front of 2,000 miles.

Japan’s 1941–42 military triumphs caused the Western Allies to overrate its army, as they might not have done had they known of a significant earlier clash, which it had suited both parties to cloak in secrecy. In the summer of 1939, skirmishes between the Japanese and Russian armies on their common border dividing Manchuria from Mongolia erupted into full-scale war, commonly known as the Nomonhan Incident. Since the beginning of the century, powerful voices in Japan had urged imperialist expansion into Siberia. In the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, for some time Japanese forces deployed there, hoping to stake claims which could later be formalised. Only the belated decision of the Western powers to support a stabilised, unified Soviet Union caused them to withdraw. In 1939, Tokyo judged the Russians weak and vulnerable, and committed an army to test their resolve. The outcome was a disaster for the Japanese.

Japan’s soldiers had remarkable powers of physical endurance, matched by willingness for sacrifice. The army had good air support, but was seriously deficient in tanks and artillery. The country’s industrial and scientific base was much too weak to support a sustained conflict against the United States. Germany and Japan never seriously coordinated strategy or objectives, partly because they had few in common beyond defeat of the Allies, and partly because they were geographically remote from each other. Hitler’s racial principles caused him to recoil from association with the Japanese, and only grudgingly to acknowledge them as his cobelligerents. It is just possible that, if Japan had struck west into Russia soon after the German invasion of June 1941, such a blow would have turned the scale against Stalin, making possible Axis victory, and delaying if not averting a showdown with the United States.

Given that Japan could not invade the United States, American power must ultimately prove irresistible by a nation with only 10 percent of U.S. industrial capacity and dependent on imports for its existence.

But it was a conspicuous feature of the war that again and again, dramatic changes of circumstance unmanned the victims of assault. The British and French in May 1940, the Russians in June 1941, even the Germans in Normandy in June 1944, had every reason to anticipate enemy action, yet responded inadequately when this came, and there were many lesser examples.

Adm. Husband Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, respectively navy and army commanders at Pearl Harbor, were unquestionably negligent. But their conduct reflected an institutional failure of imagination which extended up the entire U.S. command chain to the White House, and inflicted a trauma on the American people.

Yet fortunately for the Allied cause, American vulnerability at Hawaii was matched by a Japanese timidity which would become an astonishingly familiar phenomenon of the Pacific conflict. Again and again, Japanese fleets fought their way to the brink of important victories, then lacked either the will or the means to follow through.

The core reality was that Nagumo’s attack sufficed to shock, maul and enrage the Americans, but not to decisively cripple their war-fighting capability. It was thus a grossly misconceived operation. From 7 December 1941 the United States became unshakeably committed to total war, total victory. The legend of the “Day of Infamy” united the American people as belligerents in a fashion no lesser provocation could have achieved.

For many months, Winston Churchill had been haunted by apprehension that Japan might attack only the European empires in Asia, so that Britain would confront a new enemy without gaining the United States as an ally. Hitler meanwhile contemplated a mirror image of this spectre, fearing that America might enter the war against Germany, while Japan stayed neutral. He had always expected to fight Roosevelt’s people once he had completed the destruction of Russia.

As a corollary of this, once Russia’s survival and fighting power became plain in 1943, the American chiefs of staff felt able to divert significant strength to the Pacific sooner than expected; popular sentiment, so much more hostile to Japan than Germany, made this politically expedient as well as strategically acceptable.

For years to come, Russia must bear the chief burden of fighting the Wehrmacht. Even if, as the U.S. chiefs of staff wished, the Western Allies launched an early diversionary landing in France, their armies would remain relatively small until 1944.

Churchill had made a brutal and probably inescapable decision to concentrate the best of the empire’s forces in the Middle East. The air defence of Malaya mustered just 145 aircraft, of which 66 were Buffaloes, 57 Blenheims and 22 Hudsons. The obsolesence of most of these aircraft was less significant than the overwhelming superiority of Japanese pilots in experience and proficiency to those of the Allies.

The behaviour of British communities in Malaya and later Burma was rational enough: word had reached Southeast Asia about the orgy of rape and massacre which accompanied the fall of Hong Kong at the end of December. But the spectacle of white rulers succumbing to panic mocked the myth of benign imperial paternalism.

Yamashita once delivered a speech in which he asserted that, while his own people were descended from gods, Europeans were descended from monkeys. British racism in Southeast Asia was now eclipsed by that of the Japanese. Tokyo’s new regime was characterised by a brutality such as the evicted imperialists, whatever their shortcomings, had never displayed.

Soldiers of all nations, in all wars, are sometimes guilty of atrocities. An important distinction can be made, however, between armies in which acts of barbarism represent a break with regulations and the norm, and those in which they are indulged or even incited by commanders. The Japanese were prominent among the latter.

The federal budget soared from $9 billion in 1939 to $100 billion in 1945, and in the same period America’s GNP grew from $91 to $166 billion. The index of industrial production rose 96 percent, and 17 million new jobs were created. Some 6.5 million additional women entered the U.S. labour force between 1942 and 1945, and their wages grew by over 50 percent; sales of women’s clothing doubled.

Antitrust legislation was thrust aside by the pressures of war demand: America’s hundred largest companies, which in 1941 were responsible for 30 percent of national manufacturing output, generated 70 percent by 1943. The administration overcame its scruples about monopolists who could deliver tanks, planes, and ships.

1944, while British domestic production of consumer goods had fallen by 45 percent from its prewar levels, that of the United States had risen by 15 percent.

Among the worst rackets uncovered was that of a primary war contractor, National Bronze and Aluminum Foundry Company of Cleveland, which knowingly sold scrap metal as parts for fighter engines; four of its executives were jailed. The U.S. Cartridge Company of St. Louis issued millions of rounds of defective ammunition, though such chicanery could cost lives.

To put the matter bluntly, U.S. soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor showed themselves more stalwart than British imperial forces in Malaya and at Singapore, albeit likewise in a doomed cause.

Among U.S. naval aircraft, the Coral Sea battle showed that the Dauntless dive-bomber was alone up to its job, not least in having adequate endurance. The Devastator was “a real turkey,” in the words of a flier, further handicapped by high fuel consumption.

A most un-American reluctance to learn from experience meant that this fault, afflicting submarine as much as air operations, was not fully corrected until 1943.

The Japanese began the war at sea with a corps of highly experienced seamen armed with the Long Lance torpedo, the most effective weapon of its kind in the world. Their radar sets were poor, and many ships lacked them altogether. They lagged woefully in intelligence gathering, but excelled at night operations, and in early gunnery duels often shot straighter than Americans. Their superb Zero fighters increased combat endurance and speed by forgoing cockpit armour and self-sealing fuel tanks. The superiority of Japanese naval air in 1942 makes all the more astonishing the outcome of the next phase of the war in the Pacific.

Yamamoto may have been a clever and sympathetic personality, but the epic clumsiness of the Midway plan emphasised his shortcomings. It required him to divide his strength; worse, it reflected characteristic Japanese hubris, by discounting even the possibility of American foreknowledge.

By one of the war’s most brilliant feats of intelligence work, Cmdr. Joseph Rochefort at Pearl Harbor used fragmentary Ultra decrypts to identify Midway as Nagumo’s objective. On 28 May the Japanese switched their naval codes, which thereafter defied Rochefort’s cryptographers for weeks. By miraculous luck, however, this happened just too late to frustrate the breakthrough that betrayed Yamamoto’s Midway plan.

Each island action was tiny in scale by the standards of the European theatre: at the peak of the Guadalcanal battle, no more than 65,000 Americans and Japanese were engaged with each other ashore, while 40,000 more men served on warships and transports at sea. But the intensity of the struggle, and the conditions in which the combatants were obliged to subsist amid swamps, rain, heat, disease, insects, crocodiles, snakes and short rations caused the Pacific battlefield experience to become one of the worst of the war.

The Japanese, by contrast, laid bare their limitations, especially a shortage of competent commanders. Even during Japan’s victory season, while Yamashita conducted operations in Malaya with verve and skill, the campaigns in Burma and the Philippines suggested that his peers lacked initiative. When defending a position, their ethic of absolute conformity to orders had its uses; but in attack, commanders often acted unimaginatively. Man for man, the Japanese soldier was more aggressive and conditioned to hardship than his Allied counterpart: British general Bill Slim characterised the enemy condescendingly as “the greatest fighting insect in the world.” Until 1945, Hirohito’s men displayed exceptional night-fighting skills. Collectively, however, the Japanese army had nothing like the combat power of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army—or the U.S. Marine Corps.

It was a reflection of the fantastic Japanese capacity for self-delusion that, after their first stunning wave of conquests, their army commanders proposed establishing small garrisons to hold their island bases, while redeploying most of their troops to China—which they regarded as their nation’s main theatre of war. Short of trained manpower, they had scraped the barrel for forces to conduct the Southeast Asia and Pacific island offensives; the long China campaign had weakened and demoralised the army even before Pearl Harbor took place. Thereafter, Japan’s generals were obliged to find soldiers from a shrinking pool, then dispatch them into battle with barely three months’ training. Japanese strategy had been rooted in a conviction that the United States would treat for peace after a brisk battlefield drubbing. When this hope was disappointed, the army spent the rest of the war struggling to defend Nippon’s overblown empire with inadequate means and inferior technology.

At the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands on 26 October, the Japanese lost over a hundred aircraft and the Americans seventy-four, more than the rival air forces on any day of the Battle of Britain.

Only the Americans’ possession of Henderson Field enabled them to deploy sufficient air power to compensate for their depleted carrier force. The men who fought at sea and in the air off Guadalcanal in the latter months of 1942 experienced a sustained intensity of naval surface warfare unmatched at any other period of the struggle.

EVEN AS THE MARINES were fighting on Guadalcanal, the most protracted land campaign of the Far Eastern war was unfolding on Papua New Guinea

Most British battleships were old, slow and could not be adapted for bulky modern fire-control equipment. The Dutch navy’s triaxially stabilised Hazemeyer system represented the most advanced antiaircraft gunnery technology in the world, to which the Royal Navy gained access in 1940. It was fragile and unreliable, however, and a British version entered general service only in 1945;

In the course of the entire war, while 6.1 percent of Allied shipping losses were inflicted by surface raiders and 6.5 percent by mines, 13.4 percent were caused by air attack and 70 percent by U-boats.

But the submarine force commanded by Dönitz was weak. Germany’s prewar industrial planning envisaged a fleet which achieved full warfighting capability only in 1944. Naval construction was skewed by a focus on big ships: a hundred U-boats could have been built with the steel lavished on the Bismarck.

Until June 1940, Dönitz did not anticipate waging a major campaign in the Atlantic, because he was denied means to do so; the small, short-range Type VII U-boats that dominated his armoury were designed to operate from German bases. Even when the strategic picture radically changed with Hitler’s seizure of Norway and of France’s Atlantic ports, the Kriegsmarine continued to build Type VIIs. Productivity in German shipyards, hampered by shortages of steel and skilled labour, and later by bombing, fell below British levels. U-boats remained technically primitive. Innovation—for instance, the 1944–45 snorkel underwater air-replenishment system—was not matched by reliability: the revolutionary Type XXI sailed on its first war patrol only on 30 April 1945. Thus, Dönitz’s force lacked mass, range and quality. Just as the Luftwaffe in 1940–41 attempted to deal a knockout blow to Britain with wholly inadequate resources, so the U-boat arm lacked strength to accomplish the severance of the Atlantic link. Germany never built anything like enough submarines to make them a war-winning weapon.

Dönitz calculated that he needed to sink 600,000 tons of British shipping a month to achieve a decisive victory, for which he required 300 U-boats in commission to sustain a third of that number in operational areas. Yet only 13 U-boats were on station in August 1940, falling to 8 in January 1941, rising to 21 the following month. This small force inflicted impressive destruction: 2 million tons of British shipping were sunk between June 1940 and March 1941. But in the same period just 72 new U-boats were delivered, far short of the number Dönitz needed. They achieved their highest rate of productivity—measured by tonnage sunk per submarine at sea—in October 1940; thereafter, while many more boats were deployed, their pro-rata achievements diminished.

German torpedo technology was almost as flawed as that of the 1942–43 U.S. Navy.

It is a remarkable and important statistic that 99 percent of all ships which sailed from North America to Britain during the war years arrived safely.