Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

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After twenty months in which he had denied Rommel support that might have yielded victory, the Führer now chose to reinforce failure. By air and sea, 17,000 German troops and supporting armour moved from Italy into Tunisia, with the acquiescence of its Vichy French resident-general.

It was their good fortune to face the Germans when the Allies had substantial material superiority and the Wehrmacht had suffered debilitating losses in Russia. There is no reason to suppose that any of the battlefield stars of 1942–45 would have fared better than their French and British predecessors, had they borne responsibility for the earlier campaigns of the war. The first requirement of a general eager to forge a great reputation is to lead an army with sufficient strength to overcome its opponents.

Soaring weapons output increased the Red Army’s advantage: the Russians were building more than 1,200 T-34s a month, while the Germans produced only 5,976 Panthers and 1,354 Tigers, their best tanks, during the whole war.

But Russia could endure such losses, and even such clumsy, brutal warmaking. Stalin’s forces were now much larger than those of Hitler, and their superiority was growing steadily: some Soviet weapons systems were better than those of the Wehrmacht. Russian air power was increasingly formidable, as ever more of the Luftwaffe’s declining strength was diverted to defend the Reich from Allied bombers. For a time in the spring of 1943, the Germans looked incapable of holding any line east of the Dnieper, 400 miles from Stalingrad. Indeed, it seemed plausible that Hitler’s Army Groups A and Don could be prevented even from getting back to the river.

Manstein no longer aspired to achieve the Soviet Union’s defeat; he sought only a success which might oblige Stalin to acknowledge stalemate, a strategic outcome that would persuade Moscow to accept a negotiated peace rather than fight to a finish.

Their guerrilla activity made far more impact than that of any western European resistance movement, aided by Moscow’s indifference to Wehrmacht reprisals against the civilian population.

Over half the Soviet territory lost to Hitler since 1941 had been regained. By the end of 1943, the Soviet Union had suffered 77 percent of its total casualties in the entire conflict—something approaching 20 million dead.

South America was the continent least affected by the struggle, though Brazil joined the Allied cause in August 1942 and sent 25,000 of its soldiers to participate—albeit almost invisibly—in the Italian campaign. Most of the nations that escaped involvement were protected by geographical remoteness. Turkey was the most significant state to sustain neutrality, having learned its lesson from rash involvement in World War I on the side of the Central Powers. In Europe, only Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland were fortunate enough to have their sovereignty respected by the belligerents, most for pragmatic reasons. Ireland had gained self-governing dominion status only in 1922, although until 1938 Britain retained control of four strategically important “treaty ports” on its coastline. In 1939–40, as the former mother nation began its struggle for survival against the U-boats, Winston Churchill was tempted by the notion of reasserting by force his country’s claims upon these naval and air bases. He was dissuaded only by fear of the impact on opinion in the United States, where there was a strong Irish lobby.

The Swedes asserted their status with a rigour promoted by proximity to Germany and thus vulnerability to its ill-will: they arrested and imprisoned scores of Allied intelligence agents and informants. Only in 1944–45, when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, did the Stockholm government become more responsive to diplomatic pressure from London and Washington, and less zealous in locking up Allied sympathisers.

Switzerland was a hub of Allied intelligence operations, though the Swiss authorities foreclosed all covert activities they discovered. They also denied sanctuary to Jews fleeing the Nazis, and profited enormously from pocketing funds deposited in Swiss banks by both prominent Nazis and their Jewish victims, which later went unclaimed because the owners perished.

Switzerland provided important technological and industrial support to the Axis war effort, in 1941 increasing its exports to Germany of chemicals by 250 percent, metals by 500 percent. The country became a major receiver of stolen goods from the Nazi pillage of Europe, and banked what the OSS, Washington’s covert operations organisation, categorised as “gigantic sums” of fugitive funds. The Swiss unblinkingly paid to the Nazis the proceeds of life insurance policies held by German Jews, and the Bern government dismissed postwar recriminations about such action as “irrelevant under Swiss law.” Only a fraction of Switzerland’s enormous profits from wartime misappropriations were ever acknowledged, and an even smaller portion paid out to Jewish victims and their families. The war proved good for business in the ice-hearted cantons.

For instance, an Office of War Information poll in mid-1942 found that one-third of Americans expressed willingness to make a separate peace with Germany. A January 1944 opinion survey showed that while 45 percent of British people professed to “hate” the Germans, only 27 percent of Canadians did so.

So too were people whose allegiance was deemed suspect, sometimes grossly unjustly: Britain in 1939 detained all its German residents, including Jewish fugitives from Hitler.

At the outbreak of war, the United States was by no means a homogeneous society. American Jews, for instance, suffered suspicion, if not hostility, from their own countrymen, exemplified by their exclusion from country clubs and other elite social institutions. A wartime survey showed that Jews were mistrusted more than any other identified ethnic group except Italians; a poll in December 1944 showed that while most Americans accepted that Hitler had killed some Jews, they disbelieved reports that he was slaughtering them in millions.

At army recruit John Capano’s training camp in South Carolina, there was a sign outside a local restaurant: “Niggers and Yanks not welcome.” He said, “It was a very white troop, which fought running battles with the blacks in the motor pool.” 1940 witnessed six recorded lynchings of black Americans in the South, four of them in Georgia, and many more floggings, three of them fatal.

The 1942 influx of large numbers of black workers to join the labour force in Detroit provoked vociferous white anger, which in June erupted into serious rioting. The following year witnessed further racial disturbances, in Detroit against blacks and in Los Angeles against Mexicans. The president adopted a notably muted attitude towards the Detroit clash, and indeed until his death remained circumspect about racial issues. The proportion of black workers in war industries rose from 2 percent in 1942 to 8 percent in 1945, but they remained underrepresented.

At the outbreak of war even many white Americans, immigrants or children of immigrants, defined themselves in terms of the old-world national group to which they belonged, notably including almost 5 million Italian-Americans: until December 1941, their community newspapers hailed Mussolini as a giant. One published letter writer applauded the German invasion of Poland, and predicted that, “as the Roman legions did under Caesar, the New Italy will go forth and conquer.” Even when their country declared war on Mussolini, many Italian-Americans hoped for a U.S. victory that somehow avoided imposing an Italian defeat.

By 1945, however, an immense change had taken place. The shared experience of conflict, and especially of military service, accelerated a remarkable integration of America’s national groupings.

Between 1942 and 1945, millions of his compatriots of recent immigrant stock discovered for the first time a shared nationalism.

Despite the legend of Dutch sympathy promoted by Anne Frank’s diary, Holland’s policemen proved more ruthless than their French counterparts, dispatching a higher proportion of their country’s Jews to deportation and death.

France was riven by internal dissensions. Especially in the early years of occupation, there was widespread support for the Vichy government, and thus for collaboration with Germany.

Some 25,000 Frenchmen served as volunteers in the SS Westland Division. Though the colonial authorities in a handful of France’s African possessions “rallied” to de Gaulle in London, most did not. Even after the United States entered the war, French soldiers, sailors and airmen continued to resist the Allies. In May 1942, when the British invaded Vichy Madagascar to preempt a possible Japanese descent on the strategic island, there was protracted fighting.

Clashes at sea made it necessary for the Royal Navy to sink a French frigate and three submarines; in the Madagascar shore campaign, 171 of the defenders were killed and 343 wounded, while the British lost 105 killed and 283 wounded.

The defenders of Madagascar finally surrendered only on 5 November 1942. Once again, few prisoners chose to join de Gaulle. Everywhere Vichy held sway, the French treated captured Allied servicemen and civilian internees with callousness, and sometimes brutality.

Even in November 1942, when it was becoming plain that the Allies would win the war, the resistance offered by French troops shocked Americans landing in North Africa.

In mainland France, the Resistance enjoyed support from only a small minority of people until the Germans’ 1943 introduction of forced labour persuaded many young men to flee to join maquis groups, for which they afterwards fought with varying degrees of enthusiasm. To challenge the occupiers was difficult and highly dangerous. Given the strong French tradition of anti-Semitism, there was little appetite for assisting Jews to escape the death camps. Much of France’s aristocracy collaborated with the Germans, as well as with the Vichy regime which governed central and southern France until the Germans took them over in November 1942.

Elsewhere, some small countries showed bolder defiance than did the French. The Danes, alone among European societies, refused to participate in the deportation of their Jews, almost all of whom survived. Few of the 293,000 people of the tiny Grand Duchy of Luxembourg welcomed its incorporation into Hitler’s empire. During the 1940 German invasion, seven of Luxembourg’s eighty-seven defenders were wounded; the ruling family and ministers escaped to London to form a government in exile. When a plebiscite on the German occupation was held in October 1941, 97 percent of the population declared their opposition. Berlin shrugged off this vote, declared all Luxemburgers German citizens, and began conscripting them into the Wehrmacht. They responded by calling a general strike, which was broken by the execution of twenty-one trades unionists and the deportation of hundreds more to concentration camps. It would be mistaken to idealise Luxembourg’s resistance to the Nazis: its postwar government convicted 10,000 citizens of collaboration, and 2,848 Luxemburgers died in German uniform. But most of the duchy’s people made plain their rejection of Nazi hegemony.

Farther east, large numbers of Ukrainians and citizens of the Baltic states enlisted in the Wehrmacht, disliking Stalin’s Soviet Union more than the Nazis. Ukrainians provided many of the guards for Hitler’s death camps, and in February 1944 Nikolai Vatutin, one of Stalin’s best generals, was killed by anti-Soviet Ukrainian partisans who attacked his vehicle.

Perhaps the most exotic formations in Hitler’s armies were the 13th and 23rd SS Divisions, largely composed of Bosnian Muslims and led by German officers; for parade appearances, these men wore the tasselled fez.

The Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians suffered appallingly from 1942 onwards, as the Japanese pillaged their countries: elderly Vietnamese later said that their experiences were worse than those of their later wars of independence.

Denied their own produce, local people began to starve on a staggering scale. In Tonkin, by 1945 at least 1.5 million Vietnamese, and perhaps many more, had died of hunger in an area which before the war was the world’s third-largest grower of rice. The French colonial authorities suppressed local protests and insurrections with a brutality the Japanese could not have surpassed.

Many people in Burma, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, together with more than a few in the Philippines, at first welcomed the invading Japanese as liberators. Even ardent foes of European imperialism were soon disillusioned, however, by the arrogance and institutionalised brutality of their new masters. Examples are legion: far more local people died as slaves on the notorious Burma Railway than did Allied prisoners. Of almost 80,000 Malays sent to work there, nearly 30,000 perished, alongside 14,000 whites; the rail link also cost the lives of 100,000 Burmese, Indians and Chinese. When cholera broke out at Nieke on the Burma-Thailand border, infecting large numbers of Tamils performing forced labour on the railway, the Japanese set fire to a barracks housing 150 stricken patients.

A minimum of 5 million people in Southeast Asia died in the course of the war, many of them in the Dutch East Indies, either at Japanese hands or as a result of starvation imposed by Tokyo’s diversion of food and crops to feed its own people.

The jewel in the crown of Britain’s empire, second only to China as the largest and most populous landmass in Asia, became a huge supplier of textiles and equipment to the Allies. It manufactured 1 million blankets for the British Army—the wool clip of 60 million sheep—together with 41 million items of military uniform, 2 million parachutes and 16 million pairs of boots. It was a source of fury to Churchill that India’s sterling balances—the debt owed by Britain to the subcontinent in payment for goods supplied—soared on the strength of this output. “Winston burbled away endlessly,” wrote India Secretary Leo Amery on 16 September 1942, “that it was monstrous to expect that we should not only defend India and then have to clear out, but be left to pay hundreds of millions for the privilege.”

THE MOST SERIOUS BLOT upon the wartime Raj, and arguably upon Britain’s entire war effort, was the 1943–44 Bengal famine. The loss of Burma deprived India of 15 percent of its food supplies. When a series of floods and cyclones—natural catastrophes to which low-lying East Bengal is chronically vulnerable—struck the region, wrecking its 1942 harvest, the population fell prey to desperate hunger. Much transport was destroyed, further impeding movement of food supplies.

In 1943, sailings to Indian Ocean destinations were cut by 60 percent, as shipping was diverted to sustain Allied amphibious operations, aid to Russia and Atlantic convoys; the British cabinet met only 25 percent of Delhi’s requested food deliveries.

There was no doubt of the logistical difficulties the British faced in assuaging the consequences of natural disaster while fighting a great war. But Churchill responded to Wavell’s increasingly urgent and forceful pleas for aid with a brutal insensitivity which left an irreparable scar on Anglo-Indian relations.

But posterity can see the irony that while Britain fought the Axis in the name of freedom, to retain control of India it practised ruthless governance without popular consent, and adopted some of the methods of totalitarianism. Britain’s wartime treatment of its subject races remained humane by German or Japanese standards; there were no arbitrary executions or wholesale massacres. But India was not the only imperial possession in which the exigencies of emergency were used to justify neglect, cruelty and injustice. In 1943, famines afflicted Kenya, Tanganyika and British Somaliland; at various moments there were food riots in Tehran, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus. While these were caused by circumstances of war, the imperial power was parsimonious in apportioning resources to alleviate their consequences.

Though Mao deluded some Americans into supposing that his guerrillas were making war effectively, for much of the conflict he maintained a tacit truce with the Japanese, and indeed became secret partners with them in the opium trade. While the Nationalists recorded 3.2 million military casualties during the Japanese occupation, the communists acknowledged only 580,000. Latterly, Chiang devoted as much military energy to holding his ground against Mao as to fighting the Japanese. He was unembarrassed by his own equivocations. He said: “The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the communists are a disease of the heart.”

Nonetheless, the occupation of half of China constituted a massive drain upon Tokyo’s resources, and cost Japan 202,958 dead between 1941 and 1945, compared with 208,000 men killed fighting the British, and 485,717 army and 414,879 naval personnel lost in combat with the United States.

The Japanese were the only large-scale wartime users of biological weapons.

Thousands of captive Chinese were murdered in the course of tests at 731’s base near Harbin, many being subjected to vivisection without benefit of anaesthetics. Some victims were tied to stakes before anthrax bombs were detonated around them. Women were laboratory-infected with syphilis; local civilians were abducted and injected with fatal viruses. In the course of Japan’s war in China, cholera, dysentery, plague and typhus germs were broadcast, most often from the air, sometimes using porcelain bombs to deliver plague fleas. An unsuccessful attempt was made to employ such means against American forces on Saipan, but the ship carrying the putative insect warriors was sunk en route.

That the Japanese attempted to kill millions of people with biological weapons is undisputed; it is less certain, however, how successful were their efforts. Vast numbers of Chinese died in epidemics between 1936 and 1945, and modern China attributes most of these losses to Japanese action. In a broad sense this is just, since privation and starvation were consequences of Japanese aggression. But it remains unproven that Unit 731’s operations were directly responsible. For instance, over 200,000 people died during the 1942 cholera epidemic in Yunnan. The Japanese released cholera bacteria in the province, but many such epidemics took place even where they did not do so.

Between 1942 and 1944 big battlefield encounters in China were rare, but Japanese forces conducted frequent punitive expeditions to suppress dissent or gather food.

Not only Japanese nationalists, but also some modern Western historians, argue that the United States provoked Japan into war in 1941. They suggest that conflict between the two nations was avoidable, and propound a theory of moral equivalence, whereby Japanese wartime conduct was no worse than that of the Allies. But the Japanese waged an expansionist war in China, massacring countless civilians, for years before President Roosevelt imposed economic sanctions.

The record shows that Japanese conduct in China was both wholly self-interested and shamelessly barbaric. But sufficient numbers of Japanese remained convinced of their nation’s “civilising mission” and of the legitimacy of their claims upon an overseas empire to render their government implacably opposed to withdrawal from China, even when Japan began to lose the war and to ponder negotiating positions.

While European imperialism was indisputably exploitative, the Japanese claimed rights to pillage Asian societies on a scale and in a fashion no colonial regime had matched.

The U.S. Navy in the last two years of the war projected long-range power such as the world had never seen, and grew larger than all the other combatant navies put together.

If the Allies had confronted their foe on a major landmass where there was scope for motorised manoeuvre, they would have achieved victory much more quickly: overwhelming U.S. superiority in tanks, artillery and air power would have smashed the relatively primitive Japanese army, as did the Russians in Manchuria in August 1945.