Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict.

So widespread is a modern Western perception that the war was fought about Jews that it should be emphasised this was not the case. Though Hitler and his followers chose to blame the Jews for the troubles of Europe and the grievances of the Third Reich, Germany’s struggle with the Allies was about power and hemispheric dominance. The plight of the Jewish people under Nazi occupation loomed relatively small in the wartime perceptions of Churchill and Roosevelt, and less surprisingly in that of Stalin. About one-seventh of all fatal victims of Nazism, and almost one-tenth of all wartime dead, ultimately proved to have been Jews. But at the time their persecution was viewed by the Allies merely as one fragment of the collateral damage caused by Hitler, as indeed Russians still see the Holocaust today. The limited attention paid to the Jewish predicament by the wartime Allies was a source of frustration and anger to informed coreligionists at the time, and has prompted powerful indignation since. But it is important to recognise that between 1939 and 1945 the Allied nations saw the struggle overwhelmingly in terms of the threat posed by the Axis to their own interests, though Churchill defined these in generous and noble terms.

The nature of battlefield experience varied from nation to nation, service to service. Within armies, riflemen experienced far higher levels of risk and hardship than millions of support troops. The U.S. armed forces suffered an overall death rate of just five per thousand men enlisted; the vast majority of those who served faced perils no greater than those of ordinary civilian life. While 17,000 American combat casualties lost limbs, during the war years 100,000 workers at home became amputees as a result of industrial accidents.

It may be useful to explain how this book was written. I began by rereading Gerhard Weinburg’s A World at Arms and Total War by Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard, probably the two best single-volume histories of the war. I then composed a skeleton narrative, setting the most important events in sequence, and laid upon it the flesh of anecdotage and my own reflections. When I had completed a draft, I revisited some other outstanding recent accounts of the conflict: Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, Allan Millett and Williamson Murray’s A War to Be Won and Michael Burleigh’s Moral Combat. I then reviewed my own comments and conclusions in the light of theirs.

Poland became the only nation occupied by Hitler in which there was no collaboration between the conquerors and the conquered. The Nazis henceforth classified Poles as slaves, and received in return implacable hatred.

Before peace came, accidents in the blackout killed more people than did the Luftwaffe: in the last four months of 1939 there were 4,133 deaths on the roads, 2,657 of these pedestrians, a figure almost double that for the same period in 1938.

German, British and French commanders, alike surprised to find themselves fighting in Norway, were alike reduced to assembling intelligence about the battlefield by buying Baedeker travel guides from their local bookshops in Berlin, London and Paris.

Very few Frenchmen in 1940 and afterwards followed the example set by tens of thousands of Poles—fighting on in exile, even after their country had been defeated. Only in 1943–44, when it became plain that the Allies would win the war and German occupation had proved intolerably oppressive, did French people in large numbers offer significant assistance to the Anglo-Americans. In the years of Britain’s lonely defiance, French forces offered determined resistance to Churchill’s armies and fleets wherever in the world they encountered them.

By launching an air assault on Britain, Hitler adopted the worst possible strategic compromise: as master of the Continent, he believed a modest further display of force would suffice to precipitate its surrender. Yet if, instead, he had left Churchill’s people to stew on their island, the prime minister would have faced great difficulties in sustaining national morale and a charade of strategic purpose. A small German contingent dispatched to support the Italian attack on Egypt that autumn would probably have sufficed to expel Britain from the Middle East; Malta could easily have been taken. Such humiliations would have dealt heavy blows to the credibility of Churchill’s policy of fighting on.

Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory served his country wonderfully well in 1940–41, but thereafter it would reveal important limitations. He sought the preservation of British imperial greatness, the existing order, and this purpose would not suffice for most of his fellow countrymen. They yearned for social change, improvements in their domestic condition of a kind which seemed to the prime minister almost frivolous amid a struggle for global mastery.

Even in the sunshine days of Mussolini’s relationship with Hitler, such was the Nazis’ contempt for their ally that 350,000 Italian workers in Germany were treated little better than slaves; Rome’s ambassador in Berlin was obliged to devote most of his energies to pleading for some amelioration of their working conditions.

“Many, perhaps most Germans, and certainly most German intellectuals, saw the First World War as a battle for cultural survival against the converging forces of Russian barbarism and, far more subversive, the decadent civilisation of the West, embodied no longer by French aristocrats but by the materialist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world. This belief was taken over in its entirety by the Nazis and provided the bedrock of their own philosophy.”

A total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders—more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war.

“How then shall I end this war?” Todt replied that only a political outcome was feasible. Hitler dismissed such logic. He chose to convince himself that the imminent accession of Japan to the Axis would transform the balance of strength in Germany’s favour. But the November diary of army chief of staff Franz Halder records other remarks by Hitler that acknowledged the implausibility of absolute triumph. For the rest of the war, those responsible for Germany’s economic and industrial planning fulfilled their roles in the knowledge that strategic success was unattainable.

Many more months elapsed before the Allies saw that the tide of war had turned. In 1942, the Axis would enjoy spectacular successes. But it is a critical historical reality that senior functionaries of the Third Reich realised as early as December 1941 that military victory had become unattainable, because Russia remained undefeated. Some thereafter sustained hopes that Germany might negotiate an acceptable peace. But they, and perhaps Hitler also in the innermost recesses of his brain, knew the decisive strategic moment had passed.

To discourage desertion, the Red Army adopted a new tactic: dispatching groups of men towards the German lines with their hands in the air, who then tossed a shower of grenades. This was designed to provoke the Germans to fire on others who attempted to surrender in earnest.

The ruthlessness of the Soviet state was indispensable to confound Hitler. No democracy could have established as icily rational a hierarchy of need as did Stalin, whereby soldiers received the most food; civilian workers less; and “useless mouths,” including the old, only a starvation quota. More than 2 million Russians died of hunger during the war in territories controlled by their own government.

War at sea was statistically much less dangerous than it was ashore for all participants, save for such specialists as aviators and submariners. Conflict was impersonal: sailors seldom glimpsed the faces of their enemies. The fate of every ship’s crew was overwhelmingly at the mercy of its captain’s competence, judgement—and luck. Seamen of all nations suffered crampled living conditions and much boredom, but peril intervened only in spasms. Individuals were called upon to display fortitude and commitment, but seldom enjoyed the opportunity to choose whether or not to be brave. That was a privilege reserved for their commanders, who issued the orders determining the movements of ships and fleets. The overwhelming majority of sailors, performing technical functions aboard huge seagoing war machines, made only tiny, indirect personal contributions to killing their enemies.

Yet even on such fare, the Wehrmacht remained a formidable fighting force. Most of Germany’s generals, in the dark recesses of their souls, knew that they had made their nation and its entire army—it was a myth that only the SS committed atrocities—complicit in crimes against humanity, and especially Russian humanity, such as their enemies would never forgive, even before the Holocaust began. They saw nothing to lose by fighting on, except more millions of lives: it deserves emphasis that a large majority of the war’s victims perished from 1942 onwards. Only victories might induce the Allies to make terms.

The great Duke of Wellington justly remarked, “Believe me, not every man who wears a military uniform is a hero.” In all armies, soldiers serving with forward combat units shared a contempt for the much larger number of men in the rear areas who fulfilled roles in which they faced negligible risk: the infantry bore 90 percent of global army casualties. An American or British rifleman who entered France in June 1944 faced a 60 percent prospect of being killed or wounded before the end of the campaign, rising to 70 percent for officers. Armoured and artillery units suffered much smaller proportionate losses, and those in the huge logistics “tail” were exposed to no greater statistical risk of death or mishap than industrial workers at home.

For every pound of supplies the Japanese transported to their island garrisons, many of whom—at Rabaul, for instance—spent the second half of the war engaged in subsistence vegetable gardening rather than combat operations, the United States shipped two tons to its own forces. American reluctance to feed their men on local supplies was increased by the shortcomings of some nations’ canning processes: eight U.S. airmen died in an outbreak of botulism after eating Australian tinned beetroot. American specialists were thereupon dispatched to raise local standards. Maj. Belford Seabrook, of the famous New Jersey agribusiness, introduced its principles to Australia. Coca-Cola established forty-four bottling plants in theatres of war, which produced 95 percent of all soft drinks sold in camp PXs.

After Pearl Harbor, there was an interval of thirty months—a long time in the context of a seventy-one-month war—before America’s military and industrial mobilisation translated into large armies deployed on European battlefields, though U.S. air and maritime power impacted sooner. Most of the soldiers who later fought in northwest Europe enjoyed the luxury—and endured the boredom—of more than two years’ training before being committed to action: the majority of U.S. formations did not see their first battlefield until 1944.

The North African campaign established the reputations of the Allied commanders who would dominate the big western campaigns in Europe—“Monty,” Alexander, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley. 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.

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. The daughter of a rich French Holocaust victim, Estelle Sapir, said later: “My father was able to protect his money from the Nazis, but not from the Swiss.” 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.

It was a source of embarrassment to thoughtful politicians that in 1942, in the midst of a war against tyranny, some fifty battalions of troops—more than were then committed against the Japanese—had to be deployed to maintain internal control of India. It may be argued that there were overwhelming practical objections against surrendering power to Congress when the Japanese army stood at the gates. But it was among the ugliest aspects of British conduct of the war that in order to hold India, it was necessary not merely to repulse external invaders but also to administer the country under emergency powers, as an occupied nation rather than a willing cobelligerent. Some of the repressive measures adopted in India were similar in kind, if not in scale, to those used by the Axis in occupied countries. Reports of excesses by the security forces were suppressed by military censorship.

Rationally, the United States might have halted its ground operations against Japan in 1944 once the Marianas had been secured. From its air bases, the USAAF’s Superfortress bombers could reduce the enemy’s homeland to ashes. Together with naval blockade, which crippled Japanese industry and above all oil supplies, irresistible air bombardment made eventual Japanese capitulation inevitable. America’s last bloody island campaigns of 1944–45, like the belated British advance into Burma, did little to advance the outcome of the war. But this is a perspective accessible only to posterity.

Thirty-five Axis divisions were deployed in Yugoslavia, but few were first-line troops, and this concentration reflected Hitler’s obsessive fear of an Allied landing in the Balkans as much as the need to secure the country against Tito. The partisans’ military achievements were less significant than London allowed itself to believe. From late 1943 onwards, the Allies began to send Tito weapons in quantities far larger than those supplied to any other European resistance movement. But most were used to suppress the Chetniks and secure the country for Tito in 1944–45, rather than to kill Germans.

“The Philippines campaign was a mistake,” says the present-day Japanese historian Kazutoshi Hando, who lived through the war. “MacArthur did it for his own reasons. Japan had lost the war once the Marianas were gone.” The Filipino people whom MacArthur professed to love paid the price for his egomania in lost lives—perhaps half a million, including those who perished from famine and disease—and wrecked homes. It was as great a misfortune for them as for the Allied war effort that neither President Roosevelt nor the U.S. chiefs of staff could contain MacArthur’s ambitions within a smaller compass of folly.

The casualties of the Vistula offensive were staggering, even by the standards of the Eastern Front: the Russians inflicted slaughter on every formation in their path. In January alone, 450,000 Germans died; in each of the ensuing three months, more than 280,000, a figure that included victims of the Anglo-American bombings of Dresden, Leipzig and other eastern cities. During the last four months of the war, more Germans perished than in the whole of 1942–43. Such numbers emphasise the price paid by the German people for their army leadership’s failure to depose the Nazis and quit the war before its last terrible act.

The advancing Soviet legions resembled no other army the world had ever seen: a mingling of old and new, Europe and Asia, high intelligence and brutish ignorance, ideology and patriotism, technological sophistication and the most primitive transport and equipment. T-34s, artillery and katyusha rocket launchers were followed by jeeps and Studebaker and Dodge trucks supplied under Lend-Lease, then by shaggy ponies and columns of horsemen, farm carts and trudging peasants from the remote republics of Central Asia, clad in foot cloths and rags of uniform. Drunkenness was endemic. German harmonicas provided musical accompaniment for many units, because they could be played in rattling trucks. The only discipline rigorously enforced was that which required men—and women—to attack, to fight, and to die. Stalin and his marshals cared nothing for the preservation of civilian life or property. When one of Vasilievsky’s officers asked for guidance about the proper response to wholesale vandalism being committed by his men, the commander sat silent for several seconds, then said, “I don’t give a fuck. It is now time for our soldiers to issue their own justice.”

By 27 March, when Iwo Jima was secured, the Americans had suffered 24,000 casualties, including 7,184 dead, to capture an island one-third the size of Manhattan. Its airfields proved useful to B-29s returning from missions damaged or short of fuel, but they were little employed for offensive operations. Geographically, Iwo Jima seemed a significant landmark on the way to Japan; but strategically, like so many hard-won objectives in every campaign, it is hard to argue that its seizure was worthwhile

Some of those who are today most critical of the use of the bombs ignore the fact that for every day the war continued, prisoners and slaves of the Japanese empire in Asia continued to die in the thousands. Perversely, the Allies might have done more to confound Japan’s militarists by publicly announcing that they did not intend to invade the mainland, but instead to continue starving and bombing the Japanese people until they surrendered, than by preparing for Olympic. Truman’s greatest mistake, in protecting his own reputation, was failure to deliver an explicit ultimatum before attacking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

France, Britain and its dominions were the only major Allied nations to enter World War II as an act of principle, rather than because they sought territorial gains or were themselves attacked. Their claims upon the moral high ground were injured, however, by the fact that they declared support for embattled Poland without any intention of giving this meaningful military effect.

Only a tiny fraction of those guilty of war crimes were ever indicted, partly because the victors had no stomach for the scale of executions, numbering several hundred thousands, that would have been necessary had strict justice been enforced against every Axis murderer.