Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

“All hell broke loose.” Because the phrase is commonplace in eyewitness descriptions of battles, air raids, massacres and ship sinkings, later generations are tempted to shrug at its banality. Yet in an important sense the words capture the essence of what the struggle meant to hundreds of millions of people, plucked from peaceful, ordered existences to face ordeals that in many cases lasted for years, and for at least 60 million were terminated by death. 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.

half the population of Britain changed residence in the course of the war,

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.

If Stalin was not Hitler’s cobelligerent, Moscow’s deal with Berlin made him the cobeneficiary of Nazi aggression. From 23 August onwards, the world saw Germany and the Soviet Union acting in concert, twin faces of totalitarianism. Because of the manner in which the global struggle ended in 1945, with Russia in the Allied camp, some historians have accepted the postwar Soviet Union’s classification of itself as a neutral power until 1941. This is mistaken.

Hitler did not anticipate the British and French declarations of war. Their acquiescence in his 1938 seizure of Czechoslovakia, together with the impossibility of direct Anglo-French military succour for Poland, argued a lack of both will and means to challenge him.

In remote African colonies, some young men fled into the bush on hearing that a war had started: they feared that their British rulers would repeat First World War practice by conscripting them for compulsory labour service—as indeed later happened.

His inquisitor replied coldly: “You are wrong. Our policy is at present to be neutral during the struggle between England and Germany. Let them bleed—our power will increase. When they are utterly exhausted, we shall come out as the strong and fresh party, decisive during the last stage of the war.” This seems a just representation of Stalin’s aspirations.

Britain’s antimilitarist tradition was a source of pride to its people, but in consequence the nation declared war on the strongest power in Europe while capable of contributing only limited ground and air reinforcements to the French armies deployed against Germany.

A Finnish delegation, summoned to receive Moscow’s demands, prompted international amazement by rejecting them. The notion that a nation of 3.6 million people might resist the Red Army seemed fantastic, but the Finns, though poorly armed, were nationalistic to the point of folly.

Russian forces advanced across the frontier in several places, and Finns joked: “They are so many and our country is so small, where shall we find room to bury them all?”

Before the Russians attacked, the Finns adopted a scorched-earth policy, evacuating from the forward areas 100,000 civilians, some of whom adopted an impressively stoical attitude to their sacrifice: border guards who warned an old woman to quit her home were amazed, on returning to burn it, to find that she had swept and cleaned the interior before leaving. On the table lay matches, kindling wood and a note: “When one gives a gift to Finland, one desires that it should be like new.”

The snowy wastelands of eastern Finland were soon deeply stained with blood; some defenders succumbed to nervous exhaustion after mowing down advancing Russians at close range hour after hour.

Though these had been used earlier in the Spanish Civil War, it was in Finland that the soubriquet “Molotov breadbasket,” then “Molotov cocktail,” first entered the military lexicon.

The Red Army was grotesquely ill-equipped for winter war: its 44th Division, for instance, issued men a manual on ski tactics, but no skis; in the first weeks, Russian tanks were not even painted white.

Around the world, the Soviet assault inspired bewilderment, increased by the fact that the swastika was a Finnish good-luck symbol. Popular sentiment ran strongly in favour of the victims: in fascist Italy, there were pro-Finnish demonstrations.

In the tiny, intimate society of Finland, he insisted upon having casualty lists read aloud to him, name by name.

The Finnish government never deluded itself that the nation could inflict absolute defeat on the Russians: it aspired only to make the price of fulfilling Stalin’s ambitions unacceptably high. This strategy was doomed, however, against an enemy indifferent to human sacrifice.

After the armistice, Finland, having failed to gain useful help from Britain and France, turned to Germany for assistance in rearming its forces, which Hitler was happy to provide.

Germany had entered the war on the verge of bankruptcy, in consequence of Hitler’s armaments expenditure.

Yet Hitler paid a price for Norway. Obsessed with holding the country against a prospective British assault, until almost the war’s end he deployed 350,000 men there, a major drain on his manpower resources. And German naval losses in the Norwegian campaign proved a critical factor in making a subsequent invasion of Britain unrealistic.

The campaign’s most important consequence was that it precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Had there been no Norway, it is overwhelmingly likely that he would have retained office as prime minister through the campaign in France that followed. The consequences of such an outcome for Britain, and for the world, could have been catastrophic, because his government might well have chosen a negotiated peace with Hitler.

Eight million French people abandoned their homes in the month following the onset of the German assault, the greatest mass migration in western European history.

On the battlefield, Allied soldiers, reflecting the societies from which they were drawn, prided themselves on behaving like reasonable men. The Wehrmacht showed what unreasonable men could do.

Weygand later claimed that the British were bent on betraying their ally: this reflected a profound French conviction, dating back to World War I, that the British always fought with one eye on their escape route to the Channel ports.

The fall of the capital two days later caused the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a Jew now in remote exile, to write: “Few of my own misfortunes have dismayed me and filled me with despair as much as the humiliation of Paris, a city that was blessed like no other with the ability to make anyone who came there happy.”

Nazi triumph provoked horror. All Soviet strategic calculations had been founded upon an expectation that a protracted bloodbath would take place on the Continent, which would drastically weaken Germany as well as the Western powers. A Russian diplomat in London later remarked indiscreetly that, while most of the world weighed Allied and German casualties against each other, Stalin added the two together to compile an assessment of his own balance of advantage.

Italy entered the war alongside Hitler on 10 June, in a shamelessly undignified scramble for a share of the spoils. Benito Mussolini feared Hitler and disliked Germans, as did many of his fellow countrymen, but he was unable to resist the temptation to secure cheap gains in Europe and the Allied African empires.

HITLER’S AIR ASSAULT on Britain ranks second only to the invasion of Russia among his great blunders of the war.

Posterity sees the period between July 1940 and the spring of 1941 overwhelmingly in terms of Britain’s air battle against the Luftwaffe, yet that engaged only a small proportion of Germany’s military resources. For the remainder of Hitler’s warriors, and almost the entire army, this became a curious time of idleness comparable with the earlier Phoney War.

Hitler persuaded himself that British obstinacy was fortified by a belief that Churchill might forge an alliance with Stalin, which could make victory over Germany seem plausible. Thus, the Soviet Union’s defeat would make Britain’s capitulation inevitable.

Hitler saw three reasons for striking: first, he wished to do so, in fulfilment of his ambition to eradicate bolshevism and create a German empire in the east; second, it seemed prudent to eliminate the Soviet threat before again turning west for a final settlement with Britain and the United States; third, he identified economic arguments.

There was a contemptuous joke in Nazi Party circles of Hitler’s lackey Wilhelm Keitel reporting, “My Führer, Italy has entered the war!” Hitler answers, “Send two divisions. That should be enough to finish them.” Keitel says, “No, my Führer, not against us, but with us.” Hitler says, “That’s different. Send ten divisions.”

Mussolini, indeed, was fearful that the British might make terms with Hitler before he had achieved his own conquests. Instead, Italy would become the only nation whose strategic fortunes were decisively affected by events in Africa, where it lost progressively twenty-six divisions, half its air force and its entire tank inventory, together with any vestige of military credibility.

The British historian Michael Howard has written: “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.”

It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalised society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues.

Germans, other than Jews, had greater personal freedom than did any Russian. Yet Stalin’s tyranny was less adequately organised to defend itself against foreign enemies than against its own people. The Red Army’s formations in the west were poorly deployed, in a thin forward line. Many of its best commanders had been killed in the 1937–38 purges, and replaced by incompetent lackeys. Communications were crippled by lack of radios and technical skills; most units lacked modern arms and equipment. No defensive positions had been created, and Soviet doctrine addressed only offensive operations. The dead hand of the party crippled efficiency, initiative and tactical prudence.

Britain remained undefeated. Stalin thus refused to believe that Hitler would precipitate a cataclysmic breach with him, and was personally responsible for the fact that the German onslaught, no surprise to his senior commanders, caught the defences unprepared.

“We were following Napoleon’s invasion route,” Maj. Gen. Hans von Griffenberg wrote later, “but we did not think that the lessons of the 1812 campaign applied to us. We were fighting with modern means of transport and communication—we thought that the vastness of Russia could be overcome by rail and motor engine, telegraph wire and radio. We had absolute faith in the infallibility of Blitzkrieg.”

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.

RUSSIA WAS SAVED from absolute defeat chiefly by the size of the country and of its armies.

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.

Alfred Jodl, the Führer’s closest and most loyal military adviser, asserted in 1945 that his master understood in December 1941 that “victory could no longer be achieved.” This did not mean, of course, that Hitler reconciled himself to Germany’s defeat: instead, he now anticipated a long war, which would eventually expose the fundamental divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies.

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.

For all the exuberant declarations of patriotism that followed the “Day of Infamy,” many Americans remained resentful about the need to accept even a modest share of the privations thrust upon most of the world’s peoples. Early in 1942, Arthur Schlesinger visited the Midwest on a tour of army bases for the Office of War Information: “We arrived in the midst of the whining about gas rationing, and it was pretty depressing. The anti-administration feeling is strong and open.”

Nonetheless, Leningrad’s experience was at least as significant in showing why the Soviet Union prevailed in the Second World War. It is unthinkable that British people would have eaten one another rather than surrender London or Birmingham—or would have been obliged by their generals and politicians to hold out at such a cost. Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad’s survival, as in that of Stalin’s nation. If the city’s inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given up. But in the Soviet Union no such choice was available, and those who attempted to make it were shot.

The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans.

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.

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.

It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire “butcher’s bill” for doing this, accepting 95 percent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance.