Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II

FIGURE 12 (#ulink_ff71be39-2e26-593c-bae5-023bdcf180e8)

Comparative ship sizes (#ulink_ff71be39-2e26-593c-bae5-023bdcf180e8)

The Allied sea lanes were kept open because in the long run there were enough ships built, and enough brave men to man them. Britain’s merchant service had gone through bad interwar years but during the war seamen were formed into a ‘pool’ by means of the ‘Essential Work Order’ of May 1941. This brought permanent engagement and regular pay. Crew accommodation in many ships was squalid, dirty, unhealthy and cramped, and would have horrified any factory-inspector. Yet during the war Britain’s Shipping Federation was receiving a hundred letters a day from boys (16 was the minimum recruiting age) asking for a job afloat.

When war began Britain’s merchant service included 45,000 men from the Indian sub-continent (including Pakistan) and over 6,000 Chinese, as well as many Arabs. When it ended, the Official History says, 37,651 men had died as a direct result of enemy action, and the true total, including deaths indirectly due to war, was 50,525.

The U-boat war was no doubt difficult and dangerous, and the German navy lost 27,491 men out of approximately 55,000.

Perhaps the most important figure – and the most surprising – is that less than 50 per cent of all U-boats built got within torpedo range of a convoy. Of the 870 U-boats that left port on operational trips, 550 of them sank nothing.

The sea has always attracted men from far and wide. On the escorts there were Dutchmen, Free French, Poles, Norwegians, Americans and many Canadians. The Atlantic convoys were not the worst perils the sailors faced: those convoys to Murmansk saw ships labouring under tons of ice and attacked constantly from German bases in Norway. Convoys through the Mediterranean to Malta were equally hazardous.

Ultimately it was the vast resources of the United States of America which decided the outcome. Using the techniques of mass-production, American shipyards proved able to build a freighter in five days! Despite the war in the Pacific, the US spared carriers, escorts and aircraft to supplement British and ever-growing Canadian naval forces in the Atlantic. Soon there would be US armies to be supplied in Europe and North Africa. During a war of unprecedented supply lines and unprecedented amphibious operations, a war in which every front demanded more and more seagoing vessels, the ships kept coming.

PART TWO (#ulink_d7c7a08d-7c70-59fe-a204-99181677af0b)

6 (#ulink_b1e0d361-8c94-5fb6-894d-30ed38529329)

GERMANY: UNRECOGNIZED POWER (#ulink_b1e0d361-8c94-5fb6-894d-30ed38529329)

I have to report that M. Blériot, with his monoplane, crossed the Channel from Calais this morning. I issued to him a Quarantine Certificate, thereby treating it as a yacht and the aviator as Master and owner.

The Collector of Customs at Dover, 25 July 1909

To understand why an improvised and inadequate mixture of British military formations were sent to war in 1939 it is necessary to remember that her army had always been quite different in tradition, formation and function to any of the continental armies.

In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, standing armies were established on the Continent, not so much in response to foreign wars as to civil strife and rebellions. From that time onwards continental rulers made sure that every town had its barracks and parade ground. The constant sound of bugles and drums reminded the discontented that ‘who draws a sword against a prince must throw away the scabbard’. A centralized and severely regulated life is still the normal one for most Europeans, who remain subject to compulsory military service and are required to carry identity papers that they have to produce for any authorized inquirer.

Apart from a riot here and there Britain did not need such control of its population. England’s civil war had ended in a consensus as the English discovered that they hated foreigners more than they hated their own countrymen. Once England was united with Scotland no army was needed to guard the frontiers; keeping invaders at bay was the Royal Navy’s job. Britain had no need for a mighty army: its power and wealth came from peace and stability, its wars took place overseas, and agile politicians ensured that England was always allied with the winning side.

When the continental powers were evenly balanced, England tipped the scales.

The army was simply a refuge for the disinherited rich and the unemployable poor.

The role of Britain’s navy was to raid and harass shipping, ports and coastlines to bring the enemy to the negotiating table. Within such a policy, overseas possessions were primarily needed as bases to revictual the fleets. From these, in the course of time, merchants, soldiers and adventurers conquered vast tracts of land. They found that a small armed presence was usually enough to maintain control of even the largest overseas dominions, although much of these was hostile uninhabitable land like the northern part of Canada and the Australian interior. Weapons improved, and in a short time Britain acquired and maintained a vast empire extending far beyond any real power that it could deploy.

Citizen armies

Compulsory military service is not a new device. Press-gangs that kidnapped able-bodied men in seaports and forced them into the slavery of naval service had been keeping the navies manned for many years before Prussia set up a system of compulsory military service in 1733. Prussian regiments, each based in a Kanton or county, kept records of local men and summoned them to military service as needed. But when Napoleon attacked, the Prussian army was mauled and humiliated by the French and the defeat was blamed upon its inefficiency. Two out of three men had been given exemption from military service, so that the Prussian army in the field consisted of mercenaries and peasants in about equal numbers.

Now Prussia created a system of service which exempted very few healthy men whatever their social class. They were not simply called in time of war. Each citizen spent a year in uniform and returned to the colours throughout his life.

But compulsory military service as we know it was born, like so many other intolerable devices of the centralized totalitarian state, out of the French Revolution. In 1793 the war minister proposed to the National Assembly that every healthy single Frenchman aged between 18 and 25 should be summoned to the army. Married men of the same age would go into the armoury workshops, and males aged from 26 to 40 would be entered on a reserve list for service in wartime.

Thus Germans and Frenchmen spent their adult lives at the beck and call of the generals. In 1870 the two systems of mobilization could be compared. The Germans attacked France with an army of 1,200,000 men. In that same two weeks of crisis France had mustered only half that number.

By 16 February 1874 Helmuth von Moltke was able to stand up in the Reichstag and claim that the army’s prodigious use of civilian manpower had been ‘raising the nation for almost sixty years to physical fitness, mental alertness, order and punctuality, loyalty and obedience, love of our country, and manliness.’

It had also enabled Prussia to thoroughly thrash her neighbours, including France, into abject submission.

It is difficult to be sure whether the prospect of military service was as unpopular in France and Germany as it was in Britain. But in France and Germany public opinion was disregarded by the government; Britain was different. Dating from Anglo-Saxon times, its army consisted of small companies raised by noblemen under royal commission. Only in dire emergencies were citizens called to serve. Although nineteenth-century Britain was not a democracy – no European state enjoyed democracy – public opinion in Britain was important. This importance did not depend upon the vote. In Britain in 1901 only two-thirds of the men, and no women, had the vote. Government was confined to a small, carefully defined and exclusive class, and these men decided that universal conscription was not politically acceptable.

During the nineteenth century, Britain was protected by its coastline and its unchallenged navy. Half of the army was stationed in India, and most of the other half was winning a succession of small colonial wars in other distant possessions. Only at the century’s end was Britain’s power tested. In southern Africa, where the world’s largest gold deposits had recently been discovered, the Boers, farmers of Dutch descent, besieged garrison towns. Closing their minds to the appalling inefficiency their army had demonstrated in the Crimean War (1854–56), the British decided to exercise their unique resources by dispatching an army to fight six thousand miles away from home. No other country could equal or counter such an expedition. The part that wealth played in such power had long been celebrated in a music hall ditty: ‘We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.’

Britain still had the money but, despite the tied markets provided by her Empire, less and less of it was coming from manufacturing and exporting goods. Financiers, rather than factory owners, were the new elite. Overseas investments in railways, mines and urban expansion were now bringing enough money into London to make up for the drop in exports, but it was another ominous sign that Britain was losing the trade wars to rivals such as Germany and America.

There were also danger signals about the workforce. The British government was reportedly shocked to find that 38 per cent of men volunteering to fight the Boers – a sampling one would expect to be in good health – were not fit enough to serve with the colours. And this despite the way in which the army’s height requirement had been brought down to five feet! A subsequent official report stated that about a quarter of the inhabitants of Britain’s industrial towns were undernourished because they were poor.

The Boers were fit and strong, hunters and farmers fighting in terrain they knew how to exploit. Moving rapidly on horseback, they fought on foot, using Mauser repeating rifles with deadly accuracy. Lacking discipline, organization, medals and military textbooks, they knew when to sneak away from a lost encounter. There were never more than 40,000 Boers in the field but it took a British army of unprecedented size almost three years to subdue them. Helped by the Dominions, Britain mobilized half a million men.

The controversies, scandals, triumphs and disasters of the war came at a time when rotary presses and improved typesetting machines provided cheap newspapers for a newly literate public. Winston Churchill reported the war for the Daily Telegraph, Edgar Wallace, a famous crime novelist, covered it for the Daily Mail and Rudyard Kipling worked there on an army newspaper. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was running a field hospital and Mahatma Gandhi was a stretcher-bearer.

The conflict had a profound effect on European politics. The French, the Dutch and the Germans, who had colonized foreign lands with varying degreees of cruelty, objected to the British colonizing European settlers. And Britain’s rivals relished the sight of her army suffering humiliating defeats at the hands of a few skilful and tenacious white farmers. When the British started to get the upper hand, their European neighbours became more critical of them and more pro-Boer. Disease-ridden prison camps caused the deaths of many thousand Boers and brought accusations of deliberate murder. The British explained that it was incompetence, but by the time the war was over, Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe was clouded by resentment.

The fighting in South Africa had provided some glimpses of how future wars might be fought. But the machine-gun, which would dominate future battlefields, played little part in the fight against the Boers. It was not a weapon unknown to the British army. Various forms of machine-gun had been used by them since 1871. It had been used in the Ashanti campaign in 1874, the Zulu War, and by General Kitchener in the Sudan. It had killed some 11,000 Dervishes at Omdurman. No wonder Hilaire Belloc’s poem, ‘The Modern Traveller’, confidently claimed that:

‘Whatever happens, we have got

The Maxim Gun, and they have not.’

But machine-guns did not defeat the Boers. Some said the British sense of fair play and an antipathy to replacing heroes with machinery made them reluctant to massacre white men with automatic fire.

There are other reasons too. The army had given the Maxim, which weighed 40 lb, to artillery-men who put it on a carriage weighing 448 lb, with wheels almost five feet in diameter. Such a large and cumbersome weapon was not so effective against Boers who avoided frontal attacks, used ground and cover with great skill and were masters of the arts of camouflage and sniping. The role of the machine-gun went unremarked in the war, and after it the British army preferred to admire the horsemanship of the foe and concentrated its reforms upon its own horsemen. By 1914 British cavalry were the finest in the world, but there were to be no battles for them to fight.

The decisive components of future warfare were more easily seen in the savage civil war which had torn nineteenth-century America in two. Here was a country where public opinion counted for a great deal. Even in the most desperate days of the war its leaders had stopped short of universal conscription. (The Confederate army was 20 per cent conscript, the Union army 6 per cent.) A cunning combination of cash bounties for volunteers, plus the threat of conscription, had bulldozed enough men into uniform. The inescapable lesson of the civil war was that the industrial might of the North inevitably prevailed. Frequent demonstrations of military prowess by Confederate generals came to nothing because the Union had more soldiers, more miles of railroad, and more factories to produce armaments and all the other resources of war.

Neither the British nor the French seemed to learn much from the American battlefields and the terribly high casualties that were suffered there. After the stunning German victory in 1870, the defeated French generals concluded that it was the nature of the offensive that had been the true secret of Germany’s lightning campaign. Assault became the new theory of warfare. France soon paid off the punitive reparations demanded by its conquerors and, inexplicably, regained its reputation as the world’s most formidable land power. With Britain’s navy considered indomitable, the Anglo-French alliance was not actively challenged.

As the dust of war blew away, it was starkly evident that France would not be content with the European borders that the Germans had imposed upon her. Frenchmen were determined to regain the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and redress their humiliating defeat. The thought of Wilhelm posturing in the great Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, amid the German princes and the battle-torn standards, while the grand duke of Baden hailed him as emperor had ignited a lasting desire for revenge in every French heart.

A different sort of German ruler might have guided his country through this prevailing French resentment but Wilhelm was a neurotic and enigmatic personality. Despite his seven children, his closest friends were homosexuals. From them he seemed to get the warmth and affection that he needed in order to play the role of a tough and pitiless warlord. When he became ruler of a united and powerful Germany, a war to decide the hegemony of Europe was almost inevitable. Furthermore the unified Germany that came after the victory of 1870 was being transformed. In the following 25 years the national income doubled. Railroads spread across the land. Giant electrical, chemical and industrial enterprises flourished and booming cities absorbed a population which increased 50 per cent. ‘German universities and technical schools were the most admired, German methods the most thorough, German philosophers dominant,’ said Barbara Tuchman.

Technical advances

Displayed by the Americans at Britain’s Great Exhibition of 1851 there were half a dozen mass-produced rifles, every part of them easily and quickly interchangeable. The advantage such precision production brought to an army will be readily understood by those British soldiers who used a hammer and file, and sometimes a hacksaw, when servicing their vehicles and equipment during the Second World War. In the German section of the Exhibition in London, Alfred Krupp displayed a cannon made from cast steel, instead of the usual iron or bronze. He found no buyers.

The nineteenth century transformed warfare, with machine-guns used in conjunction with barbed-wire. Mass-produced weapons and citizen armies were moved by railways. Two inventions were yet to bear fruit: nothing would change the nature of war more than the wireless telegraph and the internal combustion engine.

Britain’s industrial revolution had been made possible by the invention of such devices as George Stephenson’s steam engine, Richard Arkwright’s water-frame, Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, Hargreaves’ spinning jenny and Samuel Crompton’s mule. These inventions were brilliantly simple; the inventors were unsophisticated men. Arkwright was a barber assisted by a watchmaker, Hargreaves a carpenter, Cartwright a clergyman, Crompton a spinner and Stephenson a collier’s son who didn’t learn to read until he was 17 years old. But the next step in modern progress would delve into such mysteries as chemistry, microbiology, physics and precision engineering. It would require educated people working in well equipped workshops and laboratories.

Inventions were improved at a dazzling speed. A gas engine invented by Dr N. A. Otto in 1876 was developed by Gottlieb Daimler to propel a vehicle. Before the end of the century there was an automobile race covering 744 miles from Paris to Bordeaux and back. By 1903 the Wright brothers were flying their curious contraptions. Six years later Europeans suddenly understood the significance of powered flight when Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel in 31 minutes. The world had been irreversibly transformed and so had the way in which men would fight. War had entered the third dimension.

Wireless was no less important. By 1901 Guglielmo Marconi’s development of work by Rudolf Hertz enabled a wireless message to be transmitted 3,000 miles. While the industrial revolution had used crude machines and unskilled labour to produce wealth, this new ‘technical revolution’ was far more demanding. Nations with leaders who failed to respond to the complexities of this new world ran the risk of rapid decline. In the words of one British major-general who was also an historian:

Mind more than matter, thought more than things, and above all imagination, struggled to gain power. New substances appeared, new sources of energy were tapped and new outlooks on life took form. The world was sloughing its skin – mental, moral and physical – a process destined to transform the industrial revolution into a technical civilization. Divorced from civil progress, soldiers could not see this. They could not see that as civilization became more technical, military power must inevitably follow suit: that the next war would be as much a clash between factories and technicians as between armies and generals. With the steady advance of science warfare could not stand still.

In 1890 Germany’s production of iron and steel had been half that of Britain; by 1913 Germany produced twice as much as Britain and half that of the United States. Such advances were matched by progress in manufacturing. German industry – chemical and electric firms in particular – set up research institutes, and worked closely with the universities. By the end of the nineteenth century German technology had left Britain behind. By the time Hitler came to power, Germany had collected one-third of all the Nobel prizes for physics and chemistry.