Antony Beevor's "The Second World War": Strategic analysis and myth-busting

In the acknowledgements to his latest history, TheSecond World War, Antony Beevor says that he wrote this comprehensive tome on one of the biggest events in human history because he wanted to fill in the gaps to his own knowledge of the topic. But, he says, “above all it is an attempt to understand how the whole complex jigsaw fits together, with the direct and indirect effects of actions and decisions taking place in very different theatres of war.” In this, Beevor succeeds where no other historian I have read has. Weighing in at 833 pages (with notes), Beevor deftly describes and analyzes the political and military strategic events, people, and decisions that started, fought, and ended World War II. Potentially more importantly, he debunks one myth after another surrounding this war.

Geographically and politically, the European and Pacific Theaters were fairly cordoned off from each other, outside of the involvement of the United States and the British, but not entirely. Beevor pulls the thread to examine how the Soviet victory at Khalkhin Gol in eastern Mongolia in the summer of 1939 ensured that the Soviets stayed out of the eastern war (Beevor is not, of course, the only historian to make this important point) and how that affected both theaters. As he pulls the thread further, the interactions of east and west, Axis and Allies, become more acute. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have almost no strategic interaction (there are a handful of exceptions), but their actions on three or four fronts each create a strategic graph theory problem of biblical proportions for the Allies. As a big-picture example, the United States did not just face a Pacific versus Europe resource competition. The United States faced resource competition between Stillwell’s command supporting the Chinese Nationalists, MacArthur’s forces, Halsey’s forces, the preparation for an invasion of western France, operations in North Africa and then Italy, strategic bombing campaigns on both sides, and Lend-Lease to many a slew of locations. To compound this, American leaders needed to maintain support for the war at home and keep the Alliance together while trying to shape the post-war world through a political minefield of communists, socialists, fascists, colonialists, revolutionaries, and democratists. All while trying to actually win the war. If you consider the number of facets and decisions required in this complex world, multiply these considerations by the same problems with which all of the other Allies (and enemies) were forced to contend. The result is an exponentially large equation to determine the outcomes of a world in flux moving at the speed of a tank. Beevor is at his best in this work when he examines these interdependencies of these fronts, the Allies’ force structure to address them, and the inter- and intra-national political considerations.  For students of strategy, this alone makes The Second World War worth reading.

Beevor is equally as good at myth-busting the saintliness of the war’s heroes, the competence of its tragic warriors, and the general sense that it was, in fact, a “good war.” Almost none of the major players of the war get a pass (more on an exception below). Montgomery was “egotistic, ambitious and ruthless, possessing a boundless self-confidence which occasionally bordered on the fatuous.” MacArthur receives even harsher treatment that includes accusations of gross corruption. Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower, Patton, Brooke, Bradley, Stalin, Zhukov, Clark, Stillwell, Halsey, et al, are all described by their weaknesses and mistakes as much as they are by their strengths and failures. The sheer volume of egomania among these great captains significantly exceeded their capabilities, as Beevor explicitly demonstrates. That is not to suggest that these were not extraordinary men in extraordinary times - on the contrary. But none of these men were as idyllically competent as many histories would have us believe. The Axis powers are given the same treatment, if not more with rightful criticism focused on their general inhumanity. As a young Armor officer undergoing basic maneuver traing, a number of German officers were still considered gods of mechanized warfare: Rommel, Peiper, Guderian, von Rundstedt, etc. Further analysis, as done in this book, shows that these men were not nearly as good as I was taught. And those that were actually tactically or operationally superior, such as Peiper, were so ruthless with their own men and civilians that their tactics should hardly be extolled, never mind exemplified, by modern Western armies. It is well past time to end this infatuation with German maneuver exceptionalism as it never really existed. (As an aside, my experience has been that those who believe in this exceptionalism also believe, incorrectly in my opinion, in Israeli maneuver exceptionalism. The sooner we end these fantasies, the better for the education of the coming generations of maneuver leaders.)

Before I return to the myth-busting of the “good war” trope, I would be remiss if did not discuss this book’s shortcomings, of which I found two. Anyone who has read extensively on World War II, a population I consider myself a part of despite my just now revisiting the topic after many years, has a pet rock about this war: some issue or topic, preferably obscure and contrarian, which is used by its holder to judge all writing and analysis of World War II.  I have one of these and his name was Major General Philippe Leclerc who commanded the French 2d Armored Division.  Although Leclerc was a competent and brave commander, he had absolutely no regard for the Allied chain of command or unity of effort. He had a reputation for ignoring his orders and doing whatever he pleased for the glory of France and/or himself. There was an obscure incident that occurred in August 1944 towards the very end of Operation OVERLORD during the attempt to trap hundreds of thousands of Germans in the Falaise Pocket. The battle to close the gap and encircle the German forces inside the pocket was hard fought and in the end a victory for the Allies. But at least one Panzer corps (and most likely more) escaped. There were three reasons: Montgomery’s inability to drive his forces south fast or hard enough, Bradley’s indecision, and Leclerc disobeying orders. The really long-story-short is that Leclerc was so excited to end the battle so that he could turn south and spearhead the liberation of Paris that he exceeded his divisional boundary in the Foret d’Ecouves. This caused a massive traffic jam with the U.S. 5th Armored Division and provided the German Army defenders time and space to establish a defensive line that allowed more German forces to escape encirclement (see page 416 at this link). I find Leclerc’s actions unconscionable. In a book that aims to break down the many cults of personality surrounding the key characters of this conflict, Beevor misses this opportunity and gives Leclerc a pass. I will grant the author some forgiveness in that if he picked on the foibles of every division commander in the war (even if this particular one was a prominent player) then this book would expand to be many volumes.  But this is my pet rock and I am miffed that Leclerc’s egomania likely led to the deaths of many soldiers and Beevor did not take a written hammer to him for it.

Some readers will complain that the Pacific Theater receives short shrift in this book. Many of the battles are not detailed, but that is true of most battles in both theaters. This book was not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of the fighting, but rather of the strategic decisions and actions that comprised the whole of the war.  Tactics are rarely discussed anywhere unless they are needed for the larger analysis, such as in Stalingrad where the type of fighting played a role in the Red Army’s ferocity in the outbreak that in turn had a number of strategic implications through the end of the war. So yes, Midway gets all of two pages, but that is all that particular battle warrants when not examining the tactical situation of the battle that was irrelevant to strategy in the Pacific. Rest assured that the major strategic concerns of the Pacific are addressed in detail as well as relevant tactical analysis.

No, the second major issue with this book, besides some redundancies, is sloppiness in editing. There are too many sentences that do not make sense because of various errors. Thankfully the errors do not create ambiguity and thus confusion, but they are irritating and interrupt the flow of the book. They also increase in number near the end. It is a rather large book so some errors are expected, but the publisher would do well to give it another scrub before a second printing. Related to this is the index, which is a mess. For example, there you will find in order: Cholitz, Chungking, Chou, Ciano. There is the obvious problem that Chou should precede Chungking, but more importantly is that “Churchill” is not to be found between “Chungking” and “Ciano”.  Winston Churchill is not in the index. That is a major mistake if I have ever seen one.

These problems are overwhelmed by this book’s positive contribution to the study of World War II and military history and strategy in general. Beevor attacks the “good war” campaign and stops it dead in its tracks. The incomprehensible costs of this war should cause anyone about to describe it as “good” to pause. Indeed, fascist and imperialist aggressors and mass murderers were defeated and there is no denying that was a good thing. However, the Western Allies were hardly angels themselves if potentially lesser devils. Atrocities on the ground in the Pacific and western European fronts are detailed and are comparatively benign. But the strategic bombing campaign conducted against civilians on both sides of the war with no tangible military objectives should be viewed through a realist lens. If the Allies had lost the war, its leaders would have been tried for war crimes. And these crimes pale in comparison not only with Nazi and Japanese atrocities, but also with Soviet atrocities and later Chinese crimes. Beevor is also quite harsh on the Western leaders for acquiescing to Stalin on Eastern Europe, saying that they sold out half of Europe to save the other half. He is not wrong in this. It is important to note that Beevor does not suggest that World War II was an unjust war, he in fact says that is (from the Allied perspective, naturally), but rather that we should remove our rosy glasses on the West’s activities during the war and understand analysis of the war and its events for what they are and why “good” is not a descriptor of this war. He describes the war as “so rich a source for the study of dilemmas, individual and mass tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of commanders, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable compassion.” Indeed this is true. Beevor’s account of it sets a high bar of scholarship and unprejudiced perspective for such study. 

The strange ethical paradox of mass slaughter from the air

The July-August issue of The National Interest carries a good review by Richard Overy of Martin van Creveld's most recent book, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. This passage was particularly striking:

[N]o Allied commander would have sent his troops into Hamburg with orders to machine-gun thirty-seven thousand of its inhabitants. It would unquestionably have been a war crime. But Allied aircraft killed just that number in July 1943, and there has never been even the merest suggestion that those who ordered the raid ought to have stood trial after 1945 (though there is now a widely held view that this was a war crime). Indeed, bombing killed hundreds of thousands in horrible ways. What made this kind of airpower different?

Overy hints at a few stale rationalizations, from the all-justifying horrors of the Nazi regime to the absurd suggestion that civilians were not expressly targeted by the bombing campaigns, to which the very psychological-philosophical foundations of Douhet's own airpower theory gives the lie.

So: how is it that William Calley is so reviled for the killing of 22 Vietnamese civilians while Harry Truman is largely forgiven for the killing of perhaps 200,000 Japanese civilians? Why is tactical atrocity punished while strategic atrocity is applauded?

C'est le 14 Juillet: African Veterans to Get Same Benefits as their French Colleagues!

Over at Secret Defense, Jean Dominique Merchet reports that African veterans who served with French forces during WWII, Korea, Indochina, and Algeria will now get the same benefits as their colleagues. President Sarkozy (who is in need of some positive spin--have you read about the whole Bettencourt "affaire"? It's a trip), in honor of the Fete Nationale du 14 Juillet, has announced a 150 million Euro program to ensure that African veterans now receive the same level benefits, regardless of where they now live.

Why is this such a big deal? Because, as the BBC explains, until now, African soldiers were only payed a pension worth one tenth to one fifth of what their French colleagues got. Back in May, the Conseil Constitutionnel (the Constitutional Council) declared that practice illegal so now Sarko is presenting legislation to the Assemblee Nationale and the law should go into effect in January.

Oh, and did you see that soldiers from 13 African countries (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, CAR, Congo, Gabon, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritanie, Niger, Sénégal, Tchad and Togo) joined French forces today on the Champs Elysees for the Annual Defile du 14 Juillet? It was apparently pouring rain most of the time but this created a lot of buzz too--not all of those leaders have the best human rights records and Sarkozy was criticized both for colonial nostalgia and for granting them the honor of parading.

Bon 14 Juillet les amis!

Friday photo of the day (UPDATED)

So yeah, it's cool that U.S. troops are marching in the Victory Day parade in Moscow today, etc etc. Security cooperation, building bridges between past allies, remembering our mutual sacrifices in the destruction of the Nazi specter and so on and so forth. But easily the awesomest thing about this whole story is this picture of U.S. TROOPS MARCHING ACROSS RED SQUARE.

If you don't watch it, Russkies, next time they'll be serious!

(Ok, not really. (Well, probably not.))

UPDATE: Two more pictures from the day of the parade. First from the NYT...

...second from Danger Room (thanks to karakapend in the comments for this one).

Awesome.

This is really uncool

Somebody stole the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign from Auschwitz museum on the site of the former Nazi death camp in southern Poland last night.

The 5-meter-long (16-foot-long), 40-kilogram (90-pound) iron sign at the Holocaust memorial site in southern Poland was unscrewed on one side and torn off on the other, police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo said.

The theft from the entrance to the camp — where more than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died during World War II — brought immediate condemnation worldwide.

"The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory of the Holocaust, and an escalation from those elements that would like to return us to darker days," Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said in a statement from Jerusalem.

"I call on all enlightened forces in the world who fight against anti-Semitism, racism,
xenophobia and the hatred of the other, to join together to combat these trends."

The sign disappeared from the Auschwitz memorial between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m., Padlo said.

Police deployed 50 investigators and a search dog to the Auschwitz grounds, where barracks, watchtowers and ruins of gas chambers still stand as testament to the atrocities inflicted by Nazi Germany.

Makes you wonder what anybody's gonna do with that thing, but I guess that's not the point.

There's nothing new or original to say about the Holocaust, so I'm not going to try. But I've been to Oswiecim and walked under that sign -- "work makes you free" displayed prominently at the entrance to a concentration came where exactly nothing makes you free is perhaps history's sickest joke -- and it's a pretty horrifying thing to imagine. (Others, I'm sure, have experienced similar sensations in Rwanda and Congo and elsewhere.)

Not much to do with COIN or security or anything else, sorry.

Japanese community festivals, national reconciliation, and Iraq

There are two people whose writing ability I would trade body parts for: Christopher Hitchens and David Foster Wallace. Two completely different styles, obviously, and it's hard to imagine content more varied. But both guys are just such an absolute pleasure to read that I really don't care much what the subject is. I've read everything DFW ever wrote (from tennis to cruise ships to lobster festivals and more), and I try to keep up with Hitchens as best I can (though he's so prolific that it's difficult).

In this week's Fighting Words -- Hitchens' weekly column for Slate -- we're met with a sort of sappy sentimentalism you don't normally see from the world's crankiest public intellectual. The spark for all this: a festival in California. Hitchens elaborates:

This time every summer I begin to suspect myself of going soft and becoming optimistic and sentimental. The mood passes, I need hardly add, but while it is upon me, it amounts to a real thing. On the first weekend of every August, in Palo Alto, Calif., the Japanese community opens the doors of its temple and school in order to invite guests and outsiders to celebrate the Obon Festival.

Ancestor-oriented celebrations are not exactly my thing, but there is a very calm and charming way in which the Japanese use this particular moment in the lunar calendar to remember those who have preceded them and to make the occasion a general fiesta. (I suppose the nearest regional equivalent would be the Mexican Day of the Dead.) The clement weather allows the wearing of the lighter yukata, or summer kimono, and the staging of the Bon Odori dance, in which all can join, to the soft rhythm of taiko drums. For the rest of the time, the yagura, or wooden scaffold, is the center of a sort of fairground, in which stalls and raffles compete for custom with the sellers of sake and Japanese beer and with an amazing teriyaki buffet.

There's a large turnout of non-Japanese for these attractions, getting larger every year it seems to me, but it doesn't succeed in swamping the main event or in making it into a mere tourist attraction. You come across a group of grave and serious Japanese gardeners, engaged in the judging of a bonsai competition, and you suddenly appreciate that nothing can turn this consideration into a hucksterish sideshow. (One day, perhaps, someone will write something serious about the Japanese genius for small things and for miniaturization, which extends from carvings to plants to the idea of painting on grains of rice and which seemed at one point to lead the world in the concept of the microchip.)

If you've read his stuff before, you'll be a little surprised to see Christopher Hitchens singing the praises of a pseudo-religious, ethnic-identity based celebration -- this is, after all, the author of God is Not Great, among other forceful explications of secular humanism. So why all the gushing? Well, perhaps because it's easy to see how it all could have gone so much differently.

In the United States, and especially in California, the war against Japanese imperialism was also accompanied by collective punishment of Japanese-Americans and the sequestration of their persons and property. When I first came to the Bay Area in 1970, I was introduced by Carey MacWilliams, a great historian of the state, to Lou Goldblatt of the longshoremen's union, one of the very few public figures to have opposed the indiscriminate internment. It was a crime committed largely by liberals like Earl Warren, as many people prefer to forget, and was even supported at the time by the Communist Party. (Actually, why do I say even? Communists by then were getting pretty used to supporting mass roundups and deportations.)

Hatred and fear and bigotry were probably never more general or more strongly felt than against Japanese people in America in the period between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and Hollywood and the comic book industry kept the feeling alive for some years afterward. Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas drew howls of laughter when he said a kind word to young Rep. Daniel Inouye, who had lost a limb fighting for America in Europe, and—thanked for taking the trouble to notice the newcomer—roared: "Ain't no trick to it! How many one-armed Japs we got around here?"* (Actually, I think that was pretty funny.)

It may be that this narrative resonates more with me than most: my twin brother's wife is a fourth-generation Japanese-American from California. Her grandparents met and married behind a fence at the Manzanar internment camp. Lest we forget, this was a mere six decades ago, and in perhaps the freest and most open society man has ever known.

And so, the point?

Well, my point is that under the azure blue skies that prevailed all of last weekend, you would not have known that any of the bitterness and misery had ever taken place. There were old people present, Japanese and non-Japanese, who had a real memory of it. And there were young people to whom, if it occurs at all, it must seem prehistoric. But there was no awkwardness; no "making nice," no pretense of a false coexistence. All could meet under the great roof of a secular multiethnic democracy, and all did, sharing the food and the music and admiring one another's children. And if this of all reconciliations can occur, without it even having to call itself a reconciliation, then perhaps we are not all heading for hell on a sled as fast as we sometimes think. Ernest Renan said that to form a common nation, people had to agree to remember a few things but also to forget a few things. Without undue amnesia, and without being mandated or enforced or policed, this maxim seems to have been followed naturally in this case.

So why is this meaningful? Well, if for nothing else, then simply because it reminds us how recently our world was riven with violence on a scale nearly unimaginable to those of us born in the latter part of the 20th century. In living memory, as they say. No matter what you think about the necessity or morality of the whole deal, it's a matter of record that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were immolated by American bombs. Those people were the mothers and fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins and so on of people who lived and live in this country. And yet by and large their descendants don't rage against this historic iniquity, don't seek reparations, don't consider blowing themselves up in shopping malls or airplanes to right the wrongs visited on their ancestors.

And so what? Well, it sort of gives you hope for a place like Iraq, doesn't it? Ok, if not hope, then at least some vague precedent. I know there are a host of differences in these scenarios. I know that there are massive, meaningful dissimilarities in culture, religion, economics, government, level of development, national character, and so on that inform and control the ways that different populations respond to conflict and injustice. Japan wasn't gripped with insurgency or civil war after the 1945 surrender. The two scenarios have almost nothing in common, except for this: in both places, awful things happened to people, many of whom were innocent.

Somehow Japan has emerged from that experience as a strong and vibrant democracy, the Japanese people are free of anti-American grudge, and our country hosts a large and incredibly well-integrated ethnically Japanese population. How did all this happen? Why did it happen to the Japanese, and how do we help other populations recover from conflict with similar resiliency? I can't answer those questions and I'm not sure anyone can nail it down, though I'm sure there are people who can speak to them in some kind of meaningful way.

So when I see people saying that there's no chance that Iraq will become an integrated, peaceful, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional modern state, I consider what our grandfathers must've thought in 1945: did the Germans -- hell, Nazis! -- seem amenable to reconciliation, to integration into the European political and economic framework? Did the Japanese -- those very same Japanese who showed such wanton disregard for their own lives as to fly suicide missions in airplanes or run as waves into enemy guns?

Maybe I, like Hitchens, am feeling a little loopy, intoxicated with optimism. (Just not about Afghanistan, I guess.) But it's worth keeping in mind sometimes that there was a time when the world was more hateful, more dangerous, more fractured, more violent, and all around shittier than it is today, and some of those things in some of those places have changed for the better. So don't cross your fingers or anything, but maybe consider the fact that a century and a half ago, Americans were shooting one another up, too.