Sunday, November 11, 2007

David's Bookshelf 52 (David Frumm review)

If Aristotle is right that tragedy produces feelings of pity and terror,
then Max Hastings Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45 rates
among the most tragic books I have ever read. Opening in September 1944,
after the battle for Normandy, when the western Allies believes the war
was all but over, Hastings plunges into seven months of violence more
total than anything our planet had ever suffered before, or ever will
again barring a nuclear war.

For the Jews of Europe, it was already too late by September 1944; the
Nazi work of extermination had largely run its course. But a more prompt
collapse of Germany would have saved the lives of millions of fighting
men, Allied and German, and millions of civilians, not to mention the
cultural treasures of Dresden.

Among the questions Hastings addresses in this lucid and deeply
researched book: Why did the war last so long?

His answer leads us to consider some of the deepest themes in his
emerging multi-party history of World War II. (A volume on the Pacific
war will shortly be forthcoming to add to his previous works on Bomber
Command and the Normandy campaign.)

1. The poor quality of the Western Allied generalship and the weak will
to fight of the Western Allied armies.

Hastings does not offer much comfort to the vanity of American, British,
or Canadian readers. He disparages the generalship of every high Western
commander except George C. Marshall. Eisenhower was too cautious,
Montgomery too boastful and unreliable, Crerar too stolid and
unimaginative. He contrasts all of them with the Soviet commanders,
especially Zhukov, who took strategic risks and won huge encircling
victories.

He blames Montgomery for allowing his ego to drive him to reach German
territory first in Operation Market Garden, the air drop at Arnhem -
thus missing a chance to seize Antwerp before the Germans dug in, and
open the deep water port that the Allies would need to supply an early
drive into Germany proper.

He blames Eisenhower for insisting that all Allied fronts advance in
neat tandem, so as to avoid exposing themselves to flank attacks. German
flank attacks could not inflict serious damage given Allied air
supremacy - while the constant "tidying up" delayed Allied advances
enough that winter arrived in 1944 before the Western Allies arrived in
Germany.

Hastings esteems Patton rather better than any of the other field
commanders. He describes Patton, disgusted at the slow movement of one
of his corps, ordering the corps commander to act as a traffic
policeman. Yet Hastings harshly condemns Patton for his willingness to
put thousands of lives at risk to stage an operation whose main purpose
seems to have been to liberate his son-in-law from German captivity.

Here though he makes another and even more uncomfortable point: Even
when Allied commanders showed aggressiveness and verve, they were
thwarted by the hesitancy and passivity of their troops. In contrast to
stereotype, it was the German soldiers who most consistently acted
independently. Americans and Brits awaited orders and shunned risks.

Among other shibboleths, Hastings takes aim at the "greatest generation"
myth. While there were real heroes on the Anglo-American side - and
while the troops at the tip of the spear did often fight valiantly -
overall (he insists) British forces in World War II displayed nothing
like the devotion and courage of the British forces in the First World
War, and American units fell far short of the standards set, North and
South, during the Civil War. Hastings' emphasis on the extreme problems
of corruption in the US Army lead one to wonder whether Sergeant Bilko
may not be a much more representative figure than Captain Winters.

And yet, Hastings - always very reflective in his moral judgments -
counters these harsh assessments with a consoling thought. In a
nightmare encounter like the last year of World War II, great
generalship meant great ruthlessness - and great disregard for human
life. The best commanders came from the worst societies, Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union. The failure of the Anglo-Americans to produce such
fighters was a tribute to the positive qualities of the commercial,
civilian Anglo-American societies. And thanks to the amazing productive
capacity of these free societies, the Anglo-Americans won anyway, not by
out-generaling or out-fighting the Germans, but by out-taxing and
out-producing them. My favorite anecdote from the whole book expresses
this thought:

    General Erich von Straube, after signing the surrender of his forces
in Holland to First Canadian Army, was being escorted back to the German
lines by Brigadier James Roberts. After driving some twenty minutes in
silence, von Straube's aide tapped Roberts on the shoulder and said that
his commander wished to know what the brigadier had done before the war:
"Were you a professional soldier?" Roberts was momentarily bemused by
the question. He had indeed been a soldier for so long that his other
life seemed impossibly remote. Then he realized that the German was
seeking some crumb of solace for his defeat. He answered von Straube:
"No, I wasn't a regular soldier. Very few Canadians were. In civilian
life I made ice cream." 

2. Wrong-headed Allied strategy. Hastings seconds those who thinks that
the British and Americans over-invested in airpower and then deployed it
unstrategically. Bombing destroyed Gemany's fuel-making capacity and
forced the Germans to invest resources in anti-aircraft defenses that
might otherwise have built ground weapons. But the city-blasting
strategy was not only morally obnoxious - it also wasted Allied
resoruces. Hastings witheringly documents the distaste of the Allied air
arms for ground support work. With an eye to securing their bureaucratic
independence postwar (remember the US Air Force of World War II was
still the Army Air Force), they sought a role distinct from ground
forces - and city-blasting was it.

The scale of the waste is difficult to measure or fathom. The British
massively over-invested money resources in the construction of heavy
bombers. On the American side, the waste was of scarce manpower
resources: the moste dedicated and capable able soldiers and officers
were too often directed away from the infantry toward "elite" arms and
especially the air services.

Hastings believes that the Second World War was every bit as much a war
of attrition as World War I or the US Civil War. It had to be done by
destroying German armed forces on the ground, at high human cost to the
Allies, with the outcome being determined by brute numbers. He tells the
story of a Polish officer listening with mounting disgust to a lecture
by an American colonel on "the principles of war." Afterward, the Pole
approached the American. "You have forgotten the most important
principle: Be stronger."

Churchill's hopes of a "soft underbelly"; American hopes of victory
through technology; all were misplaced. It was the Soviets who had the
clearest grasp of the ugly strategic reality. Germany would have to be
defeated through the mass slaughter of German fighting men - and since
those German fighting men almost invariably inflicted more casualties
than they suffered, the mass slaughter of German fighting men implied
even worse slaughter among the Allies. Consciously or unconsciously, the
Allied leaders allowed most of that terrible human cost to fall on the
Soviet fighting forces - which is why the postwar settlement so
appallingly appeased the imperial ambitions of the Soviet rulers.

3. German fanaticism. In our memories of World War II combat, we tend to
associate "fanaticism" with the forces of the Japense Empire. Yet as
Hastings arrestingly observes, the Japanese surrendered before US forces
landed on their home islands. The Germans by contrast fought ferociously
all the way to Berlin. More arrestingly still, the Germans resisted to
the last as ferociously on the western as on the eastern front.

And since the German army, man for man, was the best fighting force in
Europe, this extended resistance prolonged the war months beyond all
Allied expectations.

Hastings points out that if the German high command had cared at all for
the future welfare of the German population, they could easily have
shifted all their resources to the east, and given ground to the
Anglo-Amricans in the West. They chose otherwise. Hastings vividely
describes the terror methods used against those Germans suspected of
less than adamant resistance: intimidation, torture, murder. Yet he also
makes plain that to the end, the great preponderance of the German
population joined their leaders in a refusal to accept the inevitable
and seek peace.

Again and again in Hastings pages, we meet many more committed Nazis
than it is now convenient to acknowledge. Even more often, we meet
Germans who refuse to acknowledge that their nation had done anything
wrong - and who react with fury to the appearance of British troops in
their towns as an "invasion" entirely disconnected from any action by
their own nation. One might say (Hastings does not go in for such
fanciful thoughts himself) that the Second World War will only truly
have ended when all sides complete their moral calculus: Germans first
and foremost, collaborators and allies in the rest of Europe - but also
the western allies too, who waged an unnecessarily horrific air war
against civilian populations, and finally (the one country that has not
even begun this task) the people of Russia.

4. Soviet Brutality. For many years after the war, it was considered
somehow unseemly to describe in any detail the horrifying abuses
committed by the Soviet troops in eastern Germany, especially East
Prussia. Somehow it was taken as minimizing Nazi guilt to record Soviet
guilt. Hastings as ever keeps a clear moral head, acknowledging that the
Nazi crimes were greater - and that Soviet atrocities were a response to
previous outrages - but also documenting exactly what the Soviet
population did. Mass rape, murder of prisoners, reckless disregard for
all humanity: as it was done unto them, so the Russians did unto the
Germans, both spontaneously and under the orders of their high command,
up to Stalin himself. The once beautiful city of Konigsberg, home to
Immanuel Kant, burial place of the Prussian kings, was reduced to rubble
- and then rebuilt as a Soviet nightmare eyesore. The most valuable of
  all the artworks looted by the Nazis in Russia, Peter the Great's
amber room, had been stashed in Konigsberg Castle. It vanished in the
battle, almost certainly destroyed by the Russians themselves, unaware
that the art they were smashing up was property of their motherland, not
the enemy.

The Soviets themselves soon perceived that this misconduct only hardened
German resolve and prolonged the war. By then it was too late: the
Germans were digging in for a battle in and around Berlin that would
ultimately cost some 400,000 Soviet casualites, including perhaps 80,000
dead, and uncounted hundreds of thousands of Germans.

5. The Character of Twentieth Century Warfare. After the prolonged
stalemate on the western front in 1914-1917, military thinkers
understandably became fascinated with technologies and techniques that
promised to restore maneuver warfare. Erwin Rommel, Charles de Gaulle,
Basil Liddell Hart - all wrote books hailing the possibility that the
tank, the fighter, and the radio in combintation could achieve sudden
and decisive results. The success of the German operations in the spring
of 1940 seemed to confirm these theories, and the Western Allied
breakout in the reverse direction in August-September 1944 seemed to
confirm them again. British writers in particular, acutely conscious of
their nation's much lighter casualty toll in 1939-45 than in 1914-1918,
were especially susceptible to the "blitzkrieg" myth.

The technological and tactical advances of the second war did not
however alter the fundamental strategic fact revealed by the first (and
foreshadowed by the US civil war): the ability of modern states to
command unprecedented resources - the power of nationalism to mobilize
unprecedented popular support - meant that the locus of decision in war
had shifted from the individual battlefield to the will to fight of the
nation as a whole. 

The Napoleonic idea of the "decisive battle" - the battle that destroyed
an army and thus won a war - the idea borne out by Austerlitz and
Waterloo, and then extended into late 19th century military thinking at
Solferino and Sedan - had passed out of date. In the 20th century,
nations that lost armies raised new ones. At Waterloo, France suffered
about 25,000 casualties. At Verdun, 400,000. After Waterloo, the emperor
fled. But the France of Verdun had no emperor - it was France itself
that was fighting, and it continued to fight so long as it had anything
to fight with. 

France collapsed in 1940 not because it could not have continued to
resist, but because French society was so divided that the French state
had forfeited the ability to summon resources from the population.
France however was a unique case among the large nations. Genuine
popular support in the Anglo-American democracies, a mix of genuine
support and terror in Germany and the Soviet Union, gave the other major
combatants access to the total material and human resources of their
respective nations. Blitzkrieg, that access kept them working and
fighting to the end: the Wehrmacht never ran out of ammunition after all
and continued to receive new and more advanced tanks to the very end.

**

Hastings is working his way to an episodic multivolume history of the
second world war. If I had to recommend any one series of books on the
subject, his would be it. No author does a better job of addressing all
aspects of the titantic struggle in an accessible and lively way, from
battlefield tactics to grand strategy to economics and war finance to
the experience of the ordinary soldier or citizen. And all is bounded by
a moral judgment that is both sensitive and fair. Hastings never allows
his respect for the Wehrmacht to blind him to the evil of its cause;
never allows his support for the Allied cause to blind him to the
misdeeds of his side or his British countrymen. These books represent a
truly outstanding historical achievement, in the best British tradition
of non-academic history. 

I'm sending in my advance order for Hastings' book on the Pacific war
right away, and I look forward to it eagerly.

11/11 09:56 AM