All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [413]
Because German and Japanese soldiers displayed high courage and tactical skill, the principal Axis powers were overrated by their enemies. From June 1940 onwards, both Berlin and Tokyo made strategy with awesome incompetence. Japan’s early victories in 1941–42 reflected local Allied weakness, not real Japanese strength; it is extraordinary that Hirohito’s government entered the war without taking any convincing steps to protect its maritime lifelines from a US submarine offensive. It became clear within months that Japan’s gamble had failed, because its success was dependent on a German victory in Europe which was no longer attainable.
Once the British and American war efforts gained traction, the Western Allies conducted their affairs much better than the Germans and Japanese at every level save local ground combat. Whether or not the leaders of Germany and Japan were stupid men, they did many stupid things, often because their understanding of their opponents was so poor. Most of the men close to Hitler – Himmler and Goering notable among them – would have seemed to posterity ridiculous figures, save that they had licence to shed so much blood. Where Stalin’s Russia was indeed a totalitarian state, a monolith, the Nazi leadership was riven by personal ambitions, its war effort weakened by competition among rival fiefdoms as well as by Hitler’s persistent blunders.
The democracies mobilised the finest brains and empowered clever men to exploit their nations’ scientific genius and industrial capacity. America and Britain fulfilled their strategic aims at relatively low human cost, by imaginative mobilisation of resources to generate firepower and exploit superior technologies, especially at sea and in the air. For this their governments, and above all Roosevelt and Churchill, richly earned the gratitude they received from their peoples.
Britain’s defiance in 1940–41 was critical in averting Nazi triumph; but thereafter Churchill’s people made only a subordinate contribution to victory. They paid a price in blood and treasure which seemed to them heavy enough, but was modest in comparison with the horrors that befell the Continental nations. Even Britain’s leaders were slow to realise that, while the war accelerated the nation’s loss of global power, this was anyway inescapable. The British people developed a sense of grievance about their post-war privations, which included the maintenance of some food rationing until 1952. Having had an exaggerated sense of Britain’s strength and wealth in 1939, their descent to diminished importance and relative impoverishment was correspondingly more painful, after achieving a place among the victors of 1945.
The war became a proud national folk memory, because the British came to regard it as the last hurrah of their greatness, a historic achievement to set against many post-war failures and disappointments. Their lone stand against Nazism in 1940–41 was indeed their finest hour, for which they were empowered by Winston Churchill, the towering personality of the forces of light. Throughout the war, Britain was governed with impressive efficiency; its leaders harnessed civilian brains and scientific genius to dazzling effect, symbolised by the epic of Bletchley Park’s codebreakers, the nation’s greatest single achievement of the war. The Royal Navy and the RAF did many things bravely and well, though always straining to match their strengths to their commitments. The British Army’s overall performance, however, seldom surpassed adequacy, and often fell short of it. As an institution, and as Alan Brooke readily acknowledged, it was deficient in competent commanders, imagination, appropriate transport and armour, energy and professional skill, its artillery alone displaying excellence. Its shortcomings would have been even more cruelly exposed had it been obliged to bear a larger share of the burden of beating the Wehrmacht.
America’s industrial might contributed more to victory than did its armies.