Inferno - Max Hastings [279]
But this is a perspective accessible only to posterity. At the time, it would have seemed unthinkable—save to the airmen fiercely ambitious to show that they could defeat Japan on their own—to halt ground operations. The U.S. Marine Corps and Army divisions deployed in the Pacific expected to keep fighting, and so did their commanders and the nation at home. Once great peoples are committed to the business of killing, there is a bleak inevitability about the manner in which they continue to do so until their enemies are prostrate. In the spring of 1944, the Japanese were still far from acknowledging defeat.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ITALY: HIGH HOPES, SOUR FRUITS
1. Sicily
IN SEPTEMBER 1939, wiseacres in Britain said, “The generals learned their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.” To this Evelyn Waugh responded with characteristic waspishness, “How is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?” His question, while mischievous, was entirely to the point. To defeat Nazi Germany, it was indispensable for its enemies to destroy the Wehrmacht. 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. In 1940–41, the British Empire defied Hitler alone. Thereafter, the United States made a dominant material contribution to Germany’s defeat, by supplying aid to Russia and Britain which assumed massive proportions from 1943 onwards, and by creating great air and naval armadas. The Anglo-American bomber offensive made an increasingly heavy impact on Germany. The Western Allied armies, however, by deferring a major landing on the Continent until 1944, restricted themselves to a marginal role. The Russians eventually killed more than 4.5 million German soldiers, while American and British ground and air forces accounted for only about 500,000. These figures emphasise the disparity between respective battlefield contributions.
For Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s soldiers to have played a decisive role in the ground war against Germany, they would have needed to land on the European continent at least forty divisions, and probably more, in 1943 before the Russians achieved their great victories. These armies did not exist, with the length of training and scale of equipment that American and British military leaders deemed essential. Equally important, shipping was lacking to transport such a force to the Continent and keep it supplied thereafter. The Luftwaffe remained relatively potent: its nemesis came in the following year, at the hands of the USAAF’s Mustang fighters over Germany. Allied dominance of French airspace, which proved absolute in 1944, would have been contested had the Allies landed earlier.
The Americans were willing to risk landing a small army in France in 1943, or even in 1942. The British, who would have had to provide most of the men, were not. They judged, almost certainly rightly, that unless they deployed overwhelming strength they would suffer another disaster, as painful as those of the early war years. Even if a continental campaign in 1943 had proved sustainable, it would have cost hundreds of thousands more casualties than the Anglo-American armies suffered in 1944–45, since they would have faced German forces much stronger than those deployed in Normandy on and after D-Day, following a further year of attrition on the Eastern Front.
The expanses of sea separating the Western Allies from occupied Europe posed a challenge for invasion forces that had to cross them, but they also quarantined the Anglo-Americans