Inferno - Max Hastings [415]
Churchill displayed the highest wisdom by embracing the Soviet Union as a cobelligerent in 1941, but both he—briefly—and later Roosevelt—persistently—were foolish to suppose that a real partnership was possible. Stalin, with his usual icy clarity of vision, recognised that the common commitment of Britain, Russia and the United States to defeat Hitler did nothing to bridge the yawning divide between their respective national objectives. He intended to sustain a tyranny which denied any vestige of freedom to his own people, and to secure territorial gains for the Soviet Union which the Western Allies would never willingly approve. Russia’s vast blood sacrifice spared the lives of hundreds of thousands of British and American soldiers, but in consequence the Red Army secured physical possession of an eastern European empire. The Americans and British had no choice save to acquiesce in this, since they lacked both military means and domestic support for a new war to expel the Soviet Union from its conquests. The Russians reaped the rewards for doing most of the fighting necessary to defeat Nazism. Western material aid contributed importantly to the Soviets’ 1943–45 war effort, but seems trifling alongside the destruction and slaughter they experienced.
Stalin committed many blunders in the first year after Barbarossa was launched, but thereafter learnt quickly, as Hitler did not. The Soviet Union revealed an industrial and military capability that would have enabled it to complete the destruction of Hitler’s war machine even had the Western Allies never landed in Italy or France, though their interventions hastened the end. There is a powerful argument that only a warlord as bereft of scruples or compassion as Stalin, presiding over a society in which ruthlessness was even more institutionalised than in Germany, could have destroyed Nazism. Stalin proved a supremely effective tyrant, as Hitler was not. The Western Allies’ manner of fighting, hampered by bourgeois sensitivity about casualties, was a chronic impediment to overcoming the Wehrmacht. In 1944, when the Italian officer Eugenio Corti first met British troops socially, he enjoyed their company, but observed in some puzzlement that “they are more like civilians than soldiers, which may account for the sluggishness of their advance.” So indeed it did.
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 U.S. 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