Inferno - Max Hastings [416]
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 Britain’s loss of global power, this was anyway inescapable. The British people developed a sense of grievance about their postwar privations, which included the maintenance of some food rationing until 1952. Having had an exaggerated sense of Britain’s strength and wealth in 1939, its 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 postwar 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, and 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. It was apparent to German economic managers as early as December 1941 that victory was beyond Hitler’s reach because of events in Russia and the accession of the United States to the Allied cause. This was long before the RAF’s and USAAF’s strategic air offensives attained maturity: Allied bombing of Germany hastened the end, but did not decide the outcome. Nonetheless, it is important to stress the importance of close air support, and absolute command of the skies, to the western war in 1943–45. The Western Allies created superb tactical air forces, and used them with all the skill and flair their ground operations lacked. Every man who glimpsed the armies, their convoys crowding the roads of Italy and later northwest Europe nose-to-tail without intervention from the Luftwaffe, recognised the critical contribution of air power in conferring freedom of movement, while denying it to the Wehrmacht.
The United States Navy and Marine Corps were chiefly responsible for the defeat of Japan. In pursuing that end, many battles were fought, notably