It took me more than a month to plow my way through this richly documented history tome by a professor at the University of Exeter. It is the only book that I have borrowed from the library this year that became due before I finished reading it, with 39 people waiting for it! I had to borrow it a second time months later to read the last 200 pages. By any measure, it should become one of the definitive modern reference texts on World War II and the events leading up to it and consequent to it. Now I feel a need to convince my readers that I actually read to the end, with a proportionately long review.
Commonalities of hundreds of years of wars- the political leaders’ perceived need for space for their ethnically, culturally, and racially homogeneous populations to expand, extract resources and prosper are explored in the Prologue and the first chapter entitled Nation-Empires and Global Crisis,1931-40. Even the British attempts to preserve their vast empire with suppression of native cultures and peoples is likened to Hitler’s invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland in that regard. The hyperbole of Randolph Churchill’s 1940 rant illustrates this: “… if we lose our empire, we shall become, not a second-rank, but a tenth-rank power. We’ll have nothing. We will all die of hunger.” Ironically, the defeat of the Axis powers lead directly to the worldwide anti-empire nationalist uprisings that lead to the downfall of British, Dutch, French, Belgium and Japanese empires following the war, as related in great detail in the last chapter. Earlier intense competition between the Axis countries to grab the French, Belgian, Dutch and British colonies around the world developed while their defences were weakened by the need to defend the homelands.
In some ways the Nazi eastern campaign against Russia seems like the earlier British settler’s of the Americas in their treatment of natives but even far more heartless, massive, and deliberately cruel. In discussing the 1942 attempts to expand eastward a German senior commander is quoted as saying that “Among the peoples of the occupied East, 85 % of Poles, 50% of Czechs, 50% from the Baltic States, 75 % of Belorussians and 65% of Ukrainians are ‘expendable.’” This was a total of 47,925,000 racial aliens to be expelled or eliminated, not including the Jews, most of whom had already been murdered.
In the 138 page chapter titled The Death of the Empire State, 1942-45, detailed documentation of dozens of battles around the world are provided with an astounding amount of precise bits of data (some inaccurately called statistics) on almost every page. In the 1944 ‘Operation Olive’ alone against the Adriatic end of the German ‘Gothic Line’ “German forces had 8944 meters of tank ditches, 72,517 anti-tank mines, 23,172 anti-personnel mines, 117,370 metres of wire, 3604 dugouts, 2375 machine gun posts, and 479 anti-tank units.” The squabbles between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt are discussed as are those between Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. The final few pages of this chapter turn the conventional explanation of the reasons for Japanese surrender following the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (intended for Kokura) on its head and reveal the very messy process of surrender and rebuilding of a no-longer-imperial Japan.
Macroeconomists and trade union leaders may be interested in the 59 page chapter Mobilization for Total War and the later 58 page War Economics: Economies at War. Much of the later is devoted to discussion of the impact of America’s Lend-Lease program of aid to Britain, Russia, and Nationalist China among others. Again here abundant very precise numbers of questionable accuracy are provided, although some are referenced to sources in the notes. “[German] Air Ministry calculations made in late 1941showed that no more than 5 per cent of Britain’s rapidly expanding war production was lost as a result of the bombing campaign….The effort to disrupt British stocks of oil and foodstuffs was equally limited. Only 0.5 per cent of stored oil was lost, 5.5 percent of flour- milling capacity, 1.6 percent of oilseed output and 1.5 percent of cold storage facilities….. The cost to German was substantial ….between January and June, 1941, 372 bombers were destroyed… and 496 damaged. By May, the Bomber arm had 769 serviceable bombers….For the British side the heaviest cost was the death of 44,652 men, women and children in 1940-41..” These very precise numbers seem questionable to my sceptical mind. How can anyone be sure that the NKVD ‘blocking agents’ on the Soviet front prevented precisely 657,364 soldiers from escaping from the front line and that precisely 10,201 of these were executed? In other contexts relating data such as tonnage of bombs dropped, casualties, economic costs, ships sunk, etc., numbers are suspiciously rounded off with two, three, or four zeros at the end, with nary any acknowledgement that these numbers are estimates or approximations. I am sure there must be contradictions in some of the data stated as facts, but it would take a powerful computer analysis to find them all. The documentation is supported by 76 pages of notes, and a 47 page Index, not included in the number of pages of text that I have calculated.
The Fighting The War chapter with discussion of communications, use of deception and captured prisoners as double agents may be of interest to technicians in telecommunications, military strategists, and fans of spy novels. The differences between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’, two words often used incorrectly, are never expounded; this prompted me to undertake an internet search, where the terms are mostly distinguished in the context of corporate planning.
In Just Wars? Unjust Wars?, Overy clearly espouses the view that almost all individuals participating in WWII were motivated by sincere beliefs in the justice of the cause rather than by fear of reprisals from dictatorial leaders, regardless of the bizarre lies those dictators fed them. This assertion is unsubstantiated for the most part and insults the ability of at least a substantial minority of people to reason for themselves.“Fitness to colonize” was, and still is in some senses, seen as the preserve of rich white peoples in Britain, America, and some Western European nations (and now Russia and China).
This read emphasizes that national borders and names of countries are fickle and at the mercy of ruthless leaders. As Canadians, we should be grateful that the name of our country and its borders have changed little in over 150 years.
The long chapter on the role of the civil defence mobilization of nonmilitary civilian fire fighters, rescue workers, paramedics and resistance fighters in occupied territories shows up the artificiality of the distinction between military and civilian populations at least in places where bombing and shooting was occurring.
The equally loquacious discussion of the emotional reactions of fighters to danger, deaths of comrades, and killing is dense with euphemisms and attempts to dress psychiatric illness up in the more acceptable terms for physical ailments, and the approaches differed dramatically in the American, British, Russian, Japanese, and New Zealand military forces. The stigma of seeing mental illness as a moral weakness was even more powerful in the 1940s but still persists.
The chapter on Crimes and Atrocities documents the grossest most heart-wrenching documentation of anything I have ever read, worse than anything in the fictional Silence of the Lambs. Acts of cruelty of both military and civilian personnel on both sides, around the world and throughout the war make a mockery of the various Hague and Geneva conventions and their numerous vague unenforceable updates. They made any subsequent multilateral agreement on what constitutes a war crime or a crime against humanity almost impossible, a tragedy we are still living with, although there were a surprising number of convictions. The very widespread slaughter of Jews in the Baltic states, Romania, Ukraine, Belorussia, the Slavic states, and the Soviet Union with no help from Germany was a bit of a surprise to me. (This chapter also contains the only misspelling I found- use of ‘dystrophy’, where the author obviously meant ‘dysentery’.)
The massive movement of people following the war, some to be repatriated, some to newly created countries, some voluntary and some mandated is a facet of the war that is often neglected in standard texts but is discussed in detail in the final chapter. Canada, by 1951, is said to have accepted 157,000 displaced people of various previous ethnicities and nationalities displaced but the war. The defeat of expansionist Axis powers also forced reconsideration of imperialism and the beginning of disassembly of the existing exploitive empires of the conquering Allies, with the new United Nations playing a major role. This chapter also provides readers with a concise summary of the the complex negotiations leading to the establishment of the state of Israel and a summary of the rise of the Chinese Communist state. Only the continental conflicts in South America are largely left out in what is a concise summary of later twentieth world history in this chapter.
As a reference work of modern history, this is a comprehensive valuable guide. Consumed in small nibbles on the dense leaves, between snacks of lighter, tastier fare and lots of fluids (it is extremely dry) this provides an impressively informative, global, revisionist perspective on all modern wars of conquest including Russian’s invasion of Ukraine. Good brain food, but my antique brain is now ready for something lighter.
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Thanks, Goodreads.
The Passionate Reader 