"Burrowing into Books - The Second World Wars"
Sydney M. Williams
swtotd.blogspot.com
Burrowing into Books
Reviews of Selective Readings
December 29, 2017
“The Second World Wars”
Victor Davis Hanson
“Unlike World
War I, there has never been any doubt
as to who caused, won and lost World War
II.”
Victor
Davis Hanson
The
Second World Wars
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in classics and military history
at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His background is ideal for an
analysis of the Second World War. “Wars” are plural in the title because, as
Hanson notes, it was fought in many different places, from Singapore to
Finland, and in many different ways, on air, sea and land, with weapons ranging
from side arms to atomic bombs. It was the first war which saw more civilians
die than soldiers.
The book is divided topically, with chapters titled “Ideas,” “Air,” “Water,”
“Earth,” “Fire,” and “People.” A complaint may be that the book is repetitive,
but different aspects are looked at from different angles. The War was fought
on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, with combatants from every
continent except Antarctica. It was fought on the land, the sea and in the air,
and Hanson reviews all facets. The facts he assembles are sobering: From a
world population of about two billion, five hundred million people were
displaced, perhaps a hundred million mobilized, and sixty million died, two
thirds of whom were civilians. Seven million Jews were killed. “No other deliberate mass killings in
history, before or since, whether systematic, loosely organized or spontaneous,
have approached the magnitude of the Holocaust – not the Armenian genocide, the
Cambodian ‘killing fields,’ or the Rwandan tribal bloodletting.”
His details are encyclopedic. In 1939, the U.S. spent one percent of
GDP on defense. By 1944, forty percent of GDP was going to defense. During the
war years, the U.S. produced forty billion rounds of small-arms ammunition and
one billion rounds of artillery shells. In 1939, 9.5 million square feet of
industrial plant space was devoted to aircraft production. By 1944, that had
grown to 165 million square feet. Britain, despite being bombed, having been
defeated in most every major battle during the first two years of the War and
having mobilized 3.5 million men, added more ships to its fleet during the war
than the entire naval production of the three major Axis powers. The Allies were
more efficient manufacturers; The thousandth B-29 to roll off the production
line required half the man hours as the four hundredth. With his eye for
detail, we learn that in 1942, the Eastern Front was costing the Third Reich a
hundred thousand dead each month. “In
that year alone, the Germans lost 5,500 tanks, eight thousand guns, and a
quarter million vehicles.” About three hundred thousand planes were
destroyed or badly damaged during the War.
As a classicist, Victor Davis Hanson puts the War into historical
perspective: The Normandy invasion, for example, was the largest amphibious
assault since Xerxes’ Persians landed in Greece in 480BC. He writes about the
epic tank battle at Kursk (just northeast of Ukraine) in July 1943. While the Soviets
suffered three times the number of casualties and seven to ten times the number
of tank losses, Germany’s victory cost them 200,000 casualties and the loss of
500 tanks. He suggests a comparison to Pyrrhus’s lament at Asculum in 279BC,
when his invasion forces took heavy losses in defeating Roman defenders,
writing that Generals Walter Model and Erich von Manstein “might have sighed, ‘if we prove victorious in one more such battle with
the Russians, we shall be utterly ruined.’”
Hanson tells of the lengths democracies had to go in dealing with their
totalitarian partner, the Soviet Union: “Roosevelt,
for example, unlike Churchill, was determined to suppress the truth of the
spring 1940 massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.” It took the
Russians seventy years – until 2010 – to admit to their culpability in that slaughter.
The lesson of the book is that Mr. Hanson believes the War was
preventable. It should have been self-evident, he notes, that the United
States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were bigger, richer and stronger,
and with soldiers and sailors better fed and equipped than the Fascist powers
of Germany, Japan and Italy – that Germany and Japan embarked on an
impossible-to-win quest, in invading Eastern Europe and in attacking the U.S.
fleet at Pearl Harbor. There should have been “no need for such a bloody laboratory, if not for prior British
appeasement, American isolationism and Russian collaboration.”
This is a book to savor, to read slowly, to keep as a reference – as
reminder that the strength of democracies is paramount to keeping the peace in
a world where bad men seek power and dominance. FDR once, allegedly, said to
his wife, when it was suggested in the early ‘30s he become a benevolent
dictator, “There is no such thing as a
benevolent dictator.”
The lesson for us today is that, like it or not, responsibility for global
accord falls on the United States. There is no other country or entity – not Europe,
Russia, China or the UN – that can ensure world peace.
Labels: book reviews, Burrowing into Books, Classical History, Second World War, Victor Davis Hanson
posted by Thought of the Day @ 4:18 AM
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