World War II, 1939-45
4.3. Total War
Much worse for Japan was its defeat at Midway in June. The Japanese objective was to capture the island as a stepping stone to an ultimate landing on Hawaii, a thousand miles away. By way of a feint, a small task force went o to capture some of the Aleutians.
Meanwhile, the main force, consisting of four carriers, the battleship Yamato (which was serving as Admiral Yamamoto’s agship), and an entire armada of smaller warships and troop transports, set course for the island.
As at the Coral Sea, the Japanese eet was discovered with the aid of radio interception and decoding, causing the American commander of the Paci c Fleet, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, to order his own two carriers (which Yamamoto believed had been sunk in a previous battle) to sail. Taking their opponents by surprise, the Americans, using land-and sea-based torpedo-carrying aircraft, were the rst to attack. They in icted little damage, but their attacks forced the Japanese ghters to go into action. When the ghters landed to refuel, a second wave of planes, this time American dive- bombers, arrived, sinking three carriers and badly damaging a fourth. Many experienced naval pilots were also lost. It was a blow from which the Imperial Japanese Navy never recovered.
Both in the European theater of war and in the Far East, the aggressors hoped to either crush their opponents quickly or make them realize that a reconquest of lost territory would be so expensive that they would desist. Still, the numerous spectacular Axis victories did not, in the end, disprove Napoleon’s dictum that God favors the side with larger battalions.
prevail on the operational and strategic levels. To a very large extent, military theory during the twenty years’ truce that followed was an attempt to restore the power of the o ense by various means. Out of the four major military thinkers discussed in the previous chapter, three saw this as their most important task; so did gures such as General Heinz Guderian and Colonel Walther Wever (the man primarily responsible for developing German air doctrine in the 1930s).15 Only one, Ludendor , fully accepted that total war was inevitable and sought to work out the implications of this development.
In the end, the attempt to use armor to restore the power of the o ense and thus prevent the war from degenerating into attrition failed. The failure was due to a number of factors, all of which were linked and interacted in complex ways that re ected the character of speci c campaigns on land, in the air, and at sea.
Starting at the tactical level, it turned out that armored divisions, provided they were correctly employed, were no less useful on the defense as well. “Correctly” employing armored divisions for this task did not simply mean that the tanks should take up stationary positions, as the French did in 1940. Rather, better results could be obtained using a combination of e orts: obstacles in the form of ditches and mine elds so as to draw the enemy into a predesignated killing ground, covered by well-positioned, concealed batteries of anti-tank guns and artillery. Tanks, followed by mechanized infantry, then were deployed as a counterattack at the appropriate moment.
The rst time these measures may have been used was during the battle of Kursk, enabling the Soviets to defeat the last major German o ensive on the Eastern Front.’6 From then on, such tactics became standard even though the Germans, who had more occasion to use them than did their enemies, were often handicapped by Hitler’s
“not a step back” orders.
What was true in respect to ground operations was equally valid in the air. Leaving aside the question of “strategic” bombardment,
on which more later, many of the initial achievements of the Luftwa e were due to surprise. The same also applied to Pearl Harbor, where three times as many Japanese aircraft were shot down during the second attack as during the rst. As radar became more developed and commonly used, opportunities for surprise and, therefore, a successful o ense became rarer.
Both armies and air forces march, or y, on their stomach. A World War II German infantry division needed about 200 tons of supplies per day to remain operational. Its armored equivalent needed 300, whereas in 1944–45 an Anglo-American division, being much more lavishly equipped with vehicles and artillery, needed no less than 650.
In most of the European theaters of war, at least some railways were available and could carry part of the burden. However, railways were not completely suitable for supplying fast-moving mobile operations, and though tracks were hard to hit and easy to repair, railway stations and marshaling yards made excellent targets for bombers, and rolling stock attracted ghter-bombers as owers attract bees. In the spring of 1944, while preparing to meet the Normandy invasion, the Germans in particular were to learn that operating railways in the face of enemy air superiority was tantamount to suicide.
From 1941–42 on, these problems a ected the belligerents in di erent ways. On the German side, the only part of the Wehrmacht that was fully motorized was Rommel’s small “hunting expedition”
(the phrase used by Hermann Goering at Nuremberg)17 in North Africa. Elsewhere, a growing imbalance between the size of the forces and the productive capacity of German industry, as well as fuel shortages, forced the high command to demotorize its forces. By 1944, the number of horses stood at one and a quarter million, an increase over the 1941 gure.’8
The British and the Americans because they had the necessary industrial infrastructure, and the Soviets because they received several hundred thousand trucks from their allies, were at an
advantage. Even so, measured in terms of personnel, fuel, spare parts, and maintenance work per ton/mile transported, trucks were much more expensive than railways.
Air transport helped, but not much. Cargo aircraft could quickly lift supplies to the places they were needed at the times they were needed. However, they were usually too vulnerable to land close to the front, and the loads they carried were too small.’9 In Russia, in North Africa, and nally in northwestern Europe, experience was to show that each time a large ground force moved more than two hundred or so miles from its railheads or ports, logistical di culties would set in and bring an advance to a halt. Only after proper bases, including air bases for the ghters providing air cover, had been built, the supporting echelons moved forward, and the depots lled, could operations resume.
While intelligence and surprise aided the Americans dramatically in the great naval battle of Midway, neither factor played much of a role in amphibious landings. Uncooperative weather, wind, waves, and tides apart, one reason for this was because the defender could construct forti cations. A second was because it was easier for him to conceal his weapons, including, above all, his artillery; a third, because land-based aircraft, not being limited to short runways and not requiring folding wings, usually had a slight edge over their sea- based equivalents (which they to the present retain). For an amphibious o ensive to succeed in overcoming a forwarned, well- prepared defense, it had to enjoy crushing superiority.
In this way, a combination of tactical, operational, and logistical factors, albeit working in di erent ways in di erent environments for di erent belligerents, ensured that the struggle should be one of attrition. A few gures will illustrate what happened next. Whereas, in 1914–18, 13 million, 15 million, and 4 million men went through the German, Russian, and American armed forces respectively, in 1939–45 the gures were 18 million, 33 million, and 15 million.
Production gures were even more impressive. Combining the ve main belligerents— Britain, the United States, the USSR, Germany, and Japan—the production of aircraft rose from 53,433 in 1940 to
231,066 in 1944 (at peak, one aircraft was coming o the American assembly lines every ve minutes and forty- ve seconds). The construction of major warships by the same ve powers went up from just 251 to 2,895, an elevenfold increase. Excluding Japan, the corresponding gures for tanks were 7,816 and 74,029; for artillery pieces, 24,000 and 209,35s.20 By 1944, American production of tanks and artillery was already declining, given that the depots were bursting at the seams and more weapons were available than could be shipped to the theaters of war or deployed. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, or likely ever will again.
The prize for the most e cient mobilization of resources probably goes to Britain. With a democratically elected, highly centralized system of government that had cut its teeth in 1914–18, the national commitment was exceptionally strong. Britain was the only Allied country that fought Hitler and Tojo from the beginning and went on ghting them to the very end. Of course, being an island helped.
Unlike some other belligerents, Britain never su ered an invasion, and although it is true that some industrial areas, particularly in Oxford, Coventry, and Birmingham, were heavily hit from the air, even at the height of the Blitz, only 1.7 percent of its stock of machine tools was damaged.21
The principal constraints on production were a relatively small labor force, a somewhat antiquated production system with too many small factories, and the need to import food, weapons, raw materials, and oil from abroad. In fact, had it not been for the Lend- Lease program, proclaimed in March 1941, Britain would have gone under. American munitions contributed to 11.5 percent of the British total in 1941 and climbed to 28.7 percent by 1944. Even so, Britain emerged from the war bankrupt, which in turn played a role in the breakup of its empire.
Having conquered most of Europe, in the rst two years of the war Germany was able to expand its economic base until, in 1941, it produced twice as much steel as Britain and the USSR combined.
Thanks to ruthless exploitation of the occupied territories, some of
which were reduced to starvation, its population did not su er from hunger as much as it had in 1914–18. Millions of prisoners of war, as well as foreign labor, were impressed to support Germany’s war economy. Germany’s main weaknesses were a shortage of oil—in essence limited to the Romanian elds, a few native wells, and expensive synthetic production.
As in 1914–18, the military did not prove very understanding of the needs of industry, repeatedly calling up vital workers who had to be released, if they could be released at all, only after erce bureaucratic in ghting. Partly as a result, during the rst two years of the war production stagnated; it was only from the spring of 1942 on, probably already too late, that it really began to rise.22
Technically the Germans were very inventive. Indeed, it has been argued that almost every weapons system deployed from 1945 to 1991, including, in particular, certain kinds of submarines and many kinds of missiles, was already on the German drawing boards in 1944–45. However, in some ways this very inventiveness worked against them. It resulted in a very large number of di erent types, models, and versions of weapons, which in turn led to frequent changes, disrupted production schedules, and endless maintenance problems; at the end of 1941, Army Group Center, ghting in front of Moscow, needed a million di erent spare parts.
Whereas the Nazis were able to squeeze resources out of Western Europe, France in particular, the economic contribution of the occupied Russian territories never met expectations owing to Stalin’s scorched-earth policy. The appointment of Albert Speer as armaments minister in early 1942 did lead to a considerable increase in production, but not to the point that Allied superiority was ever threatened. Having risen until July 1944, from that point on production declined as Allied strategic bombardment started showing results and many of the occupied countries were liberated or switched sides. Germany also started su ering from a shortage of certain strategic materials, such as chromium, without which the production of high-quality weapons was impossible.23
The fact that Russia even survived the war, much less serving as one of the major contributors to the defeat of Germany, is astonishing given the losses it su ered from July to December 1941
—half of its wheat production, more than half of its meat production, and a third of the Soviet rail network. Lost, too, was 40 percent of the electrical-generation capacity; two-thirds of the supply of such vital raw materials as aluminum, manganese, and copper; and at least three-quarters of iron ore, steel, and coal production.24
Things were made worse by the fact that, whereas in the West, the Germans for the most part stuck to the international rules of war, on the Eastern Front they waged a campaign of extermination that condemned tens of millions to die of hunger. The situation was saved by the evacuation of entire industries from the west (the Ukraine in particular) to the east of the Urals. Other factors were a drastic reduction in living standards, which for Soviet citizens were already the lowest of any of the belligerents. Workers in armaments factories could be shot for tardiness or absenteeism. The result was that in terms of production, the Soviets produced weapons with an e ciency that was unparalleled. Thus, in 1943 the Soviets turned 8 million tons of steel and 90 million tons of coal into 48,000 heavy cannon and 24,000 tanks. The Germans—using more than three times as much steel and almost four times as much coal—could only make 27,000 heavy cannon and 17,000 tanks.25 And these weapons, rather than being concentrated on a single front, had to be distributed among several.
Of all the major belligerents, the only one that escaped all enemy attempts to disrupt production was the United States. Though not entirely self-su cient, the United States possessed vast domestic resources of food, coal, and iron ore. Until 1948, it was even a net exporter of oil, extracted from the elds in Texas, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.
In 1941, it produced more steel, aluminum, oil, and motor vehicles than all the other major powers combined. The enviable
“problem” was how to translate this capacity into military power. In terms of workers, even as 15 million people (of whom about 350,000 were women) served in the military, the labor force was still able to grow by 7.3 million workers between 1939 and 1944, an increase of 14 percent.26
Once mobilization hit its stride in 1942–43, American factories poured forth a ood of munitions such as the world had never seen.
In the eyes of friends as well as enemies, what the GIs had in terms of money, food, uniforms, fuel, weapons, trucks, jeeps, weapons, and equipment of every kind, from movie projectors to condoms, appeared incredible. And no other country attained excess production like the United States: Between 5 and 11 percent of all production went to the Allies under the terms of Lend-Lease.27
On the eve of the war, the best available calculations showed that Japan’s war potential amounted to rather less than one-tenth of that of its principal enemy28 Even this gure concealed a whole series of other weaknesses. The most important was Tokyo’s utter dependence on imported food, iron ore, coal and oil; ironically, had it not been for this factor, Japan might not have gone to war in the
rst place.
In theory, Japan’s occupation of much of the French, Dutch, and British colonial possessions in Southeast Asia should have enabled it to solve most of these problems. In practice, American submarines, based mainly on Midway and Australia and operating in a highly decentralized manner, proved extremely e ective in cutting Japan’s supply lines. By the spring of 1945, almost 90 percent of the empire’s merchant eet had been sent to the bottom. Coal imports had been reduced to a trickle, and the ow of oil had come to a complete halt. Even maritime transport among the main home islands was no longer secure. By the end of hostilities, Japan was teetering on the edge of starvation.
Given the amount of attention the issue has received in the literature, one might think that the role of women in the mobilization process was critical. In fact this was only true in the
Soviet Union, where, at the peak of the war, women actually outnumbered men in the labor force. They formed a majority even in the mines, the only time in history this has happened anywhere.29 In dramatic contrast, in 1941 almost one-third of all British women atly refused to do any war work at all. Even at the peak of the war in 1943, there remained ten million unemployed British women with, on the average, less than one child to care for. At no time did women form more than 38.8 percent of the labor force, which means that, after ve million men had been put into uniform, working men still outnumbered women by almost two to one. Only toward the end of 1943 did the authorities nally start “directing”
women without children under fourteen to war work. Even so, fear of social unrest caused the policy to be applied quite cautiously. The higher the class to which a woman belonged, the less likely she was to hold a job of any kind. Some even got an exemption because they had large houses to look after.30
Even in 1945, out of fty-two million American adult women, only nineteen and a half million held jobs; among married women, only a quarter did. Though the image of Rosie the Riveter dominated propaganda, its link to reality was tenuous. In metalworking plants male workers outnumbered females more than three to one.31
In some ways, the countries that treated women best were Japan and Germany. In the former, the government did what it could to protect women from the rigors of war, work-related rigors included.32 In the latter, Hitler personally was determined to make sure German women would not again be subjected to the hardships experienced in 1914–18. As a result, from May 1939 to May 1944 the total number of German working women only rose by 180,000.
Since the number of those in public administration increased from 954,000 to i,746,000,33 clearly the number of women doing hard work in agriculture and industry actually fell, their places taken by foreign workers, 2 million of whom were themselves females forcibly imported from the east. German provisions for soldiers’
wives’ pay, public kindergartens, and the like were also exceptionally generous.
In the world’s armed forces between the wars, women accounted for a small number of nurses, telephone operators, and the like.
After 1939 this changed; 9 percent of the British armed forces were female at peak strength. American and Soviet forces were 2 to 3 percent female.34 Military women di ered from the camp followers of previous periods in that they wore uniforms and had their own chain of command, yet they resembled them in that they lled a very large number of service duties, from food preparation to communications and from administration, to driving cars and trucks behind the front. Like camp followers, too, they were only semi- soldiers in the sense that they were volunteers (at a time when men were conscripted by the millions), could not be sent overseas against their will (in Britain and the United States), and, in case they had violated military law, were not punished nearly as severely as men.
Though some British women helped “man” antiaircraft defenses in the homeland, only Soviet women saw combat, both on the ground and in the air, but their numbers were very limited.
As has been emphasized elsewhere,35 the size of the Allies’
economies and their ability to translate resources into military power was not the only factor behind their victory, although it clearly was important. Whereas, in 1944, the Allies had some twenty-seven million men (including about a million and a half women) under arms, the gure on the other side was around thirteen million; throughout the war, indeed, Japan never had what it took to arm all the manpower it could have mobilized. Between 1941 and 1944, the number of aircraft produced by Britain, the United States, and the USSR outpaced Germany and Japan by a ratio of 3.6 to 1. In terms of major naval vessels, the corresponding gure was 6.1; in terms of tanks, 3.2. All this explains why, late in September 1944, one German document estimated that, in the west, the Wehrmacht was outnumbered “to an almost unlimited extent” in the air, ten to one in tanks, and three to one in artillery. The last-