When in doubt, consult Sun Tzu.  “Know your enemy,” the great ancient sage once wrote.

Good advice in wartime, I’m sure we’ll all agree.  The longer I study World War II, however, the more I am convinced how little the antagonists knew about one another.  This is especially true for the powers whose aggression started the war, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  Both powers were convinced that the western democracies were old, tired, and flabby.  Hitler was sure that once Germany had carved out an East European empire for itself, Great Britain and France would simply fall into line.  After all, the only alternative would be war to the knife, a life and death struggle for which he was sure they no longer had the will.  Likewise, all the smart voices in Tokyo felt certain that Japan could get away with something similar.  Singapore, Hong Kong, Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines:  all were ripe for the plucking.  The feeble western empires in Asia would collapse, and young Japan would inherit the estate.  About Mussolini’s insane notion that Italy could conquer and rule a modern-day Roman Empire, we will draw a merciful silence.

Perhaps the most wrongheaded notion of all was Hitler’s belief that the Soviet Union, under the yoke of its “Jewish-Bolshevik” regime, was in such an advanced state of decay that that all it would take was one swift kick and “the whole rotten edifice of communist rule will come tumbling down,” as he remarked in 1941 to staff officer General Alfred Jodl.

Similar negative stereotypes existed about the United States, as well.  The Japanese were certain that once they had set up their defense perimeter in the Pacific, the Americans would have no choice but to respect it.  After all, what U.S. president would willingly throw away the tens of thousands of young American lives it would take to penetrate that perimeter?  Frontal assaults on one fortified island after another?  Preposterous.  A commercial nation obsessed with material comforts would never be able to make the appropriate sacrifices. 
   
While Allied diplomatic and military intelligence services weren’t perfect, and while the Allies powers had their own stereotypes and misconceptions about the Axis, I think we can identify one crucial Allied advantage:  their respective leaders had a much more realistic notion of what it would take to win the war:  total national mobilization, “blood, sweat, and tears,” and a mountain of industrial production. 

The Allies knew their enemy. 

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Call it a bad month for the Führer.  On the night of December 5th-6th, 1941, the Red Army launched its tremendous counteroffensive in front of Moscow, capping one of the most remarkable military comebacks of all time.  The German front gave everywhere and broke altogether in numerous places.  Army Group Center, the Schwerpunkt of the German operation in the east, seemed on the verge of collapse.  Then, on December 7th, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war.  Although he was under no treaty obligation to do so–as if treaties mattered to Hitler anyway–he now declared war on the United States.

Looking back, it seems inexplicable.  After all, why borrow a new enemy (and a great big one) when you haven’t even beaten the enemies you already have?  Why toss a new weight into the scales, one with the world’s largest industrial base by a considerable margin?  Why ask for trouble?  More to the point, why solve President Roosevelt’s political problems for him?  FDR saw Nazi Germany, not Imperial Japan, as the gravest threat to democracy, but even this wiliest of U.S. politicians knew it was going to be difficult to get an American public outraged by the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor into a war against Germany.

There’s one simple answer, of course, and it shows up again and again in the histories. Hitler was incompetent.  Or, more likely, insane.  Others argue, a bit more precisely, that he wanted to unleash the U-Boats against an America that was already supplying Great Britain with the tools and materiel to continue to war.  Then there is Hitler’s racial ideology, his notion that the US was a multiracial “mongrel nation” that could never compete with a racially pure Germany on the battlefield.

In fact, the explanation for this seemingly absurd decision does not require reference to either Hitler’s pathology or to his ideology.  By 1941, Germany had been at war for two full years.  The Wehrmacht had crushed one enemy after another and even now stood at the gates of Moscow.  We know today that the Soviet blow had been a crushing one, but on December 11, Hitler could hardly realize the true extent of the disaster.  He could hear the panic in the voices on the General Staff, sure, and no doubt he was already toying with that famous “stand-fast order” for the Eastern Front–widely regarded as the decision that rescued Army Group Center.  Still, the war must have seemed all but over to him.  What could the U.S. possibly do to Germany that Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union had not? 

It may wound our self-esteem, but the real explanation for Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States is that he did not really think it mattered all that much.

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As we observed last week, flying a bomber over Germany was by its very nature dangerous business. Anyone who looks at it fairly, however, has to admit that some of the problems might have been  avoidable. 

There were a number of specious ideas “in the air” in those days.  The untried doctrine of "precision daylight bombing" to which U.S. air forces were wedded, for example, ran into the reality of fully alerted and heavily echeloned German antiaircraft defenses. The notion that bombers like the B-17 and B-24 could defend themselves against German fighters (the B-17 was a “flying fortress,” after all), and thus did not need a long-range escort fighter, ran into the problem of a human machine gunner trying to hit an FW-190 whizzing past the bomber at breakneck speed. We won’t even go into the giddy horror of serving as the ball-turret gunner.  The notion of a straight, slow bombing run over the target ran into the natural inclination of the pilot and crew to take evasive action from the ever-present flak.  Then there were the slogans–and the infancy of air power was filled with them.  Slogans like "the bomber will always get through" or the Norden bombsight’s alleged ability to "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet” often seemed more like mantras to silence debate than flexible and sensible guidelines to warfighting. 

Historians usually point out that much of what passed for USAAF “doctrine” in the early years of the air war was dreamed up by a handful of air officers sitting around in a room, quite literally.  General Ira C. Eaker usually gets the blame, and so, by implication, does the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field, AL.  But we need to go beyond personality.  There was a bigger issue here than one blinkered general or a single staff school.  This was new territory, after all.  There had been a great deal of discussion in the interwar era of strategic bombing, but no one had ever done it for real.  There was no objective evidence that “precision daylight bombing” by unescorted bombers would work, and, unfortunately, it didn’t.  It would take the airmen years to work out a more sensible approach. 

As always, it was the men at the point of the spear–the bomber crews–who paid the price when doctrine clashed with reality.

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Since the dawn of the air power age, an irresistible and romantic image has formed in our culture of airmen sailing, quite literally, above the fray.  To the mind’s eye, the words “air mission” still seem to conjure up images of a crystal clear day, blue skies, and fair weather.  Nothing messy here–no mud or blood, and no dying grunts.  Just handsome flyboys and their beautiful machines sailing off into the "wild blue yonder,” dropping their payloads, and returning to base for a well-deserved Scotch.  It was the glamour arm of World War II.

Anyone who still clings to these notions, however, needs to look a bit more carefully at the U.S. strategic bombing campaign over Germany.  When you do that, you’ll realize that this was very dangerous work:  a long, hazardous flight, explosive cargo (at least on the way out), and a wall of Flak over your target area.  And let us not forget those German fighters:  Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs swooping down, up, and often straight at you at breakneck speed.  U.S. bomber losses were horrific from the start.  They stayed horrific as the tide turned, and they could still be shocking well after the U.S. had gained air superiority over Europe.  Eventually, by some estimates, losses would total 77% of the crewmen who flew.  It’s a sobering thought:  casualties among USAAF bomber crews were considerably higher than those suffered by the entire U.S. Marine Corps as it stormed its way across the Pacific from one bloody island to the next. 

To be sure, much of the casualty problem resulted from the new battle environment.  There were just so many unusual ways to die up there.  If the Germans didn’t get you, anoxia or frostbite might, and if you were injured from any cause–well, let’s just say that it’s not as if there was an ambulance immediately available.  Add in personnel policies that (in the war’s early years at least), kept you flying missions until you died, and one thing becomes clear:  when it came to personal peril and nail-biting terror, bomber crews endured conditions as rough as those of any sad-sack slogging his way through the Hürtgen Forest. 

Glamour arm?  Wild blue yonder?  Oh yeah:  it was wild, all right. 

Next week, let’s ask whether at least some of the problems were avoidable. 

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Warsaw, October 2009.  I just finished spending a fascinating three days in the city where it all started, so to speak.  The Polish capital is a lovely place, jam-packed with buildings of 17th and 18th century vintage.  The stare miasto–the “old city”–is just what its name would lead you to expect:  the high city wall, the imposing statue of King Sigismund III Vasa (the Polish king who moved the capital from Kraków to Warsaw in 1596), even the old-time eateries on Bednarska Street, where the patrons eat traditional fare, family-style, at heavy oaken tables.  Warsaw is like a history book, a beautifully illustrated one. 

Just be sure to check the date of those “historic” buildings and statues and monuments, however.  The markers surprise you by saying 1947.  Or 1953.  Or 1971.  The old city of Warsaw is actually quite new, and in some cases it’s brand new.

Take any decent city tour, or just ask one of the locals, and you’ll hear one phrase repeated over and over again.  This church “was destroyed in 1944,” and rebuilt in 1967.  That hotel “was destroyed in 1944” and rebuilt in 1982.  This block of buildings was  “destroyed in 1944.”  That theater.  This school.

Few cities in the war got hit harder than Warsaw.  Manila comes to mind, and of course Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  But Warsaw got bombed before any of them, at the very start of the war in September 1939.  The city then became a kind of ground zero for Hitler’s insane racial policies. The Germans herded the considerable Jewish population of Warsaw into an overcrowded ghetto that killed through starvation and disease.  When Hitler made the decision to “liquidate” the ghetto and send its inhabitants to death camps, the Jews launched an uprising, fighting with few weapons but a great deal of courage.  The Nazis crushed the uprising, leveling the entire district in the process.  That was the spring of 1943.  In August 1944, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), in-country resisters to German rule, rose up in a city-wide rebellion, hoping to liberate Warsaw before the Red Army arrived.  The Germans crushed this uprising as well, and systematically destroyed most of the central city, block by block.  The Red Army, meanwhile, sat on the other side of the Vistula river while the Wehrmacht went about its grisly business.  The more Polish patriots killed by the Germans, the better the situation for Stalin in postwar Poland.  Indeed, the NKVD was already active behind Soviet lines in Poland, doing what it did best:  shooting civilians.

There are moments that hit you when you’re sitting alongside the Vistula, taking in a picture perfect day in Warsaw.  They come on suddenly.  Moments when you realize that, no matter how much you study, you’ll never really be able to fathom the horrors of World War II.

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Military historians spend a lot of time calling out the commanders of the past for their mistakes, pointing out the wrong decisions they took that led them (and the men under their command) to defeat.

One of the granddaddies of them all took place on Hill 107, during the Crete campaign.  The 22nd New Zealand Battalion had held the German paratroopers at bay for an entire day–the opening day of Operation Mercury–successfully blocking their path to the airfield at Maleme.  It was an increasingly dire situation for the Germans, who HAD to take the field in order to land the necessary supplies and reinforcements.  The campaign hung in the balance.  In the early morning hours of the second day, the Germans steeled themselves for one last, desperate lunge at the hill.  It was do or die time on Crete. 

They were bewildered at first when their reconnaissance probes discovered that the 22nd New Zealand had abandoned the position, retreating on the open path to the east.  Soon the airfield was in German hands, and soon after that so was all of Crete.

Every since that moment, the commander of the Kiwi battalion, LTC L. W. Andrew, has become the goat of the campaign.  What was he thinking, abandoning this crucial spot?  Was it blindness?  Incompetence?  Cowardice?

I vote for “none of the above.”  Let’s tick off a few facts about Andrew’s situation.  He’d had a bewildering day, defending under the first large-scale paradrop of the war.  In fending off a series of uncoordinated but aggressive German assaults, his battalion’s casualties were approaching 50%.  He’d been under Luftwaffe attack all day, the screaming of the Stukas making it hard to think straight, let alone exercise orderly command and control.  Radio contact with his subordinate companies was intermittent, and practically non-existent with his brigade commander, BG James Hargest (5th New Zealand Brigade).  Andrew’s counterattack late in the day, spearheaded by his two–yes, two–Matilda infantry tanks had collapsed almost as soon as it began.  And while we know today that the Germans themselves had taken a beating that first day and had almost no paratroopers in reserve, that is just the sort of thing that Andrew himself did not know.  He had no idea who’d be landing on or around him when the sun came up on day two.  He was fairly certain that those Stukas would be back, though.

And so he ordered a retreat, linking up with 21st and 23rd Battalions to the east.  A mistake?  By the conventions of military history, yes, I guess it was. 

But it probably made a heck of lot of sense at the time.

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Sure, for many, he remains the comic relief of a very unfunny war.  He had spouted off about war for almost two decades when the real thing broke out in 1939–and then he suddenly got cold feet and stayed out of it.  When “neutrality” seemed to be an insufficiently fascist term, he invented a new one: “non-belligerency.”  Only when France was well and truly beaten, and he began to get nervous about being left out of the peace talks in a Hitler-dominated Europe, did he bring Italy into the war.  The parade of disasters that followed still boggles the mind:  Savoy, Sidi Barrani, Taranto, Greece, Beda Fomm.  For many folks who study World War II, ineptitude will always be spelled “D-U-C-E.”    

Mussolini was, as my late father put it, a buffone.  And yet, the more I think about it, the more I see that the Duce played a central role in the war.  Here is a partial list of things that would not have happened if Mussolini had not brought Italy into the war.  The Balkan campaign, and thus the German airdrop on Crete.  The entire seesaw war in North Africa, from Agheila in 1941 to Alamein in 1942, and thus the fame of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.  Put the “Desert Fox” in the Soviet Union and chances are he’s just another general.  The entire Mediterranean campaign, from Torch to Husky to Avalanche to the Po.  No Anzio.  No Cassino.  In other words, it’s a VERY different war without Italy.  Indeed, a Germany completely isolated and without allies in 1939 might not have even started the war in the first place.  

Historians usually call him a drain on German resources.  My first response:  Aw, gee… you’re breaking my heart.  No one forced Hitler to sign the Pact of Steel.  My second one:  Mussolini may have unwittingly been an aid to the Germans.  By opening up those new fronts in 1940, disasters and all, he gave the Wehrmacht maneuver space to do what it did best:  win operational-level victories over the British.  Indeed, it almost had strategic consequences in the summer of 1942, when Rommel’s armored spearheads were knocking on the door of Suez.

He deserves more attention than he usually gets.

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I was pretty hard last week on Admiral William F. Halsey (see “Halsey in the Dock,” September 20th, 2009).  So let me, in my best scholarly-historian “on the one hand, on the other hand” fashion, make a case for a commander like the Bull.

I have a good friend in the army, an “06” in the armor branch, who once offered me a real insight.  We tend to think of warfighting as exciting.  Constant action.  Shouting.  Explosions.  My friend the Colonel demurs.  “In war,” he tells me, “stasis is the default setting.”  In other words, people tend to stand around.  They’re standing around because they don’t quite know what to do.  Things are confusing.  The intelligence reports are contradictory.  Everyone’s tired and afraid in equal measure.  And the result is inaction.

Someone has to step in and get things moving, and that someone is the commander.  Military history–and especially the history of World War II–is filled with stories of great leaders who seized that moment.  It might be nothing more than a pep talk, or a few well chosen curses (US officers tended to lead the way here), or it might simply mean exuding an aura of confidence.  General Norman “Dutch” Cota, for example, managed to combine all three of those things–exhortation, confidence, and cursing–on Omaha Beach, delivering what has to be one of the pithiest and most effective battlefield speeches of all time:  

“Well, goddamn it, if you’re Rangers get up and lead the way!”

And that is why, for all of Halsey’s misjudgments and rhetorical excesses, he remains in the command pantheon, at least as far as I’m concerned.  When the nation–not just the military– was uncertain about how to proceed after Pearl Harbor, Halsey was ready to act.  And because he was, so were a lot of other men in the U. S. Navy.  He was a classic example of what students of land warfare like to call a hard charger.  When Bull Halsey entered the room, no one was going to be “standing around” for long.  Things were going to happen.  He canceled that default setting.  “Hit hard,” he said, “hit fast, hit often.”  Good advice in wartime.

Still no excuse for that typhoon, however….

Now, how about it, readers?   A list of your five greatest “hard chargers”–land, sea, and air?

During World War II, Americans liked their military heroes to be tough talkers–and no one did it better than Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey.

From the start of the Pacific War to the end, from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, the Bull was the ultimate quote machine, a reporter’s dream.  His response to Pearl Harbor was pithy enough:  “When we’re through with them,” he growled, surveying the wreckage of the U.S. Pacific Fleet on December 8th, 1941, “the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.”  During those awful early months, when one western bastion after another was falling to the Japanese, Halsey remained defiant.  His view of the war was fairly easy to summarize:  the U.S. had to find a way to “Kill Japs! Kill Japs! Kill more Japs!”  And indeed, talk of “killing Japs” and “dead Japs” fills an inordinate amount of space in a list of his most famous quotations.

But let’s give his Halsey his due.  He was more than a talker.  He was a “do-er” and a fighter at a time when the nation seemed paralyzed, and the U.S. Navy wasn’t even sure what it was supposed to be “doing.”  Halsey spearheaded what early response there was to Pearl Harbor:  hit and run raids on the Gilbert and Marshall islands in February, 1942, and on Wake island in March; command of the “Doolittle Raid” (to many at the time, the “Doolittle-Halsey Raid”) in April, center stage for those tough naval battles off Guadalcanal in the fall.  To an American public looking for heroes in a dark time, Halsey was the man.  A fortuitous typo by a reporter even turned “Bill” Halsey into “Bull,” and a legend was born.

Unquestionably a hero–at least that’s how the U.S. public saw him.  And yet, who can deny that the very qualities that made him a hero also amounted to his undoing?  Sure, war requires killing, but it also requires thought, a cold eye, and careful planning.  Such qualities were not always high on Halsey’s list of priorities.  The battle of Leyte Gulf is the classic example, where he abandoned his post at the San Bernardino Strait to chase down a force of Japanese carriers deliberately dangled as a decoy.  If it wasn’t for those brave “tin can sailors” manning the escort carriers of “Taffy 3,” the Japanese might well have smashed the U.S. invasion force off Leyte.  That was bad enough of course, but even worse was his deliberate hesitation to admit error and return when summoned by Admiral Chester Nimitz, a result of a message that looked to Halsey like it was framed in insulting terms.  Indeed, he didn’t even RESPOND to the message for an hour, while Taffy 3 fought for its life.  And then there was the great typhoon of December 1944, with Halsey ignoring the warnings and continuing operations in the face of worsening weather conditions.  Three destroyers capsized and 790 U.S. sailors paid with their lives.

Suffice it to say that Halsey was, and always will be, controversial.  So here’s your chance to weigh in.  The Bull:  thumbs up or thumbs down?

Picture the scene:  it is May 1942, at an obscure desert location called Gazala, and General Erwin Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika has just landed one of the great operational-level blows of the war.  Operation Theseus has opened with the “Desert Fox” carrying out the most audacious move of this career:  an entire mechanized army driving deep into the desert, circling around the open flank of the British 8th Army, then turning sharply to the north and northeast and, quite literally, erupting into the British rear in the first ten minutes of the battle.

The British were in trouble.  They’d been badly beaten in the game of maneuver, their carefully prepared defensive line from the sea to Bir Hacheim had proven to be worthless, and their confidence in their own commander, General Neil Ritchie–not all that high to begin with–had just suffered a body blow.  Now they had a huge Panzer force securely ensconced in their rear, blocking their retreat route.  If ever an army were ripe for dissolution, it was this one.

They didn’t dissolve, however.  They fought, and fought hard.  Rommel’s Panzer divisions were supposed to drive clear to the sea, but they didn’t  get anywhere close.  Rommel himself learned a lesson that day:  being in the rear of an intact enemy army meant that you, too, were surrounded.  Soon he was under attack from all compass points, in a position that became known as “the Cauldron.”  Despite all their troubles, no one could ever say that the men of 8th Army lacked guts.

But there was one other factor on that hot desert day in May 1942.  As the lead units of Rommel’s spearhead burst into the British rear, they encountered something new:  the strangest-looking tank they had ever seen, an ungainly creature that seemed to be as tall as a house.  But it could fight!  Most German shells had no effect at all on the things.  And when the hulks began returning fire, they drilled one German tank after another at seemingly impossible ranges.

The M-3 “Grant’ doesn’t get a lot of respect from historians nowadays.  It really was tall and ungainly and slow, it really did have all the design elegance of a boxcar, and its twin armament (a 37mm in the turret and a limited-traverse 75 mm in a fixed “sponson” in the hull) turned out to be a design dead-end.  But maybe every dog does have its day.  For a brief, shining moment in the desert war, the M-3 dominated the battlefield.  Indeed, in that awful moment when 8th Army found itself utterly compromised, the Grant might well have constituted a margin of survival for the British.

So here’s to the Grant!  What about it?  Are there any other World War II weapons/vehicles that you feel have been unjustly judged?

Saying that “World War II began in 1939” leads us to another problem, however:  it ignores what was happening outside of Europe. 

In fact, by the time Hitler’s Panzers rolled into Poland, the world was already in flames, and had been for years.  Africa had seen one of the largest and deadliest colonial wars of all time in 1935-36:  Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia (Abyssinia).  It featured (at least on the Italian side) tanks, poison gas, and the unrestrained bombing of defenseless civilians from the air; in all ways it was a suitable curtain-raiser on the war to come.  In Asia, Japan had been on the march for years, seizing the rich Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931, thumbing its nose at international protests, lopping off Chinese border territories like Rehe (Jehol) in 1933, and, finally, in July 1937, launching a full-scale invasion of China proper.  You can’t accuse the Japanese of thinking small:  this campaign aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the world’s most populous nation.  The Imperial Japanese Army managed to overrun much of north China against the indifferently armed and led Chinese, then linked up with amphibious forces landing at Shanghai in August.  The invasion’s signal moment was the orgy of violence after the capture of the capital city of Nanking in December, where the victorious invaders butchered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, apparently just to show that they could.  Japan never formally declared war, however, and so this incredibly brutal campaign went by one of the all time understatements:  it was the “China incident.”

Surprisingly, given that fast start, China would turn into a quagmire for the Japanese.  The regime of Chiang Kai-shek continued to resist the invaders, fleeing to the interior and setting up a new capital at Chungking.  Chiang also suspended his long-running civil war with the Chinese Communists under Mao Tse-tung in favor of a United Front against the Japanese.  Foreign supplies also began to flow into China, with arms from the U.S. and Great Britain arriving via a new “Burma Road” hacked out of the mountains.  American pilots came to China as mercenaries, flying as the American Volunteer Group and helping to contest Japanese control of the air.  As a result, by 1941, the fighting had stalemated.  Large chunks of China were in Japanese hands, but even with a troop commitment of some 1.5 million men, Japan was no closer to ultimate victory.  It couldn’t win in China, nor could it simply cut its losses and go home.  It ultimately decided to solve that problem by dramatically widening the war, conquering an empire in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, regions rich in tin and oil and rubber, so that it could bring its war in China to a successful conclusion.  The “China Incident,” in other words, led directly to Pearl Harbor.

My take:  1937 is as good a date as any to use for the start of World War II. 

Fact:  World War II started seventy years ago, on September 1, 1939.

Or did it?  Historians spend a lot of time thinking about dates, about issues of “periodization.”  Questions like “When did the Renaissance start?” or “When did the Great Depression end?” are our bread and butter.  With that in mind, let’s talk for a moment about 1939.

Certainly, a case can be made that Nazi Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Poland was the curtain raiser, the first act in the great conflict that would rage for the next six years. Every student of the war knows it:  two days after the first Panzers crossed the border, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, and the world was at war.

Or was it?  In September 1939, the “world” was hardly at war.  Some of Europe was at war, to be sure.  But even here, we should exercise caution.  Unlike 1914, Russia was not yet involved directly (although it was assisting the Germans with supplies and raw materials, and it did send forces into eastern Poland two weeks into the campaign).  Austria-Hungary no longer existed, and its successor states hung back.  As in 1914, the Italians vacillated and would not enter the war until the second year.  Another great power, the United States of America, still stood aloof , although FDR had already made it known he would do whatever he could to assist the Allies.  The scope of the fighting was surprisingly limited.  Most of the early action would be confined to a relatively small area of eastern Europe, and after the German conquest of Poland there was no land fighting at all for six full months–the “Phoney War” to Americans, the “Sitzkrieg” to the Germans.

A war certainly did start in 1939, but it was a limited one, fought in a limited way in a limited theater.  The Germans were right to call it a "sitting war."  The armed forces on all sides mostly sat.  After all those years of pundits predicting devastation from the air by strategic bombing in the first fifteen minutes of a new war, all of the homelands remained pretty much untouched.  German “action” against France was limited mainly to loudspeaker broadcasts opposite the Maginot Line.  The British did send bombers over the Ruhr, but only to drop anti-Hitler leaflets.

So, did “the war “ start in 1939?  Maybe, but I’d say it took a couple of years for this one to become “World War II.”

Next time:  let’s look at Asia and Africa.

The headline of this post is one of the greatest and most enduring myths of World War II. Despite a complete lack of evidence to verify it, the notion keeps coming back: that on some unnamed battlefield, on some imprecise date, some unidentified unit of Polish cavalry–presumably with lances lowered–decided to have a go at some German Panzers.

Like a lot of the mythology of the war, this one has come under attack by scholars and specialists for a long time now. As far back as 1991, Steven Zaloga and Victor Madej wrote a good book called The Polish Campaign that, to my mind, should have demolished the myth once and for all. They discuss a charge by the Polish 18th Lancer Regiment (part of the Pomorska Cavalry Brigade) against a weak German infantry position near the town of Krojanty in Pomerania on the first day of the invasion. Initially successful in dispersing the Germans, the 18th Lancers later came to grief when several German armored cars happened on the scene and opened up with their machine guns and light cannon. The regimental commander, Colonel Kazimierz Mastelarz, was killed in the incident. This “skirmish at Krojanty,” described in sensationalist terms by journalists like William Shirer, is almost certainly the source material for the fanciful tale of Polish cavalry charging tanks. We might also add that at times during the campaign, as Polish mounted units sought to evade or escape encirclement, they may indeed have encountered German Panzers. But that’s a long way from “charging” them.

Such myth-busting has hardly seemed to matter, unfortunately. The story continues to have legs, as anyone who has ever taught a course on World War II can testify. Forget how improbable it is, even ridiculous. It’s almost as if we want it to be true, perhaps as an illustration of the power of the new German “Blitzkrieg,” perhaps as proof of the central role that technology plays in modern warfare, perhaps simply as a tribute to doomed heroism. German General Heinz Guderian included the tale in his memoirs as a sign of Polish backwardness (“The Polish Pomorska Cavalry Brigade, in ignorance of the nature of our tanks, had charged them with swords and lances…”) But Polish cavalry would hardly be surprised by the capabilities of tanks: each cavalry brigade had an armored troop attached to it, and the Polish army in 1939 contained the not-inconsiderable number of 600 tanks.

Cavalry charging tanks. A lot of people have bought this one for years. It makes me wonder what other “facts” about the war we still need to call into question.

Sixty-seven years ago this month, two German spearheads were heading towards their respective rendezvous with destiny.  One, made up of the 6th Army, was driving on the key industrial city of Stalingrad against what was already some pretty stiff opposition.  It was slow going, made even slower by 6th Army’s precarious supply situation and the caution of its commander, General Friedrich von Paulus.  The other, however, was a multi-army extravaganza–including the 1st and 4th Panzer Armies, the 17th Army, and the Romanian 3rd Army–that was hurtling forward at top speed, lunging deep into the Caucasus mountains.  Operation Edelweiss had already conquered one of the Soviet Union’s three principal oil cities, Maikop, and the other two, Grozny and Baku, glittered on the far horizon.  The Soviets had done a pretty good job of wrecking Maikop before they left, true.  As distressing as that must have been to its new overlords, however, getting Maikop pumping again was an engineering problem, not some sort of mystery, and engineering had always been a German specialty.  Already the Panzers were concentrating on the Terek river, less than 100 miles from Grozny.

The Germans still had a long way to go, but then again, they had already come pretty damn far.  The Wehrmacht had opened the campaign by crossing the Manych river and driving into Asia.  It was now campaigning on no fewer than three continents at the same time.  The Soviet defenders had not yet coalesced into any sort of coherent line, and the roads in the Caucasus were filled with columns moving south:  German Panzers, retreating Soviet columns, and the poignant site of 100,000s of civilian refugees crowding the roads, heading south and east.  Moreover, one entire German army had not yet even made its appearance in the theater.  Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army was still in the Crimea, preparing to cross the Straits of Kerch.  A concentric drive by five armies would put immense pressure on the Soviet defenses in this isolated region, and might even overload them altogether.  The stakes were tremendous.  The Wehrmacht was always tough on the operational and tactical levels.  Seizure of some of the world’s greatest oilfields might have been a solution to its principal strategic weakness:  supply and logistics.

Most historians have tended to treat the Caucasus operation as an inevitable failure, and have relegated it to the status of a footnote, a sideshow to Stalingrad.  It would be interesting to go back in time to mid-August 1942 and sample Soviet opinion on that point.

A few months ago, I had the privilege of helping to lead a dozen West Point cadets on a Normandy “staff ride.“  Advice:  if you ever get down on the current state of the nation, be sure to visit the U.S. Military Academy.  Spend a few days getting to know some of the young men and women in the Corps of Cadets, and you may find yourself feeling a whole lot better about the future of the Republic.

The trips was one of those “life changing experiences “ you hear so much about, and for me at least, epiphany followed epiphany.  Standing out on Omaha Beach on a crystal clear spring morning was one.  You could see forever, and if you were equipped with what Hunter S. Thompson once called “the right kind of eyes,” you could have sworn you had just spotted an invasion fleet on the horizon.  Maybe I’m crazy, but I even saw an older gentleman that morning who looked a heck of a lot like General Norman “Dutch” Cota.

The epiphany this time was the problem of military planning.  Modern war requires it, and the amount you need grows exponentially with the size of the op.  On Omaha, you could probably multiply the need for planning by “infinity” to account for the amphibious problem–the sheer complexity of trying to throw and sustain a huge mechanized force on a far shore.  As any World War II literate knows, Omaha didn’t “go well.”  Indeed, an operation that took over a year to plan turned into little more than a frontal assault against a German division so deeply dug into the bluffs that it was practically part of the terrain.  Any good history of the Omaha landing can provide the interested reader with chapter and verse; my choice would be Carlo D’Este’s gripping Decision in Normandy.  

Our historical memory has come down pretty hard on the folks who planned this mess. Rather than going in at night (for surprise) or in broad daylight (for a massive and spectacular bombardment), the planners went with a compromise:  a landing at “half light.”  The veteran German 352nd Infantry Division at Omaha wasn’t surprised; neither was it stunned into submission by the sheer force of U.S. firepower.  And, unfortunately, it gave a pretty good accounting of itself on that bloody June day.

So, we’re talking here about a “mistake”…  or are we?  Contrary to the way they’re often portrayed in books and movies on the war, staff officers are professionals, they take their job seriously, and most of them are pretty good at what they do.  They consider the problems that are likely to arise and usually do their best to come up with possible solutions.  They also invariably wind up with compromises.  Think about it:  you want to surprise the enemy, and you want to blow the hell out of him with a prolonged bombardment.  Those two objectives, needless to say, are not always in harmony with one another.  So you bombard less to get a little more surprise.  Or you get a little more bombardment at the expense of surprise.  But there’s no magic solution.  This is a systemic problem, in other words, and the options are not always good ones.  So you get what you got on Omaha:  a lot of good men killed, an operation that came perilously close to a catastrophe, and one that was only rescued by the sheer grit of those soldiers and junior officers in the first few assault waves.

And then, a second epiphany.  It suddenly struck me that when things do go wrong, when military planning and reality diverge as tragically as they did on June 6th, it was the young men (and today, young women) standing around me on that beautiful beach who are going to be expected to make up the difference.  The art of command is not so much about "following orders."  It’s more about coming up with a "plan B".

It’s difficult work, and dangerous.  In that moment, I wanted to stop what I was doing, shake their hands, and thank each one of them for that brave decision to devote their lives to my defense–and yours.

What was the turning point of World War II?  I’ve been teaching university courses on the war for a long time, and it’s one of the questions I get asked most often (right up there with "Would you repeat that?" and "Is this going to be on the exam?").

I’ll confess from the get-go that the question makes me somewhat uncomfortable. This war, more than any other before it, was a vast and sprawling conflict on land, sea, and air.  It involved hundreds of millions of fighters and civilians from the freezing cold Arctic wastes to the sweltering heat of the Burmese jungle, and the notion that there was a single discrete moment that "turned" it is problematical, to say the least.

A second problem with the concept is the sheer number of turning points that historians have identified over the years.  The German halt at Dunkirk, allowing the British to escape the continent and fight another day; the German decision to shift to city bombing and terror raids in the battle of Britain when they "clearly" had the RAF on the ropes; Hitler’s gratuitous decision to give himself a two-front war by invading the Soviet Union in June 1941; his diversion of the Panzer formations into the Ukraine in August; his equally gratuitous decision to declare war on the United States in December; El Alamein in October 1942; Stalingrad in November:  the list goes on and on, and there are more than a few historians who identify more than one.  That’s cheating, of course.  A second turning point should put you right back where you started!

The real problem, however, is that "turning point" simply isn’t a very useful way to think about war.  A quarterback throwing an interception–a single bad decision, a faulty throw, a badly run route by a receiver–that’s a turning point.  Momentum is a real factor in a sporting event, no doubt.  But is it the same in war?  Let’s think about El Alamein.  It was something different, certainly, a smashing victory for the British 8th Army after years of humiliating defeat in the desert.  It crushed Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika, and although the "Desert Fox" managed to retreat to Tunisia, it clearly signaled the onset of the end game in North Africa.  No less a figure than Winston Churchill said so:  "Before Alamein, we never had a victory – after Alamein we never had a defeat."  But Alamein wasn’t some shocking bolt out of the blue.  By the time it was fought, the British (backed by American muscle and materiel) had achieved a decisive superiority in manpower, tanks, aircraft, and gun tubes.  At Alamein, they used all these things to good effect to wear down (and eventually grind down) an enemy who was already mortally inferior.  Therefore, while Alamein might have made Churchill feel better, it can’t be seen as the "turning point" of either the desert war or the war as a whole.  The very fact that the British 8th Army could win it in the fashion it did showed that a turning point of some sort–or at least a dramatic shift in the balance of forces in the desert–had ALREADY taken place.   

"Turning point" confuses cause and effect.