The War on the Eastern Front: Alternative Views

The conventional view of the Axis' invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 seems to go something like this:

In June 1941 the German army and its allies struck against the Soviet Union. While vastly outnumbered in manpower and equipment by the forces arrayed against them, German troops inflicted six or eight or even more casualties on the enemy for every one they suffered, while even larger numbers of Soviet troops surrendered as the Germans went from victory to victory in a string of triumphs.

The exceptional German performance was due to several factors. One was the extraordinary military proficiency of the country's armed forces, in combination with the extraordinary weakness of their massive, but decrepit enemy. The Soviets suffered from a characteristically rigid command system and shoddy equipment, while many Soviets greeted the Germans as liberators from a wicked Communist rule. All of this was worsened by the madness and incompetence of Stalin--who destroyed his officer corps with a purge in 1937-1938; ignored the signs that an Axis attack was in the offing; and then collapsed for several days, doing nothing as the Wehrmacht rampaged in the west. However, in combination with Hitler's altering the plan mid-course, and exceptionally bad weather--a rainy and muddy fall, an early and harsh winter--Soviet numbers eventually told in the Battle of Moscow in December, finally breaking the six-month succession of victories.

If one accepts Ronald Smelser and Edward Davies argument in The Myth of the Eastern Front that the conventional view of the Axis-Soviet portion of World War II, and especially the contrasting images of German and Soviet capability, has been skewed by Nazi propaganda, then what would the alternative look like? One way is to look to the far opposite end of the spectrum of opinion for "the other side" of that portion of the war--not least, the Soviet version. There are not many books offering that version available in English, of course. By and large it seems to be just a matter of old translations of Soviet-era books (the kind of thing the Moscow-based Progress Publishers would put out). One of the better known seems to be Grigory Deborin's Thirty Years of Victory, which to go by my limited survey of such material, seems typical.

What does it say about the comparative German and Soviet military performance? Obviously it cannot dispute the astonishing run of German military victories in 1941--the depth of their penetration into Soviet territory, the vast area they captured and the massive losses they inflicted. And indeed it does not.

However, it does stress that the Soviets were not up against Germany the interwar nation-state, but a Third Reich that had in the prior three years expanded its resources considerably beyond those bounds through annexations, occupations and other forms of control over most of the European continent--over a million Romanian, Finnish and other troops marching east along with their own forces.1 Another is that the Soviets could not use the whole of their forces in the western theater because there were threats from other directions--in the south from Turkey, in the east from Japan. The result was that the Axis assault substantially outnumbered Soviet troops in the key theater. Deborin's book stresses, too, that the Soviet army had been in the midst of a rapid expansion and reequipment (the world-beating T-34s just beginning to arrive while in the meantime Soviet troops made do with older gear, and were just beginning to learn the use of the new) that left it vulnerable at the decisive moment, in contrast with the Germans who had spent the '30s preparing to strike, as they did at the time of their choosing. And finally it acknowledges that the German army of June 1941 had a vastly greater fund of practical operational and battle experience.

In short, far from the image of German supermen fighting a more numerous Soviet foe, it was the Soviets who were outnumbered, outgunned and outmatched in the practical experience that knocks the kinks out of a system, and badly, all of which seems ample to explain losses and defeats. Deborin also emphasizes the relative speed with which the initial shock passed, the stiffening of Soviet resistance, and the first successful Soviet counter-attack at Yelnya (in late August and early September).

As it happens Western studies of the war do not deny any of this, especially when they get away from generalities to discussing hard facts. However, in their analysis they tend to give these factors (numbers of troops, the need to think of other fronts, reequipment, experience) comparatively short shrift and instead emphasize matters to which Deborin pays less attention, and sometimes none at all. They stress the damage done by the armed forces' leadership by the purges of the '30s (the liquidation of a fraction of the officer corps that included such dynamic elements as the remarkable theorist and reformer Mikhail Tukachevsky, and the intimidation of the rest), and the extent to which Stalin was taken by surprise when the attack came and allegedly paralyzed, while citing poor and often disastrously poor generalship generally.1 Western historiography also pays a great deal of attention to Soviet collaboration with the invading forces, while attributing much of the German failure to inclement weather. Deborin mentions the purges, but on the whole offers a glowing (if vague) appraisal of Soviet generalship instead (I must admit I got an impression of some strategic silences here--saying nothing about certain decisions of Stalin's rather than badmouthing him), while like-minded accounts claim collaboration with the invaders was solely the purview of "priests and criminals," and marginalize the weather as a factor in the slowing of the German advance. It is notable, too, that the Soviet accounts I have seen tend to be light on actual numbers, these surprisingly sparse in Deborin's book, where Western writers emphasize the numbers of Soviet troops who became casualties or were taken prisoner.

In short, when writers make reference to concrete specifics, they tend to be in agreement. (The only Soviet claim I didn't repeatedly find in entirely mainstream Western historiography is the one regarding Turkey's role, though Turkey did sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany mere days before the invasion; and there was a precedent in Napoleon combining forces with the Turks when he invaded Russia, a little known part of that well known story; making the tying down of some Soviet forces by fears of a Turkish attack in the south less implausible than it might appear.) It is the omission of some items from the analysis, the marginalization of others--the attribution of relevance and weight--that makes the difference, and this by and large seems predictable in light of the differing biases.

Interestingly, Christer Bergstrom recently endeavored to produce an account of Operation Barbarossa that would transcend the biases of both sides, reviewed here.

1. In contrast with Deborin, Georgy Zhukov in his autobiography has a good deal to say about the surprise the Axis achieved in June 1941, and explains Stalin's refusal to heed warnings that an attack was coming in terms of concern that the West was trying to entangle Germany and the Soviet Union in a war--make the Soviets do the brunt of the fighting to take Germany down, and damage the Soviet Union too in the process.

Review: Operation Barbarossa, by Christer Bergstrom

I have already remarked the common view of Operation Barbarossa, which some have criticized as badly flawed, among them Christer Bergstrom in his recent book by that name. Here he argues from the outset that the Axis attacked the Soviet Union with a 2-to-1 advantage in troops, and similar advantages in tanks and aircraft, especially at the outset and frequently through the rest of the period, as well as having a great edge in battle experience.1 It was also of consequence that Soviet forces were in the process of a hasty expansion, and at a particularly vulnerable point in a reequipment cycle--particularly where their air force was concerned. (Had the timing of the attack differed by as little as two weeks, the German air operations might not have been nearly so successful, and gone so far to winning air superiority for their side as a result.)

However, in spite of all these advantages (and sometimes disastrous military leadership by Stalin) the Germans inflicted fewer casualties and losses than they have sometimes been credited with (2-to-1 rather than 6-to-1).2 They also took fewer prisoners than is often claimed, due to their counting of the huge numbers of civilians they rounded up as prisoners-of-war; while those actual captures of prisoners of war were never in mass surrenders--as these simply did not occur.3 Indeed, as the initial surprise war off the Wehrmacht came to suffer high losses of equipment and manpower in stalling offensives that ended the hopes of quick victory, and only a real, though decreasing, advantage in air power enabled its further progress, while the Soviets won their first tactical victory in the Yelnya offensive in early September.4 Later that year, despite the Soviet defense still being outnumbered, it beat the invader back from Moscow in a victory that was the true turning point of the war, after which a German triumph over the Soviets, and with it an Axis triumph in Europe or anywhere else, was an increasingly remote prospect.5

In assessing the Soviet victory Bergstrom also pays ample tribute to the tenacity of a not merely patriotic but ideologically committed Soviet people in resisting them; Soviet skill in relocating industrial plant eastward before the Germans could capture it; and the Soviet armed forces' doctrinal innovations, both the "deep operations" doctrine, and the Soviet system for rapid regeneration of their fighting forces, that fortunately did not die with Mikhail Tukachevsky when he became a victim of the purges, but rather endured, and if the Soviet leadership implemented them less quickly than they might otherwise have done, still put them to use in time to stave off defeat.6

As Bergstrom promised, this is a very different account than the one we are accustomed to seeing in the West--one which goes beyond merely debunking the "superman" image of German forces to rating the Soviet defense much more highly than is usual. As Bergstrom points out, they did no worse than their Western counterparts in the Battle of France, with Soviet doctrinal and operational failings rather less appalling than those of the French in 1940, and as Bergstrom's statistics make clear, the losses of the Soviets less lopsided, even in the face of a more formidable offensive than the Western allies ever faced. (If the Germans made three or even five casualties or prisoners of the Soviets for every loss of their own, the vast number of French prisoners the Germans took made the proportion more like nineteen to one in their western campaign.) Indeed, given their disadvantages in numbers, equipment, and other areas, it is the Soviets who appear to have overcome the greater odds than the ostensible supermen.

Especially as Bergstrom's account is not only more than usually positive in its assessment of the Soviet performance, but reflects specific factors much more stressed in Soviet historiography than Western, some will be tempted to dismiss Bergstrom's book out of hand as merely substituting Soviet conventional wisdom for Western. However, the fact remains that Bergstrom does not minimize the technical and operational proficiency of the Germans, whom he argues could not have fought any more skillfully they did on this level (even if tactical success was mooted by a dismal strategic conception--Hitler's expectation the Soviets would simply collapse at the first blow).

Moreover, Bergstrom makes much of factors that the Soviet writing on the subject I have seen tend to slight--like the way the purges and the readiness of at least some elements within the Soviet Union to collaborate with the Axis helped its advance, or favorable weather aided the Soviet defense.7 (Indeed, just as Bergstrom argues that Western writers have made too much of the weather, he criticizes Soviet writers as having made too little of it.) Bergstrom is especially profuse and withering in his criticism of Stalin, of whom he takes the conventional Western view--whether discussing the purges, his failure to heed the signals that Hitler was about to attack, or his handling of the war, refusing to order timely retreats that might have extracted badly needed forces for later use, and scapegoating able and loyal generals for defeats.8 In fact, in Stalin's missing many an opportunity to defeat Hitler more quickly, Bergstrom assigns him equal responsibility with the Nazi dictator for the deaths of tens of millions.

Only someone completely unfamiliar with the conventional Soviet view could see all of that as simply a conveyance of it. One might more plausibly charge Bergstrom with deliberate striving for a compromise view, attempting to create a "balanced picture" at the expense of the truth (the way that the mainstream media does when it pretends there is a "debate" about whether or not anthropogenic global warming is a fact). However, this too strikes me as unfair, especially where the more fully military aspects of the discussion are concerned. The detailing of the operational history (some four-fifths of the text) is not only comprehensive, but backed up by ample statistics, lavishly sourced, and thoroughly contextualized. This does, admittedly, come at some cost to the book's readability--even those who can cope with such perhaps tempted to skim quite a few stretches--but it makes Bergstrom's case for his position a very formidable one indeed, sufficient to show, yet again, that a good deal of rethinking of the view of the Nazi-Soviet conflict taken for granted in the West is long overdue.

1. The count is 3.35 million Wehrmacht troops, backed by 1.1 million Finns and Romanians, versus 2.3 million Soviet troops in the key theater. The Soviets had 24,000 tanks--but over 21,000 of these were outdated light tanks (the largest portion of them 6-ton T-26s), so that in medium and heavy tanks the Soviets were outnumbered. Moreover, only a portion of the tank force was present in the relevant region (some 12,000 tanks of all types).
2. The Axis inflicted 2 million casualties on Soviet forces in the relevant phase--while suffering 1 million of their own, a 2-to-1 ratio. Even when prisoners taken are counted, this amounts to a 3-to-1 or at most 5-to-1 ratio. The Germans destroyed 7 Soviet tanks for every one they lost (20,500 to 2,800), but again, most of those were the aforementioned light tanks rather than the advanced T-34s and KVs then available only in small numbers. The situation was more favorable to the Germans in the air--a 9-to-1 exchange rate in aircraft (16,000 to 1,700), and 20-to-1 in aerial combat (7,000 to about 360)--but this reflected the massive destruction of Soviet planes on the ground and the shooting down of numerous unescorted bombers in the early period of the war rather than the norm over the course of 1941.
3. Of 3.3 million Soviet "prisoners" taken in this phase of the war, Bergstrom estimates 500,000 were actually civilians.
4. The first month alone saw 300,000 Axis casualties, as well as a quarter of its tanks out of action and half its aircraft destroyed or damaged.
5. The Soviet forces were outnumbered 2-to-1 in manpower and 3-to-1 in armor in the battle for Moscow, and only had an advantage in the air (important as that admittedly proved). By the end of the year the Axis armies' casualties were in the range of one million, while their tank and plane losses were equivalent to two-thirds of the Axis' initial stock.
6. Examples of these include the propensity of Soviet pilots for ramming their planes into attacking German aircraft to destroy them, and the voluntarism and self-organization manifest in the Military Soviet for the Defense of Leningrad in late 1941, which helped save that city. Bergstrom recounts numerous expressions of shock and even admiration on the part of the Germans in response to the resistance they encountered, down to Hitler's dismayed expression as the German offensive underperformed that the "rotten" and "subhuman" Soviet Union was in fact a "colossus and strong."
7. Bergstrom emphasizes that where the purges did not actually eliminate capable officers, they made many of them hesitant to take the initiative, and reversed earlier progress in doctrine with regard to the use of armor.
8. Soviet writers--like Marshall Zhukov in his memoirs--do not deny Stalin's missing the warning, but argue that the West had long been trying to push the Soviets into war with Germany, so as to make it bear the brunt of defeating the Nazis, making his overcaution plausible. Notably Bergstrom does not take this view.

Considering Britain's Military Drawdown After 1945

Looking into the historians' debate on British decline I was struck by the coverage of the country's military drawdown between World War II and the 1970s, when it turned from dominant power and global military superpower into a regional military actor with some residual out-of-area commitments and capabilities, but in most ways, roughly on par with other industrialized states of the same size (of which there are several in its neighborhood alone). Some parts of the story are fairly well-covered in the literature, like the development of Britain's nuclear deterrent, and some of the other aspects of the story have at least been the subject of some solid books, like Eric Grove's study of the post-war British navy, From Vanguard to Trident (reviewed here). Still, there was little about the period compared with other phases of British military history, what there was of substance usually narrowly specialist stuff, and I sought in vain for really concise, really comprehensive pieces about the whole process, or even many portions of it. (Because of its connection with the nuclear deterrent there was a fair amount on, for example, the V-bomber force; but try finding anything comparable on the post-war Fighter Command, let alone Transport Command.)

While the comparative scanty and uneven nature of the coverage of a fairly important bit of history is unfortunate, it is unsurprising given the biases of military historians that Jeremy Black described so well in his book on the subject. Ultimately I wound up forming my picture of what went on from scattered bits. And as I had previously written about the country's economy I wound up consolidating them into new writing, which it seemed worthwhile to post up at SSRN given the scarcity of detailed material.

Apart from the more military-related bits in my long "Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity" (overall, more concerned with economics than defense) I have completed four pieces:

"The Evolution of Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1979."

"The Restructuring of the British Navy, 1945-1979."

"The Evolution of the British Carrier Force, 1945-1979."

"Foundations of Semi-Superpower Status: Financing Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1971."

The first paper, "Evolution," considers the country's overall posture as it developed phase by phase between 1945 and 1979. The following two consider the British navy (the funding and manning of the forces, their mission and distribution around the world, the key changes in their technology), "Restructuring" its overall development in the 1945-1979 period, while "Carrier Force" (naturally) focuses more tightly on its carrier force during the same years. The last, "Foundations," considers how Britain's posture was resourced.

Having gone through all that, I find myself less concerned with putting together a picture of British policy in that earlier period; and for that matter, the ways the issue echoed in British culture at the time; and more interested in relating it to what we are seeing now. A half century ago Britain decided to give up the global military aspirations, deeming carriers, "east of Suez" forces and the rest unaffordable and focusing on Europe. Now Britain is exiting the EU, commissioning supercarriers, and once again, getting a base "east of Suez" (in Bahrain, where it had a base until 1971). Any thoughts about all that?

NOTE: The four pieces discussed here have since been collected, with other pieces, in the collection The Long Drawdown: British Military Retrenchment, 1945-1979, now available at Amazon and other retailers.

"Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity"

Back when I wrote the first edition of The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I included in the appendix a brief essay discussing Britain's extraordinary industrial, imperial and military predominance at its nineteenth century peak, and its subsequent passing over the following hundred years. Basically what it came down to was the spread of industrialization as other nations increasingly consolidated. One result was larger-scale industrialized states, another was states which evolved a more sophisticated form of industrialization, and still another were states which combined both features, epitomized by the United States. The balance of economic power shifted in a hurry, the balance of military power with it. Meanwhile the declining acceptability of colonial rule, and the cost of two world wars, accelerated the unraveling of Britain's empire, but that economic change was first and foremost.

Given my historical and other interests I did much more reading and thinking about the issue, unavoidably rethinking what I wrote earlier (just why did others make a bigger success of the "Second" Industrial Revolution, for example?), and writing more. Initially I intended to produce a longer, better-grounded version of the piece in my appendix, later a few short pieces, but it eventually blew up into the paper I have just published through SSRN, "Geography, Technology and Opportunity: The Rise and Decline of British Economic Power" (the second revision of which is now up). About 74,000 words long it is less an appendix than a book in itself--which I suppose offers the same explanation in the end. With (I hope) more rigor, in detail and depth (unexpectedly I found myself coping with matters raging from the comparative phosphorous content of different iron ores to waterway-territory ratios in countries around the world to the finer points of the 1965 National Plan), but nonetheless, the same essential explanation.

If nothing else, I've done a fair job of convincing myself.

Empire, Spies and the Twentieth Century

Studying international relations certain subjects come up again and again and again. Even when one approaches such things as the rise and fall of great powers, hegemony and hegemonic cycles, systemic wars, industrialization and deindustrialization on a principally theoretical level, Britain, its rise and subsequent decline as an economic, military and imperial powers comes up again and again and again--and does so that much more when one takes an interest in concrete history, when one considers the situation of the recent or present or future United States in which so many have seen so many parallels.

Dealing with the spy fiction genre and its history, the same theme is almost inescapable. Much as we may think of spy fiction as a Cold War genre, the truth is that it was already well into middle age when the Cold War took center stage in international life, the thread that has really run through it from its beginning to the present the passing of the British Empire that already by 1900 saw its peak behind it. Anxiety that that empire would pass, bitterness that it seemed to be passing or actually was passing, denial about what was happening, and criticism of all these attitudes, are already there at the very beginning, in such founding works as Erskine Childers' celebrated The Riddle of the Sands and William Le Queux's contemporaneous but much less celebrated Secrets of the Foreign Office. ("The name is Drew, Duckworth Drew.")

As both of these have been major interests for me for decades, thinking about one matter naturally leads back to my thinking about the other, one reason why when writing about the James Bond films and books I spent a certain amount discussing the actual history of the period--more than most such writers, I think. When I published The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I actually included a thirteen page essay devoted to just such historical background in the appendix (and included it again when the second edition of the book came out back in 2015). You can check it out here, reposted on this blog.

Review: The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture, by Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies

In The Italian Navy in World War II James Sadkovich argues that the common view of the Mediterranean theater and Italian arms in it is deeply distorted by American and British prejudices of the time (particularly a racist disdain for Italians), as well as the prejudices of the German officers who had a surprisingly large impact onthe formation of that image. In the Myth of the Eastern Front Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies make a comparable case with regard to the conduct of World War II in Eastern Europe--that American prejudice, and the post-war influence of the German generals--have had such distorting influence, even more consequential for the understanding of the war, and with greater effect.

Sadkovich argues (as many have before and since) that had the Germans lent Italy a small proportion of their resources to pursue the "Mediterranean strategy" properly, events in this region could have been decisive. However, it would have been decisive because of what it meant for the Nazi-Soviet conflict, to which the book by Smelser and Davies speaks directly, a conflict that in our own history rather than some counterfactual actually was decisive for the war and all that could or did come from it. And the distortion to which they point has, in their view, also had more profound implications for the way the war as a whole is viewed. Rather than contemptuous dismissal of Benito Mussolini's armed forces, and the prejudices into which this plays, Smelser and Davies argue that this tendency has led to a whitewashing of Axis crimes, and even a cult of the World War II German army in the United States itself comparable to the "lost cause" mythology of the Confederacy.

Smelser and Davies, more interested in cultural history than military history per se, do not attempt to offer a corrected reconstruction of World War II in the East the way Sadkovich does (persuasively) with the war's course in the Mediterranean, but rather the history of how that war has been understood. They begin at the beginning, with an account of the brief and now forgotten "love affair" American public opinion had with the Soviet Union, a virtual selling of the Soviet Union on Main Street, laid out at length and in detail to show how different the situation was before the Cold War put an end to it.

That post-war conflict quickly led to the plans for a thoroughly de-Nazified, demilitarized Germany being set aside in favor of Germany's conservative Establishment, implicated as it was in Nazism's crimes, being rehabilitated and put in charge of a West Germany not only under non-Communist rule but contributing substantially to the industrial base and military might of the Western alliance. Which, naturally, meant taking a softer line.

This was further encouraged by the turn to German generals for insight into the Soviet armed forces and their capabilities, the Germans having fought them for four years. Naturally there was a more forgiving attitude toward the record of particular German figures (clemency for many and all of whom were to be right-wing cause celebres, with Joseph McCarthy championing war criminal Joachim Peiper, for example), and plenty of opportunity for the German generals to tell their side of the story--particularly the very senior Franz Halder, Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian of World War II fame. Halder oversaw the production of a vast amount of military history and analysis by German officers for study by U.S. forces, while the latter two penned widely read memoirs that were just the leading edge of a barrage of memoir, history and fiction presenting their side's account.

These accounts, fiction and nonfiction, took a variety of courses. Some not only excused but justified the war--stressing the evils of Communism from which Nazi Germany was supposedly defending the West; the welcome of German forces as liberators by ethnic minorities and others in the Soviet Union; or even arguing that Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike that saved the West from conquest by Stalin. Amid all this they treated as marginal or incidental the issues of aggression, atrocity, genocide, not only slighting the reality that these were the motive for Barbarossa, but distancing the German armed forces from them--depicting the soldiers as innocent patriots doing their duty by their country, utterly unaware of the crimes that others committed, and horrified at or opposed to them when they found out about them, with higher officers emphasizing their conflicts with a fanatical, interfering Hitler. Others delinked the experience of individual soldiers from the larger political context altogether--the reader encouraged to not think about those troublesome matters and instead admire the courage, professionalism, dutifulness to country displayed by men who were often presented as family-oriented, religious (in the term's most positive sense), humane. Whether the larger cause was held to be valiant, or merely the individuals who fought in it, they also contended that German forces were defeated by bad weather, by the sheer overwhelming numbers of the enemy, by the enemy's "subhuman" indifference to life and decency, by American Lend-Lease, or by the meddling in operational decisions by Hitler, rather than genuinely "military" failures on the part of the virtually superheroic German soldiers and their commanders, or any military skill on the part of their Soviet opponent (not unlike the "lost cause" view of the Civil War, which attributes Northern victory solely to numbers and industrial weight).

Smelser and Davies also devote a considerable portion of the book to showing why a significant swath of American opinion was open to such a view. American occupation troops in Europe, they note, were rather more inclined to identify with German civilians, or even former German soldiers, than with the inmates of Displaced Persons camps (or the Soviets, from whom they were increasingly isolated)--and if this had its effect on George Patton, the effect was still greater on cohorts of new draftees coming in after the fighting was over. All this reflected and fed into widespread prejudices that the Cold War each exacerbated--racial as well as ideological (the anti-Slav feeling that was often bound up with anti-Semitism and anti-Asian feeling, and all of which interacted with militant anti-Communism), all as the earlier, sympathetic attention to the Soviet experience virtually vanished from memory, and with which much of the pro-Nazi writing (or simple apologism) was all too consistent. In subsequent years the extent to which German historiography, official and popular, colored American perceptions was, in time, to be taken for granted, unnoticed--making the more distinctly German view more acceptable.

The result is that the "German" view of the war in the United States was far from limited to people espousing blatanly Neo-Nazi opinions, but has substantially colored the general understanding of the war, and found wide enough currency to produce a surprisingly sizable, widespread coterie of American "romancers" of the Nazi-era German armed forces and their war in the east. Avid consumers of books and magazines devoted to the theme, many of them participate in wargaming and even public recreations of Eastern Front battles, in which they find pleasure in personally playing the roles of Wehrmacht soldiers they regard as exemplars of military and other virtues.

Reflecting on this book's argument I recalled my own reading of World War II historiography, and many of the works they cited prominently--the works by Trevor Dupuy and Martin Van Creveld and Basil Liddell Hart, particularly The German Generals Speak--and had to concede that the notion of a cult of the German army coloring the historiography is not so far-fetched. Reflecting on Hart's interviews with the surviving German generals and subsequent commentary in The German Generals, I now find myself thinking of Hart as not merely respectful to his subjects, but taking them totally at their word--the more so given his uncritically reusing in copy-and-paste fashion much of what they had to say in that book in his later Defence of the West (in which he was, notably, very hard on Winston Churchill). Still, that Smelser and Davies say relatively little about the facts of the war that contradict the "cult" image leaves a reader forming their impressions from this book with little basis for judging just how much such assessments diverge from the reality.

Reflecting on the treatment of World War II in popular culture, it struck me that they could actually have said much more of evidences of such a cult. Detailed as the authors' attention is to some of the relevant aspects of pop culture, they virtually ignore others that seem far more conspicuous--for example, the vast body of alternate history fiction, which years before Smelser and Davies published, already led to a massive, noteworthy study (Gavriel Rosenfeld's The World Hitler Never Made). Instead his discussion of "What if" material is limited to two counterfactual histories, by R.H.S. Stolfi and Samuel Newlands. Similarly there is no reference to other science fiction novels like John Ringo and Tom Kratman's Watch on the Rhine, or for that matter mainstream fiction like George Robert Elford's The Devil's Guard, which certainly seem germane to such a discussion.

Still, if the book's coverage of the subjects could have been more comprehensive, what it does cover it treats in detail, and is more than ample to make the point--and leave me convinced (as I was, after reading Sadkovich) that what we all think we know about a very large part of the war (the biggest part of it) may need to be rethought. It leaves me convinced, too, that much more may remain to be said about this most seemingly exhausted of subjects.

Clive Ponting's 1940 and its Critics

It seems a common criticism of Clive Ponting's 1940: Myth and Reality that he repeats facts that everyone knows. (Even Angus Calder, whom I would have expected to be more sympathetic, also makes it in his own Myth of the Blitz, a book which has its virtues but which also surprised and disappointed me in forcefully coming out for the myth that, as he himself owns, he once sought to debunk.)

This strikes me as a matter of picking a fight where there is none, since Ponting makes no claims about bringing new facts to light. It also strikes me as unintentional confirmation of Ponting's making a well-founded case. And that it is commonplace gives the impression that people are straining to find support for a negativity coming from other places. (Calder, alas, is a literary critic doing history, and one not wholly unaffected by the fashions of his day, as he shows when in Blitz he cites "death of the author"-flogging postructuralist Roland Barthes, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the book came down on the side not of a reading of the facts, but of myth over fact. Groan.) Often they are pushing a blatant political agenda. (After all, his becoming a public figure as a Falklands War whistleblower did not exactly endear him to many opinionmakers; while then and now debunkers of myth like 1940 can only expect the hostility and contempt of the orthodox.)

Yet, that he is up against such prejudices is proof of how necessary his book has been--and perhaps, even more necessary now as the myth he criticized fills our movie screens once more, shaping the views of credulous moviegoers who get what little history they have from such content and nowhere else.

Review: 1940: Myth and Reality, by Clive Ponting

Reading Clive Ponting's World War II history Armageddon it seemed to me that its value lay not in its bringing new facts to light, but rather in his attentiveness to those facts that do not fit in with the conventional wisdom; in his gathering them together and recognizing that they add up to a quite different picture from the one we normally get--less romantic and less comfortable for many, but where Ponting succeeds, also more nuanced and truthful.

So does it go with his more tightly focused study, 1940: Myth and Reality. The conventional wisdom among Britons (and I suppose, the English-speaking world generally) regarding that fateful year is that, following the final demise of the appeasement-minded and incompetent Chamberlain government, a united Britain, brilliantly led, tough, resolute, singlehandedly holding off the Nazi juggernaut at its seeming peak, and in so doing saving the world.

The image Ponting presents is instead of a Britain that was a shell of its former self in economic terms--its industry too puny and obsolescent after many decades not just of American and German expansion but its own slipping competitiveness to support its war needs, its once fantastic financial might depleted (by failures in other areas, by world war, by Depression). It was also badly overstretched militarily, even before the war. Meanwhile the half-hearted and incompetent leadership did not end with the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill in the Prime Ministership, let alone the broader elite, which had rather more sympathy for the extreme right-wing government they were facing than is usually admitted, while Winston Churchill's oratory, another myth in itself, fell far short of bringing together a country deeply divided and in some quarters deeply alienated (class mattered, mattered greatly), and contact with the terror of the Luftwaffe (the fight against which was in ways very badly mismanaged) produced defeatism as well as defiance. A far cry from the legend, it was a far narrower thing than people would like to remember, in any event Britain quickly ceased to be able to rely on its own resources (already dependent on imports from, among other places, Germany, for its rearmament in the late '30s, and on the edge of insolvency by 1941, after which only American support let it continue), and it fell to the combined industrial and military might of the United States and the Soviets to not just finish the job, but do most of it in the four and a half long years that followed the end of 1940, as Britain went from great power to client state.

Ponting's argument adds up to a satisfactorily comprehensive, alternate image of 1940, satisfactorily grounded in the indisputable facts of the situation--as I am now even more convinced after grappling with a good deal more of the history in trying to explain Britain's rise and decline as a great power myself.1 And while by the time I came to the book I had already encountered not just the bulk of the facts but most of what he had to say about them, his fluency in his subject, and in conveying it, made it far and away the most striking summing up of what they mean, while being highly accessible. Meanwhile, with the myth of 1940 he tackles perhaps stronger than ever (not only in the fashion for politically convenient historical revisionism, but the way the neverending stream of movies selling the myth has recently overflooded its banks, with Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour and the rest), his debunking of misconceptions that are not only accurate but dangerous remains at least as relevant now as it was when Ponting first published it.

1. This was the subject of my recent paper "Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity," which you can read over at SSRN.

Review: Armored Champion: The Top Tanks of World War II, by Steven J. Zaloga

Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2016, pp. 336.

Armored Champion is Steven J. Zaloga's recent assessment of the "best" tanks of World War II, or more precisely, the 1918-1945 period (since the interwar era gets pretty fair coverage). Still, the volume affords much more than a mere "best of" list. Zaloga opens the book with an extraordinary overview of the key characteristics of tanks from the standpoint of conference in the period with which he is concerned, between 1918 and 1945--the properties that make for the combination of firepower, protection and mobility. He discusses not just the importance of the caliber of a gun, for example, but its length of barrel, the merits and demerits of various kinds of ammunition (with regard not only to individual performance in specific situations, but availability), steel penetration at given ranges, and fire control systems; not just the millimeter thickness of a piece of armor plate, but discussion of its sloping and hardening, and the distribution of such plate around the tank; not just the horsepower ratings of engines, and top road speeds, but details of power trains and suspension systems. He also looks beyond all these to such less noted but still essential matters as communications and layout.

Proceeding beyond the assessment of individual vehicles in the narrow sense he also affords the reader a fair grounding in the realities of tank combat (engagement ranges in different terrain, on the proportion of hits scored to shots fired, on where those hits strike the tank, on the odds of their doing damage); and the ways in which the assessment varies by level (what may seem best to an individual tanker not necessarily so from the standpoint of a whole army forced to compromise between quantity and quality). All of this is supported with numerous concrete examples, diagrams and statistical tables. He gets into the ways in which single tank designs have been inconsistent--the excellent T-34 suffering from qualitative problems amid the chaos of the early, disastrous phase of the Soviet-German war before the tank factories got their house in order, raised their productivity and upgraded the product. And all the way through he is mindful of the way the state of the art continuously changed, the "world-beater" of 1939 hopeless on the battlefield by the war's end.

Impressive as Zaloga's broader discussion is, he carries over the same meticulousness into the period-by-period and theater-by-theater assessments that comprise the bulk of the book, not only in the level and variety of detailing in his discussion of different tanks, but the disparity between the tanker's view and the commander's view according to the swiftly evolving state of the art. Admittedly the coverage of the really fine points of the subject is not equal throughout, some tanks getting deeper coverage than others (with the T-34 an obvious and very understandable example given its lengthy and critical role). Still, let me put it this way: if someone were planning to design a World War II-themed strategy game, and they needed to work out formulas for calculating the results of engagements among different kinds of armored forces, this book would offer an excellent start. Yet, precisely because of his comprehensive yet extremely accessible explanation of so many of the basics, the book is not just a useful resource for those interested in the minutiae of the subject, but an excellent introduction to the subject of tank warfare generally.

Writing on the Post-1945 History of the Royal Navy: A Few Thoughts

Originally posted on RARITANIA on March 8, 2016.

Looking into the subject of British military history, one is quickly struck by how little of it is devoted to the post-1945 period, and this clearly applies to the British Navy. There are books about particular episodes--for instance, quite an outpouring of works on the Falklands War. There are also quite a few studies of smaller subjects, especially in the academic, think tank-type specialist literature, like the development of Britain's sea-based nuclear deterrent.

However, more comprehensive treatments are scarce. In contrast with the norm for other subjects, where authors tend to get more precise and prolific the closer they get to our own time, general histories of British naval power (as with Paul Kennedy's generally excellent The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery) tend to cover the post-war period in just a few broad strokes. And books specifically attempting a comprehensive treatment of the Royal Navy's evolution in this time--its transition from a superpower-level force to something more expected of a mid-sized West European country--are downright rare in contrast with those about the age of sail, the Victorian era, the world wars.

Of course, a familiarity with the biases of the field--such as Jeremy Black has noted--affords one explanation. As he noted, the tendency among historians has been to concentrate on the premier forces, and the biggest and best-known wars.

After 1945, the Royal Navy ceased to be the world's premier force, a distant second to the United States Navy, and then a third to the Soviet Navy--with the two other navies not only larger, more lavishly equipped and more active in world affairs, but setting the pace of technological and tactical developments. And of course, even in writing about those two navies, there has been nothing to compare with the global conflagration of 1939-1945.

Instead there is the Royal Navy enduring round after round of defense reviews and budget cuts and endless retrenchment driven by economic weakness and the declining legitimacy of imperial and martial ideals at home and abroad, while being outsized and outclassed by a growing number of foreign forces; and in the meantime carrying on with innumerable operations of smaller scale and consequence, short on the more conventionally "dramatic" and "exciting" actions (like surface actions), and these apt to be on the fringes of larger events (as in the Yangtze incident), in support of another, leading actor (as in Korea) or even ending in frustration (as in Suez).

Black noted, too, that historians tend to favor operational history and biography--and one might add to this that, dry as many find history, a romanticized view of war and a nationalistic sensibility can and does affect what historians choose to write about. With nothing here quite comparable to a Trafalgar, or even a Cape Matapan; and still less the figure of a Nelson, or even a Jackie Fisher; this leaves it an even less attractive subject. Indeed, the tale of the dismantling of Britain's world power status, with all its controversies and frustrations and humiliations (epitomized by the Suez affair, by Harold Wilson's having to eat his words about Britain being a world power and influence or nothing in the wake of the pound's devaluation), still relatively fresh in the memory, is far less appealing from such a standpoint than the empire's rise--cause for lament rather than triumphalism (out of which Correlli Barnett has made a career).

Additionally, in contrast with earlier periods, like the early twentieth century when the prospect and actuality of war with Germany dominated British strategic thinking, a study of the Royal Navy in the post-war era lacks a convenient center, leaving it all the more diffuse. Decolonization meant numerous separate conflicts, interacting with each other and with the Cold War--with a discussion of these made all the harder by how, for much the same reasons given above, many of the smaller conflicts that need to be taken into account have been only slightly covered. (Despite the salience of the subject given today's politics, how much time has English-language historiography given the war in Aden?)

However, whatever one makes of the cause, the neglect is unfortunate. Whatever else one may say, the Royal Navy was not just the world's second or third-largest navy for the second half of the twentieth century (and West Europe's largest), but globally active in a period that saw the "closing shop" of the biggest colonial empire in history, and the Cold War. The legacies of these actions and events, from the South Atlantic to South Asia, remain very much with us, and just as they are part of the Royal Navy's history, so are they part of its history. Additionally, the story of that navy's accommodation to Britain's reduced circumstances is well worth considering in itself, as precedent and parallel to other developments (for instance, the contraction and recovery of the Russian navy after the Cold War, so much in the news now).

Naturally, while recently giving so much attention to the larger picture of post-war Britain while completing my recent writing on James Bond (whom you will remember is a British naval officer), I had recourse to what has been written. And the most satisfying book on this subject I have encountered so far has been Eric Grove's Vanguard to Trident, reviewed here.