Book review: A New History of the Second World War
Taking a global view leads to a different picture of the war. For example, when did it begin? Most English speakers would say 1939, with Germany’s invasion of Poland. But by then Japan had already been at continuous war with China for two years and had violently conquered Beijing, Shanghai, and the Chinese capital of Nanjing. Only by sidelining Asia can you claim that the Second World War ran from 1939 to 1945..
Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945
Reviewed by Daniel Immerwahr
What was the Second World War about? According to Allied leaders, that wasn’t a hard question. “This is a fight between a free world and a slave world,” U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace explained. It is “between Nazidom and democracy,” Winston Churchill said, with “tyranny” on one side and “liberal, peaceful” powers on the other. A new book argues that the conflict was a battle for empire.
Would that it were so simple. The Allies’ inclusion of the Soviet Union - “a dictatorship as absolute as any dictatorship in the world,” Franklin D. Roosevelt once called it - muddied the waters. But the other chief Allies weren’t exactly liberal democracies, either. Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, and (depending on how you view Tibet and Mongolia) China were all empires. Together, they held, by my count, more than 600 million people - more than a quarter of the world—in colonial bondage.
This fact wasn’t
incidental; empire was central to the causes and course of the war. Yet the
colonial dimensions of World War II aren’t usually stressed. The most popular
books and films present it as Churchill did, as a dramatic confrontation
between liberty-loving nations and merciless tyrants. In the United States,
it’s remembered still as the “good war,” the vanquishing of evil by the
Greatest Generation.
That understanding
works - sort of - when war stories focus on Adolf Hitler’s invasions of sovereign
states in Europe. It falters, however, when they center on the Pacific. There,
the Japanese targeted colonies, seizing them under the banner of “Asia for the
Asiatics.” The Allies beat Japan back, but only to return Burma to the British
and Indonesia to the Dutch - Asia for the Europeans.
The Pacific clash over
colonies reveals a greater truth about the Second World War. Or such is the
contention of Richard Overy, one of the conflict’s most distinguished
historians. After writing some 20 books about the war, focused mainly on
Europe, Overy has widened his scope. His new book, Blood and Ruins: The Last
Imperial War, 1931–1945, 1,000 pages long, refuses to treat the Pacific
as “an appendix,” as histories often do. Rather, it sees World War II as a
truly “global event.”
In that light, one
thing becomes clear. Whatever else the Second World War was about, it was, on
both sides, a war for empire.
What impelled Germany,
Japan, and Italy on their conquering missions? Given how reckless and ruinous
their belligerence was, pathologizing it is easy. Madness clearly abounded in
the high command, but three countries going insane in the same way at the same
time isn’t exactly a satisfying explanation. A better one, Overy suggests, lies
further in the past.
The 19th century had
seen a “veritable steeplechase for colonial acquisitions,” as Italy’s foreign
ministry described it. Britain won that race, with other countries that would
eventually join the Allies taking secondary prizes. The Axis powers, late out
of the gate, got the leftovers. Worse, the winners locked the losers out,
rebuffing Japan’s attempts to join the great powers’ club and stripping Germany
of its meager overseas holdings after World War I. Going into the 1930s, the
Allies held 15 times more colonial acreage than the Axis states did.
Japan, Germany, and
Italy were rising
economies without large empires. Was that a problem? Today, it wouldn’t be;
21st-century countries don’t require colonies to prosper. But different rules
applied in the first half of the 20th century. Then, industrial powers depended
on raw materials from far-off lands. And without colonies, they had every
reason to worry about ready availability. Hitler never
forgot the World War I blockade that largely cut Germany off from such
materials as rubber and nitrates and caused widespread hunger. The global
Depression, which shrunk international trade by two-thirds from 1929 to 1932,
threatened a new form of blockade.
As cross-border trade
collapsed, rich countries subsisted off whatever was within their borders. The
British and French could lean on their empires. But the Germans? They were a
“people without space,” as the title of a popular novel had it. Hence Hitler’s
fixation on Lebensraum and the parallel Italian search
for spazio vitale—both terms translate as “living space.” The
Japanese complained of “ABCD encirclement,” meaning that their access to such
vital resources as oil and rubber was hemmed in by the Americans, British,
Chinese, and Dutch.
In
Focus: World War II photos before the war
The war, Overy argues,
didn’t pit peaceful nation-states against violent thugs. It’s better understood
as a conflict between incumbent and insurgent imperialists. The British,
French, and United States preferred peace because they were satisfied with the
status quo. “We have got most of the world already, or the best parts of it,”
observed the head of Britain’s navy in 1934. “We only want to keep what we have
got and prevent others from taking it away from us.” The Japanese, Germans, and
Italians, by contrast, sought a violent redivision of the spoils.
On the day of the
Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese government blamed the war on the Anglophone
powers’ “selfish desire for world conquest.”
Taking a global view leads
to a different picture of the war. For example, when did it begin? Most English
speakers would say 1939, with Germany’s invasion of Poland. But by then Japan
had already been at continuous war with China for two years and had violently
conquered Beijing, Shanghai, and the Chinese capital of Nanjing. (China
recently mandated that its textbooks use an even earlier start year for its war
with Japan: 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria.) Only by sidelining Asia
can you claim that the Second World War ran from 1939 to 1945.
Japan started the fighting, and Japan made the war a “world” event. Until 1941, the regional conflicts on the Asian mainland and in Europe and the Mediterranean were largely disconnected. Japan fused them together on December 7/8, 1941, when it attacked the British empire in Asia. Yanking on Britain’s colonies, Japan pulled the great power into the Pacific War. That’s also how the United States got dragged in; for all its self-congratulation about standing up to fascism, the country declared war only when another country tried to take its territories.
The December 1941
attacks are the subject of considerable mystification in the United States.
Here, the episode is remembered as “Pearl Harbor” and placed on December 7,
1941, which Roosevelt indelibly called “a date which will live in infamy.” But
while Roosevelt’s speech focused on the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in the
territory of Hawaii, that was far from the only target. As Roosevelt
acknowledged in a less-noted part of the speech, the Japanese swept over the
Anglophone holdings in the Pacific. They attacked within hours not only Hawaii
but the U.S. possessions of Guam, the Philippines, Midway, and Wake Island and
the British ones of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Only in Hawaii and
Midway did the vagaries of the international date line place the event on
December 7. Everywhere else, the infamous date was December 8. By confining the
time to December 7 and the place to Pearl Harbor, Americans miss the
significance of the event. It wasn’t merely an attempt to sink battleships; it
was a blitzkrieg dash for British and U.S. colonies. And—this is another thing
the Pearl Harbor framing misses—it succeeded. Though the Japanese never
conquered Hawaii or Midway, they took all the other targets, soon adding
British Burma, Australia’s territories of New Guinea and Papua, nearly all of
the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), the western tip of Alaska, and a
constellation of colonized Pacific islands.
In the Pacific, the war was transparently a fight for empire. In Europe, Overy argues, it wasn’t all that different. “What India was for England the spaces of the East will be for us,” Hitler once remarked. Shifting analogies, he also noted that Germans should “look upon the natives as Redskins.” If Germany couldn’t easily reach distant territories in Asia or Africa, it could carve colonial space out of Eastern Europe. Only by sidelining Asia can you claim that the Second World War ran from 1939 to 1945.
The aim of these land
grabs was resources, and the Axis states plundered their conquered territories.
Millions of Asians starved as Japan impounded food—the Indonesians and
Vietnamese both suffered famines. Germany plundered, too, targeting Jews but
not limiting its depredations to them. Its scheme to feed itself with
confiscated Soviet grain, the unfathomably cruel “Hunger Plan,” was carried out
with the understanding that, if successful, it might kill 30 million.
“Starvation and colonization were German policy,” the historian Timothy Snyder
has written, “discussed, agreed, formulated, distributed, and understood.”
But were such policies
effective? Ultimately not, Overy argues. It was hard to invade a country,
subjugate it, return it swiftly to full productivity, and carry off its
goods—all while fighting a war. The extreme violence that characterized life in
the Axis empires can be partly explained by the occupiers’ desperate attempts
to extract resources that were simply not forthcoming.
Meanwhile, the Allies
still had much territory to draw on. Britain could marshal 2.7 million troops
from India alone. The United States’ continental expanse—won in the 19th
century via wars, purchases, and Indigenous dispossession—held nearly 60
percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. The Germans and Italians were
running out of fuel in North Africa while the Americans were shipping tanks
there from Detroit. U.S. supplies coursed through a global circulatory system
of bases, many of them in Allied colonies, that stretched through the
Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.
By wresting Pacific
islands away from Japan, the United States managed in 1945 to anchor its
network within striking distance of Japan’s home islands, which it bombed
thoroughly. And when the Japanese empire fell, the Allies rushed to reclaim
their lost colonies.
Allied leaders didn’t
dwell on the contradictions between fighting for freedom and fighting for
colonies. In fact, they didn’t always see them. Empire had been “one vast
machine for the defense of liberty,” Britain’s colonial secretary proclaimed,
audaciously, at the war’s end.
Things looked
different from the colonized world. Overy focuses on the imperialist rulers
rather than their subjects—Britain and Japan, in other words, not Burma and the
Philippines. Yet the glimpses he gives of colonial life confirm Mohandas
Gandhi’s warning to Roosevelt that, in the territories, Allied boasts of
protecting freedom and democracy rang “hollow.”
Gandhi’s country,
India, entered the European conflict in 1939 not out of any popular desire to
quash Nazism but because its British viceroy had declared war on its behalf.
Many of Gandhi’s fellow nationalists quit
their governmental posts in protest, but to little effect. London requisitioned
troops and supplies from its colony, paid for with IOUs, to be redeemed
after the war. The economic drain on India, already poor, caused a crisis.
Conditions grew dire
in Bengal, an Indian province near the edge of Japan’s empire. There, colonial
authorities confiscated food, evacuated villages, and destroyed tens of
thousands of boats for
fear that Japanese invaders might get them. Yet this also removed local
sources of support and encouraged panicked hoarding; many Bengalis went hungry.
The British, of
course, took hunger seriously. The government in London was “awash with
nutritionists,” the historian James Vernon has written. War meant scarcity, but
officials assiduously researched public needs, paying special attention to
vulnerable groups, and rationed food thoughtfully and fairly. Churchill was
resolute: “Nothing must interfere with the supplies necessary to maintain the
stamina and resolution of the people of this country.”
Yet by “this country,”
Churchill meant the British Isles. There, the state’s nutritional planning was
so successful that diets improved despite the shortages. In Bengal, by
contrast, British officials did shockingly
little to stop the deprivation they’d created from tipping into
starvation. They insisted on letting the market operate freely, and they
watched rice flow out of Bengal and people drop dead of hunger. Overy devotes
only a paragraph to the resulting famine but registers its enormous death toll,
which he places
at 2.7 million to 3 million. Pressed to send aid, the war cabinet in London
refused. Churchill blamed Indians for “breeding like rabbits.”
Read:
Churchill, the greatest Briton, hated Gandhi, the greatest Indian
Gandhi and the leaders
of his party, the Indian National Congress, vigorously protested the
government’s famine-inducing policy of confiscation and, days after, threatened
mass civil disobedience if India wasn’t freed. Churchill was apoplectic. “We
will not let the Hottentots by popular vote throw the white people into the
sea” was his view. The British arrested the National Congress leadership,
including Gandhi. By the end of 1943, almost 92,000 were behind bars.
“We resist British
Imperialism no less than Nazism,” Gandhi wrote to Hitler. “If there is a
difference, it is in degree.” If there is a difference. W. E.
B. Du Bois, a leading African American thinker, was also unsure he saw much of
one. “There was no Nazi atrocity,” he wrote after the war, “which the Christian
civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all
parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race.”
In 1940, nearly one
out of every three individuals on the planet was colonized. By 1965, barely one
in 50 was.
Following this logic
to its conclusion, the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose escaped British
house arrest in Bengal and fled to Hitler’s Germany. Bose recruited thousands
of captured Indians to fight with the Wehrmacht and then, moving to the Japanese
empire, helped raise an Indian expatriate army to attack British India. For
Bose, this wasn’t an invasion but a liberation.
Bose’s freedom
fighters met swift defeat. Yet their cause resounded. Throughout Asia, empire
was collapsing. Weapons, once tightly controlled, spread widely during the
fighting. And Japan, with its loud rhetoric about ending foreign rule, poured
gas on the fire. The sight of whites ousted and Asians taking their place was
one that colonized people couldn’t easily unsee.
The Allies vanquished
the Axis powers but, as Overy notes, the battles didn’t stop. Reclaiming Allied
colonies required more than dispatching rival colonizers. It also meant
confronting the colonized, who were armed and loath to return to the old ways.
In just the month after Japan announced its surrender, Indonesia and Vietnam
declared independence and Malaya was in revolt.
The British, Dutch,
and French fought bloody rearguard actions to hold their possessions (“Shoot
before you are shot at and don’t trust anyone black!” Dutch soldiers were
instructed), but ultimately they lost those battles. In 1940, nearly one out of
every three individuals on the planet was colonized. By 1965, barely one in 50
was.
Few would count the
French war in Vietnam (or the U.S. one that immediately followed) as part of
the Second World War. Yet why not? The story ends in 1945 thanks only to the
focus on Europe and the democracy-versus-totalitarianism framing, which crops
empire out of the picture.
Ignoring empire also
turns the Second World War into a moral triumph. That’s comforting for the
winners, but perhaps too much so. Whereas Germany and Japan developed serious
peace movements after 1945, the Allied powers, and particularly the United
States, kept their war footing. Though the U.S. never declared war again after
defeating Japan, the scholar David Vine calculates that there have been only
two years since—1977 and 1979—when American forces weren’t invading or fighting
in some foreign country.
The violence has
flowed from Cambodia to Congo, and often with World War II as the model.
First the
“free world” fought the “totalitarian” foes in the Cold War, then came
the “axis of evil” and “Islamofascism.” “Each succeeding conflict,” the West
Point professor Elizabeth Samet writes in
her recent book, Looking
for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness,
“has led to the reprise and reinvention of the Good War’s mythology to justify
or otherwise explain uses of American power.” Convinced of the inherent
goodness of the war, U.S. leaders have sought to refight it in new guises again
and again.
They might have been
better off seeing the war through Gandhi’s eyes rather than Churchill’s: as a
battle over territory, not an Armageddon-style showdown between good and evil.
They might have then remembered it as more like the First World War, a lethal
collision of self-interested rivals. That earlier war taught even its victors
to be suspicious of militaristic moralizing. But by restricting their attention
to Europe and taking a regional view of a global war, the Western victors in
the Second World War avoided that lesson.
The Short, Daring Life of Lilya Litvyak; the world’s first female
fighter ace
Heda Margolius Kovaly (1919-2010) : Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague
1941–1968
Abolish War - Russell-Einstein Manifesto of
1955
Journey
To A War by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (1939)
Picasso's
Guernica still screams the truth about war - Jonathan Jones
Greg Mitchell - 75 years ago: When Leo Szilard tried
to halt dropping atomic bombs over Japan
A universal appeal for humanity to end militarism
and stop war
Hiroshima Peace Declaration on 72nd A-bomb
anniversary
