War Movies: “Anthropoid” (2016).

Posted on May 1, 2025 by jsh54

If you want a look at a true case of “state-sponsored terrorism” and at one approach to counter-terrorism, watch “Anthropoid” (dir. Sean Ellis, 2016). It gives a compelling view of the May 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (the head of the Reich Main Security Office and also “Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia”[1]) and of what followed.

In the movie, the motive for the assassination is the desire on the part of the Czech government-in-exile to inspire more resistance in the Nazi-occupied country. The team of killers (Josef Gabcik, Jan Kubis[2]) is air-dropped at night; overcome difficulties to reach Prague; find that the Germans have wrecked the resistance movement and they must rely upon a small group of locals; eventually, they are joined by some other parachutists who had been dropped later; and they improvise an attack on Heydrich. The German is mortally wounded; a gigantic manhunt begins; the Germans track the parachutists to a Prague church; and one hell of a gunfight ensues. The few surviving parachutists kill themselves rather than be taken alive.

The movie strives for realism: it was filmed in Prague and mostly on the sites where events occurred; the pervasive fear of the Germans among the Czechs is brought out, not minimized; the semi-botched assassination is clearly portrayed; and the ferocious Nazi manhunt should leave anyone squirming.

Still, the movie simplifies or omits some things. First, it begins with Gabcik and Kubis on the ground in a Czech forest. The movie elides the origins of “Operation Anthropoid.” In fact, Eduard Benes, the leader of the Czech government-in-exile, feared that the West would sell out his country after the war if the Czechs didn’t show some fight. The British and French had surrendered the Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich (September 1938) and had shrugged their shoulders when Germany occupied the rest of the country (March 1939). Several thousand Czech soldiers had found their way to the West before the Second World War began (September 1939), but this wasn’t much of a contribution. Internal resistance had mostly been the work of the Czech Communist Party after Germany attacked the Soviet Union (June 1941). If the Germans lost the war, the Communists might claim a moral right to rule as the only true “resisters.” A dramatic act might arouse non-Communist resistance, but it would surely make the government-in-exile appear to be doing something. So, kill Heydrich now for a distant gain.

Second, Heydrich had crushed the resistance by a combination of carrot and stick. He had good material. Few Czechs wanted to run risks for the sake of the Western powers that had betrayed them before. Wages and working conditions in factories were improved at the same time that Gestapo penetration agents combatted the Communist underground.

Third, the Germans unleashed a savage response to the attack on Heydrich. Mass arrests; right to torture in the pursuit of some clue; massacres of villages on the mere rumor that someone had sheltered the killers. In a society where few people actually backed resistance, this worked. Finally, one of the parachutists betrayed someone else to save his own family; and the betrayed finally gave up the hiding place of the other parachutists.

“The Battle of Algiers” openly confronts truths that “Anthropoid” skims over.

[1] Also the driving force behind the implementation of the Holocaust. On this, see: “Conspiracy” (dir. Frank Pierson, 2001), with Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann.

[2] Played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan respectively.

An Episode of Appeasement: The Anglo-German Naval Pact, June 1935 4.

Posted on April 15, 2025 by jsh54

Having decided to accept the German proposal for talks on a naval agreement, the government spent the next few months quietly setting the stage. First, in January 1935, the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, informed King George V that an agreement might help get Germany back into “the comity of nations.” In February 1935, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald met with the then very anti-German French Prime Minister Pierre Laval. The “communique” afterward expressed their hope that talks with Germany would lead to enhanced security in Europe. In late March 1935, Simon had a preliminary meeting with Hitler in Berlin. The German dictator told Simon that he was done with the arms limitations imposed by Versailles Treaty. Germany would expand its army from the 100,000-man limit imposed by Versailles to 500,000 men, begin conscription, and build an air force. However, Hitler would make commitments to Britain to limit naval forces. Hitler also announced that Joachim von Ribbentrop, a Nazi schemer, rather than an experienced diplomat, would lead the German delegation in such talks.

Yet no talks began. The British foreign policy-makers were divided in their attitudes. Sir Robert Vansittart, the chief British diplomat, believed that Hitler meant to conquer all of Europe, so the best solution was a strong alliance with France, Italy, and even the Soviet Union if necessary. Anthony Eden, the second-ranking political figure at the Foreign Office, wanted British commitment to Western Europe, but would abandon Eastern Europe; he also put more stock in the League of Nations than in an Italian alliance. Sir John Simon, the Foreign Secretary, had no views of his own and went where Vansittart pushed.

The British were busy negotiating the “Stresa Pact” with France and Italy. Signed on 14 April 1935, it committed Britain, France, and Italy to resist any future German violations of the Versailles Treaty. The Stresa Pact” could not be squared with a bilateral Anglo-German agreement to violate the naval limits in the treaty.

At the end of April 1935, the Germans prodded the British by informing them that they had launched new U-Boats and had begun construction of 12 more. They meant “We’re going ahead; with or without you.” This got the British moving. On 29 April 1935, Simon told the House of Commons that Germany had begun building U-Boats; on 2 May 1935, Prime Minister MacDonald told the Commons that he would seek a naval agreement with Germany.

Things moved fast. Ribbentrop came to London on 2 June 1935. On 4 June, he told the British that Germany would accept the 35 percent ratio, but nothing less, and that the British had a few days to decide. Simon, the Foreign Secretary, walked out in answer to such rude behavior. Stil, on 5 June the government accepted Ribbentrop’s proposal. Two days later, Simon left the Foreign Office and Sir Samuel Hoare became Foreign Secretary. During further discussions, the Germans accepted the British requirement that the German fleet be symmetrical with the Royal Navy. The two parties signed the completed agreement on 18 June 1935.

The Anglo-German agreement enraged the French. Britain had not consulted the French or the Italians. The agreement of the British and Germans to “legalize” a violation of the disarmament clauses of the Versailles treaty could not be squared with the “Stresa Pact.” It appeared to fall into the tradition of “Perfidious Albion.” It’s hard to form an alliance against a common danger when the parties don’t trust each other. That’s part of the story of appeasement.

Missak Manouchian.

Posted on April 10, 2025 by jsh54

Off and on, the Ottoman Empire persecuted Armenians. Many of the victims sought greener fields outside the empire. Wherever they went, the emigres stayed in touch with other emigres and with their families at home. In 1905, some of them established the Armenian General Benevolent Union. The AGBU raised money to send seeds and farm equipment to Armenians still inside the Empire. Then came the Ottoman Empire’s terrible genocide of the Armenians. The AGBU provided much humanitarian aid at the time, but then also established orphanages to care for the hordes of children who had lost their parents. Later, they paid for the higher education of talented Armenian orphans.

Missak Manouchian (1909-1944) benefitted from the help of the AGBU. He lost his parents in the genocide (must have been about 6 years old), grew up in an orphanage in French-ruled Lebanon, and went to France (1925) in search of work. Eventually, he became a lathe-operator at Citroen near Paris. Naturally, he joined the Confederation General du Travail (CGT), a trades union group. He lost that job when the Depression hit France in the early Thirties. Disappointed, like almost everyone else, in capitalism and parliamentary democracy, he joined the French Communist Party in 1934.

He also had literary and intellectual aspirations. From 1935 to 1937, the Party put him to editing an Armenian-language literary magazine, and working on a Party-inspired Relief Committee for Armenia.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact (August 1939) led the French government to ban the Communist Party when war broke out a few days later. Manouchian was one among many communists who were arrested. Like others, he was then released for military service. Assigned to a unit remote from the front lines, Manouchian was discharged after Germany defeated France in Summer 1940. He went back to Paris; got arrested by the Germans; got released. Then there is a gap in what is known of his life. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist Party went to war in a serious way. Manouchian seems not to have been involved or involved much in any Resistance work. The most likely thing is that he did some writing for clandestine newspapers.

Things changed in February 1943. Boris Milev, a Bulgarian Communist living in France, recruited Manouchian for the group being led by Boris Holban.[1] In Summer 1943, Manouchian replaced Holban as head of the group. In September 1943, Manouchian ordered a team to kill an SS General in Paris. They did and Heinrich Himmler demanded action. He got it. Holban had worried that the group’s many young men were careless about security. He had wanted to back off for a while and increase security. He had been right. The Vichy police had already identified some of the group, who led them to many others. The French arrested 22 members of the group in November 1943. They were turned over to the Germans, tried and executed in February 1944.

Much later, an ugly quarrel over responsibility took place in the media.[2]

Resistance movements were (and are) vulnerable. They attracted enthusiasts who often were not suited by maturity or temperament or life experience to secret work. Security services often have the bulge in all these areas, along with superior resources. It can be a martyr’s game.

[1] Boris Milev – Wikipedia

[2] See: Affiche Rouge – Wikipedia and Missak Manouchian – Wikipedia. These people deserved better.

A Piece of Resistance.

Posted on April 10, 2025 by jsh54

Nationalism preaches that all the people speaking the same language should be grouped together in one independent country. Nationalism came to Rumania in the later 19^th Century, when part of it escaped from the Ottoman Empire to form the new country. However, many Rumanian-speakers still lived outside the country. After Russia collapsed into revolution and civil war during the First World War, Rumania grabbed the mostly-Rumanian territory of Bessarabia (1918).

Anti-Semitism walked in daylight in Rumania.[1] Jews had no rights and could not be citizens. Most lived in miserable poverty. A large Jewish community lived in Bessarabia, so the change of borders brought them under Rumanian rule. In 1923, a new constitution—imposed by the Western powers—granted Jews citizenship. Nothing else changed. Many Jews pined for the Soviet Union which they believed to be a socialist utopia where religion didn’t matter.

Baruch Bruhman (1908-2004) began life as a Jewish Russian subject in Bessarabia; then became Rumanian.[2] He rejected everything about the Rumanian state: he joined the illegal Communist Party (1929); went to jail for it (1930); deserted from the army during compulsory service (1932); went to jail for it; did organizational work for the Communist Party; fled to Czechoslovakia one step ahead of the police (1936); went to France to join the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War (1938), but arrived too late; worked for the French Communist Party (PCF) for a year; and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion under the name Boris Holban when the Second World War broke out (1939).[3]

The Germans captured Holban in June 1940, but he escaped in December 1940 and returned to Paris. In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. All foreign Communist parties were ordered to attack the Germans to divert troops from the Russian front. The PCF knew that the Germans would shoot a lot of French civilian hostages in reprisal. Holban had spent his life on the run and had been to war. The PCF set him to recruiting immigrant workers to kill Germans. Holban found Rumanians, Hungarians, Poles, and Italians willing to fight the Germans. Most were Jews and veterans of Spain. If Germany won, they were doomed.

From August 1942 to June 1943, Holban’s group derailed trains, attacked factories, and killed 83 Germans on the streets of Paris. Both the Germans and the French police hunted the “terrorists.” Holban fell out with his PCF bosses. They wanted more attacks; he wanted to slow down while concentrating on security. In July 1943, Holban was replaced by Missak Manouchian, who accelerated attacks. Then Manouchian was caught. The PCF brought Holban back to run a rat-hunt for whoever had betrayed the group (December 1943).

Returning to now-Communist Rumania after the war, Holban soon fell into the whirlpool of the Stalinist purges. Many years later, after he had re-settled in France (1984), he was accused of betraying Manouchian. A storm followed, but Holban was proved innocent.

A puzzle: Was this Jewish resistance or Communist resistance or French resistance?

[1] Even if vampires did not. See: Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897); “Nosferatu” (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1922).

[2] Renee Poznansky, Jews in France during World War II (2001).

[3] This is very significant. In August 1939, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did a deal with German dictator Adolf Hitler. The Soviet Union would remain neutral in any war between Germany and other countries. All foreign Communist parties were ordered to oppose their own nation’s war effort. Bruhman/Holban was defying orders.

An Episode in Appeasement: The Anglo-German Naval Agreement, June 1935 1.

Posted on April 8, 2025 by jsh54

To put it mildly, France and Britain had a long history of conflict.[1] Beginning in the 1890s, however, Germany’s pursuit of a large navy threatened Britain’s long-standing policy of maintaining naval dominance in order to safeguard the empire. Britain responded to Germany’s fleet construction by settling many of its outstanding international conflicts and drawing closer to France. The two countries fought shoulder to shoulder (although not without some elbows being thrown) during the First World War.

Once victory over Germany had been won, Britain and France began to drift apart. First, the Versailles Treaty deprived Germany of a real navy. The end of German naval power removed a thorn from the lion’s paw. Britain’s policy turned to other things.[2] Second, Anglo-American fair words and promises persuaded the French to back off their most extreme demands for guarantees against any revival of German power.[3] Third, the two countries diverged on policy toward Central and Eastern Europe. American repudiation of the security guarantee for France made the French all the more determined to strictly enforce the remaining terms. This led to the Ruhr Crisis and the near-collapse of the German economy.[4] That added to the chaos in Central and Eastern Europe.

Yet Britain desired a restoration of stability in the region in hopes of creating markets for its troubled economy. Later (in 1935), a diplomat at Britain’s Foreign Office would observe that “… from the earliest years following the war it was our policy to eliminate those parts of the Peace Settlement which, as practical people, we knew to be unstable and indefensible.”[5] Anglo-American financial pressure led France to accept a reduction in German reparations to a level that the Germans might be willing to pay, at least for a while. This was the Dawes Plan.[6] Then British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain[7] helped negotiate the Locarno treaty (1925).[8] The treaty offered a general British guarantee of the existing frontiers in Western Europe. However, the treaty offered nothing similar in Eastern Europe where France sought anti-German alliances among the “successor states” (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). If a future Germany attacked one of France’s allies, France would attack Germany. However, the Locarno Treaty might require Britain to come to the aid of Germany, rather than France. None of this was “good” from the French point of view. It was merely the best that could be won under the circumstances.

French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand tried to make the best of a bad deal. His approach to the Americans about an alliance produced a meaningless general treaty open to all. The “Kellogg-Briand Pact” (1928) renounced “aggressive war as an instrument of national policy.” Even Weimar Germany signed.

[1] History of France–United Kingdom relations – Wikipedia Very sketchy, but you’ll get the drift: war, truce, war.

[2] “Now that I’ve eaten, I see things in a different light.”—Groucho Marx.

[3] The Americans soon repudiated their guarantee by refusing ratification of the Versailles treaty.

[4] Occupation of the Ruhr – Wikipedia

[5] Part of this sprang from the de-legitimation of the Versailles Treaty by people like Keynes and Sydney Fay.

[6] Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan.

[7] Older half-brother of the future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

[8] Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West, 1925-1929.

Sleigh Ride.

Posted on March 26, 2025 by jsh54

Imagine a Russian four-horse sleigh. Coming home from a Christmas party at a nobleman’s country estate, it is loaded with presents. Its passengers are bundled in furs and further insulated against the cold by much wine and an elaborate meal. Sleep beckons.

Glancing drowsily toward the nearby forest, one among them sees the glitter of eyes watching from the woods. “Wolves,” he says. The sleigh-driver urges his horses on a bit. Looking back, the passengers see a pack of wolves emerge from among the trees. Then the leader of the pack begins to run after the sleigh. The others follow. Looking back, the driver sees them and quickly cracks his whip. The horses surge forward and the passengers come fully awake. Safety lies only in reaching their own country house.

The wolf-pack gains ground. The driver belabors his horses with the whip, but calls to his passengers that they must throw things overboard. That will lighten the load for the horses and it may distract the wolves. Hampers filled with left-overs are the first to go. The wolves pause briefly to snap at the offerings, but then come on with appetites whetted. Gifts still wrapped in paper and ribbon go over the back next. The wolves hardly glance at these, just keep rushing toward the sleigh. Panic begins to grip the people on the sleigh. Would they reach home before the wolves caught up?

So it was with rearmament in the Thirties. Germany was the leader of the pack, Japan and Italy were other members of the pack; Britain and France were the passengers in the sleigh; and rearmament itself was the sleigh.

For more detail and depth on these issues, you can see additional posts on this blog.

The Costs of the First World War. The Costs of the First World War. | waroftheworldblog

Appeasement and Beliefs. Appeasement and Beliefs. | waroftheworldblog

Britain, Appeasement, and Today. Britain, Appeasement, and Today. | waroftheworldblog

France and Appeasement in the Thirties. France and Appeasement in the Thirties. | waroftheworldblog

Crossing the Line. Crossing the Line. | waroftheworldblog

Hitler’s War. Hitler’s War. | waroftheworldblog

Why write this stuff NOW? Why write? I’m a historian trying to make sense of human actions under the pressure of ideas and events. It’s my way of trying to serve a useful purpose beyond my own enjoyment. Why NOW? I suspect that those times inform our times. China is the leader of the pack; Russia, North Korea, and Iran are the other wolves. Maybe I’m just crying “Wolf!”

British rearmament in the Thirties.

Posted on March 25, 2025 by jsh54

The government had ended the “Ten Year Rule” in 1932, but continued to hold down defense spending. Then, in October 1933, Germany withdrew from the Disarmament Conference. This tipped the balance toward rearmament.

In November 1933, the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) formed a “Defence Requirements Sub-Committee (DRC).” Its mission was to identify the worst gaps in the military forces, plan how to meet them, and to make broad judgements about strategy. By July 1934 it identified Germany as the primary danger and determined that Britain should avoid conflict with Japan. Also, the DRC adopted a five-year time-line for rearmament (1934-1939).[1] In March 1935, the government broke decisively in favor of rearmament.

Having made the decision to rearm in a hurry, all went smoothly, no? No. The DRC proposed increasing military spending by £71 million over the five years, much of it on the Army. The Chancellor of the Exchequer[2] imposed important changes. First, he cut the total to £50 million. Second, he cut the money for the Army in half, while doubling the proposed spending on the Royal Air Force (RAF). He placed the emphasis squarely on home defense. Henceforth, rearmament would involve constant tension between the armed services and the Treasury, with the Foreign Office getting buffeted between them.

Defense spending rose from £37.2 million (1934) to £42.6 million (1935) to £60.7 million (1936) to £104.2 million (1937) to £182.2 million (1938) to £273.1 million (1939). Almost half went to the Navy each year with the RAF receiving over half of the remainder.[3]

What did Britain get for the money and how soon? First and foremost, the RAF got thousands of modern, all-metal, single wing fighter planes–the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane–which were to play such an important role in the Battle of Britain. In addition, money went to development of radar for air defense control.[4] In addition, a good deal of the expanded Army budget went to anti-aircraft artillery for home defense. Second, the Navy received five new battleships, several aircraft carriers, and a host of light cruisers, while several older battleships were totally modernized. Also, the defenses of the Singapore Base were hurried to conclusion as a stop-gap defense against Japan. The Army largely got skint. It could field only five divisions for service on the Continent. Finally, industrial production saw improvements, both through the increased spending for the Royal Ordnance Factories (essentially bullets and shells), and through “Shadow Factories” (government-aided factories to expand aircraft production).[5]

Britain had to try to avoid war until the program had been completed. Until then,…

[1] Which would suggest that the “Ten-Year Rule” should have foreseen war in 1929. But that is ridiculous. It shows how fast things can change in human affairs.

[2] Neville Chamberlin served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from November 1931 to May 1937, when he became Prime Minister.

[3] Michael M. Postan, British War Production, Official History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Civil Series, Chapter II, p. 12, at HyperWar: British War Production [Chapter II] On Postan, see: Michael Postan – Wikipedia

[4] The prioritization of the RAF over the Army, but not over the Navy, reflected a fear of the danger from enemy bombing. See: Chain Home – Wikipedia, especially the section “The bomber will always get through.” It also demonstrates the initially defensive and deterrent nature of British rearmament.

[5] British shadow factories – Wikipedia

Land Bridges and Ocean Barriers.

Posted on February 21, 2024 by jsh54

In war, killing goes on until a victory is achieved. For the United States the strategy of the Second World War came down to these two things: land bridges and ocean barriers.

On the one hand, solid ground created “bridges.” Where opponents were in direct contact, the fighting could never really stop. Poland and Germany had been in contact in 1939; Britain, France, and Germany had been in contact in 1940; Russia and Germany were in direct contact from June 1941 onward. In this kind of war, soldiers, small arms, artillery, fighter-bombers, and trucks were decisive.

On the other hand, bodies of water, and especially oceans, created “barriers.” The British staved off German victory with a ferocious defense of both the English Channel and the ocean shipping routes. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans imposed huge obstacles to laying America’s military weight on the Germans and the Japanese. Furthermore, most established sea-ports were in the hands of the Germans or the Japanese. In the case of the Pacific Islands between Japan and America, they didn’t exist at all. Invaders would have to go in over the beaches. That meant landing craft. Getting soldiers, weapons, supplies to a near-by launching point for the attacks meant a huge number of merchant ships. Protecting those merchant ships required a great navy. Anglo-American forces had to conquer water barriers to reach a land bridge.

Until that could be achieved, the weight of the war fell on the Russians. Countries have foreign policies for their own advantage, not for the advantage of other countries. The Bolsheviks had made a separate peace with the Germans in 1918; Stalin had made a Non-Aggression Pact with the Germans in 1939. If the Anglo-Americans appeared to be dragging their feet on getting into the war, then maybe he would strike another deal with Hitler. Let the Anglo-Americans try to reconquer Western Europe in the face of the whole German Army instead of just ten percent of it. So, the Anglo-Americans had to do what they could against Germany. For a long time this meant the “strategic bombing” of German cities to reduce industrial production and perhaps to break the will of the German people.

Warships, merchant ships, landing craft, heavy bombers, fighter planes, tanks, trucks, artillery, and small arms had two things in common. They were made of steel and made in factories. America had a lot of both, so it became the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Two thirds of Allied military production—and half of the world’s total production–came from America.

The United States mobilized almost 12 million men for the Army and another 4 million for other branches. All these (mostly) men left the labor force while the demand for labor soared. Women, Blacks, and Hispanics filled up the gap. The US unemployment rate fell to 1.9 percent, finally ending the Depression. High wages raised the standard of living.

As soon as command of the seas permitted, the Anglo-Americans put their troops to use. They invaded French North Africa (November 1942); Sicily (July 1943); Italy (September 1943); Normandy (June 1944); Southern France (August 1944); and Germany (Fall 1944).

Meanwhile the Americans shoved back the Japanese. Battling in jungles, on coral atolls, and on the high seas, the American advantage in industrial power and man power ground Japan into dust. The war found its grim conclusion in fire raids and atom bombings.

We had won. What would we make of the peace, at home and abroad?

Hitler’s War.

Posted on February 11, 2024 by jsh54

Adolf Hitler created the Second World War. He didn’t just start the war, he repeatedly took the initiative to expand it and to point it in new directions. For this reason it is best labeled “Hitler’s War.”

The war really began in late-August 1939 when Hitler made a deal with Russia to divide Eastern Europe. This led to the rapid conquest of Poland (Sept. 1939). In late 1939 Hitler decided on war in the West at the first opportunity. In April and May 1940 German forces over-ran Denmark and Norway. In May and June 1940 they over-ran Holland, Belgium and France, driving the British army off the Continent. Hitler was master of Europe! Except that the British had now concluded that Mr. Hitler was not a very nice person at all. (See: Charles I, Louis XIV, Napoleon I, Kaiser Wilhelm II.) The British fought on, defeating Germany’s planned invasion by winning control of the air over the English Channel in the Battle of Britain. The Germans then turned to starving out the British through submarine warfare in the Battle of the Atlantic. This, too, failed.

Hitler’s victory forced other countries to make choices they didn’t want to make.

Italy declared war just as France fell, then found itself at war with Britain in the Mediterranean. The German conquests in Europe created a vacuum of power in the Far East. Japan sought to exploit this to establish its own supremacy. Germany’s defeat of France and the weak position of Britain terrified the Americans, who began to supply military assistance to the British (Lend-Lease) and to take a strong line against Japan.

Hitler widened the war in1941. He responded to a local challenge by conquering Yugoslavia and Greece in Spring 1941. In June 1941 he launched a huge surprise attack on his Russian ally, capturing millions of prisoners and conquering huge swaths of territory. Alarmed that the war would end without their having any claim on territory, the Japanese attacked. The air raid on Pearl Harbor was followed by the conquest of the Philippines, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. Soon after Pearl Harbor Hitler declared war on the United States. Also in 1941 Hitler ordered the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”: this would involve the murder of millions through mass shootings in Russia and the construction of death camps in Poland.

The further course of the war is best summed up in the term “ocean barriers and land bridges.” American forces had to cross vast oceans to reach their German and Japanese enemies. An armada of ships had to be constructed and control of the seas won. Worse still, the Americans and the British divided their resources between the European war, which mattered, and the Pacific war, which did not. In contrast, Germany and Russia had no water barriers between them; they were in continuous contact from Summer 1941 to Spring 1945. Neither side could break off, so the great majority of German casualties were suffered on the Eastern Front, while the British and the Americans made less of a contribution to the defeat of Hitler. Until Summer 1944 the bombing of Germany destroyed cities without harming the German war effort.

The war rushed to an end from Summer 1944 to Summer 1945. The Americans and the British invaded France (June 1944) just as the Russians unleashed a gigantic attack on the Eastern Front. Hitler’s empire crumbled, while the Americans banjoed the Japanese in a remarkable war fought across trackless ocean and trackless island jungle.

War had ruined virtually the whole world, and had revealed that people were capable of anything (Auschwitz and Hiroshima). There would be no easy peace.

My Weekly Reader 25 October 2018.

Posted on October 26, 2018 by jsh54

When the Second World War broke out, Americans—isolationists or not—expected a re-run of the First World War: a long pounding match. Then the German army smashed into France in Spring and Summer 1940. France surrendered and replaced the decrepit Third Republic with the collaborationist Vichy regime. The French Empire in West Africa–nominally under the control of France, but vulnerable to German seizure–stretched westward into the Atlantic. Brazil lay within flying distance of Dakar. Suddenly, Latin American affairs seemed of more than the usual importance in Washington.[1]

North Americans viewed South America as more than just a potential beach head for German invaders. The continent held vast natural resources that might feed the Nazi war-machine.[2] On its Caribbean shore, the continent abutted the shipping routes to the Panama Canal. Moreover, the colonial heritage from Spain and Portugal–rather than American imperialism–made South America a politically tumultuous place. Elites continually struggled with populists for control of the governments, and the armies of the continent did not always favor the “forces of order.” To make matters worse, in the view of Washington, the region had received hordes of German and Italian emigres in the previous hundred years. In the age of the “Fifth Column” suspicions ran hot.

As a result, South America became a battleground between the Axis and the Anglo-American Allies. For their part, Germany and Italy hoped to restrict the flow of natural resources toward the United States and to enhance the influence of their emigrant brothers. For their part, the Americans sought to build a Trans-Atlantic air ferry route to fly bombers and transports from Miami through Brazil to West Africa; they sought to monopolize purchases of raw materials, whose price spiked during the war and continued into the post-war reconstruction period; and they sought to squelch pro-Axis sentiment.[3] Propaganda played a large role for both sides, although—like most propaganda—the effort availed them but little.

The Latin American countries were eager to profit from all this interest, yet they were not eager to be drawn into the war itself.[4] Nevertheless, the turning of the tide led some Latin American countries to join the fight. Brazil sent 25,000 soldiers to fight in Italy and Mexico allowed a small number of its air force pilots to serve against Japan. In contrast, Juan Peron’s Argentina refused to engage in the war against the Axis until the very last moment. Peron’s regime illustrates a number of the key themes. He had served as military attache in Mussolini’s Italy; Argentina had received many German and Italian immigrants; and Argentina profited enormously from the spike in raw materials prices during and after the war. Perhaps as a result, Argentina became the favored rat-hole for Nazi war criminals on the run, including Eichmann.

[1] Mary Jo McConahay, The Tango War: The Struggle for Hearts, Minds, and Riches In Latin America During World War II (2018).

[2] Henry Ford had established a rubber plantation in Brazil to insure the raw material for car tires. He wanted to be free of dependence on the British Empire’s Malayan rubber during an era of bitter Anglo-American economic competition that was strategically forgotten during the Second World War. On this fascinating episode, see Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (2009).

[3] This could go to what now look like shameful lengths. Amends have scarcely been made to the Americans of Japanese ancestry who were evacuated from the West Coast, but who now remembers the Peruvian-Japanese?

[4] Rather like Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Turkey.

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