Reading notes on Chapter 5 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [1986]

The meaning of the Second World War

by Ernest Mandel

Verso: 1986

Chapter 5 Strategy

....war is a continuation of politics by other means. The point lies in the term continuation.

....decisive determinants and constraints governing the choice of priorities and, with it, the use of available resources: the class nature of the state which wages the war and hence the class interests which ultimately shape military and geopolitical considerations. The freedom of choice of a given national ruling class is decisively limited by the social and material correlation of forces.

[Franz Mehring]: ....the start of WW1, added new insights to the Clausewitz formula: 'War is an explosion (Entladung) of historical contradictions which have sharpened to the point where no other means are available for their solution since there are no judges in a class society who can decide by juridical or moral means those conflicts which will be solved by weapons in war. War is therefore a political phenomenon, and not a juridical, moral or even a penal one. War is not conducted in order to punish an enemy for supposed or real sins, but in order to break his resistance to the pursuit of one's own interests. War is not a thing in itself, possessing its own goal: it is an organic part of a policy to whose presuppositions it remains attached and to whose needs it has to adapt its own successes. There has been much debate on whether it is foreign policy which determines internal policy or vice versa. But whatever one's opinion on this subject, the two are indissolubly tied to each other: one cannot act in the one field without provoking a reaction in the other. It is possible to misunderstand this inter-relation, but such miscomprehension does not eliminate it. One may try to suspend class and party struggles during a war, gladly or reluctantly, deliberately or under compulsion, but whatever one does, these struggles will continue, albeit latently. For under the influence of war, the correlation of forces between different classes and parties is considerably modified.'

....social character of the war was thus determined by the politics the war was designed to continue, by the class which conducted the war and decided its goals. In approaching the strategies adopted by the warring states in WW II, one should therefore bear in mind that they reflected not only foreign policy' intentions of nation states but also 'internal' class and party struggles - i.e. one should understand them in their global class determination.

....Once the war on the Eastern Front turned against Germany after the battle of Stalingrad, Germany's overall position changed as well. She could no longer win the war, so her military strategy became one of defence, meanwhile hoping that a political compromise could be reached with the Western Allies on the basis of common hostility to the Red Army's advance beyond the Soviet border. Germany's defensive strategy was highly effective, as her enemies learnt to their great cost in the East and West alike. In the end, however, it was the German bourgeoisie which paid an even heavier price because its new military strategy became increasingly divorced from any feasible positive political goal after 1943.

....attack on Pearl Harbor was designed to secure raw materials with which to continue its engagement on the Asian mainland. Thereafter, it was a matter of keeping an outside defence perimeter for these conquests. Part of its success was based on brilliant strategic concepts such as the Malay campaign conceived by Akira and executed by Yamashita. As a result, Japan's strategy became defensive after less than six months. But Japan committed the decisive strategic blunder of attempting to combined defence of this vital perimeter with unnecessary offensive forays into the South Pacific and even into the Indian Ocean. They thereby overextended themselves and lost, through attrition, such vital forces as their main aircraft carriers and crack infantry divisions in battles around Guadalcanal, Midway and upper Burma.

....With the defeat of Germany in sight, the British bourgeoisie wanted above all to avoid Soviet military superiority in Central and Southeastern Europe. It therefore favored the Western Allies' entry into Europe from the South (via Italy or the Balkans) so as to prevent the Red Army from occupying the heartland of Europe. Furthermore, British financial and manpower sources were in a parlous state in 1943-4. Its foreign holdings were draining fast. The number of soldiers committed to Operation Overlord made steady replacement or reinforcement practically impossible. Montgomery's sudden and uncharacteristic commitment to Blitzkrieg on the Western front reveals that a rapid victory became as important to Churchill in the autumn of 1944 as it had been to Hitler in 1940-1.

....USA could fight a long war in the knowledge that time worked against the other participants, 'friends' and foes alike; the longer the war lasted the more economically and financially weakened by it they would be. A long war was indeed the shortest route to the 'American century'. Consequently, US strategy became a matter of slow, plodding, steady advance, particularly in Europe, based on overwhelming air superiority and a considerable presence on the ground - a strategy devoid of any real initiatives, breakthroughs or daring surprises. When events took an unexpected turn - e.g. the capture of the Remagen bridge - it came as a jolt to the American warlords too.

....The disastrous Finnish campaign of 1939-40 confirmed the terrible state of the Soviet armed forces and encouraged some rethinking and reorganization. This had been brought about largely by Stalin's criminal purge of the Red Army, which compounded the effects of the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy and society.13 Totally surprised by Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet leadership did not recover the initiative until the autumn of 1942.14 It was able to do so because the tremendous increase in its industrial potential and productive reserve created by the October Revolution and the planned economy - in sharp contrast to the military debacle of Tsarism in WW I.

....crude attempts were made to present the Red Army's defeats of 1941-42 as the products of a strategy of calculated retreat, deliberately drawing the Wehrmacht into the Russian interior only to destroy it in a series of counteroffensives. There is no substance whatsoever in such claims. Indeed, Stalin himself vigorously denounced such rumors at the time; they were militarily counterproductive since they encouraged the troops to go on the defensive and fostered defeatism in the ranks.16

....Unable to provide for its security via an enduring alliance with Britain and the United States, the Soviet leadership chose instead to transform the East European border states into a strategic glacis designed to protect the country's western flank against possible future German revanchisism. Given the revolutionary possibilities present in the last phase of the war and the immense sacrifice of the Soviet people themselves, this was a modest enough aim. But it encountered increasing hostility from the erstwhile allies, leading directly to the Cold War.

....The Chinese case exemplifies a fundamental truth of any major war: although the outcome is heavily influenced by a given material and human balance of forces, military strategies are not solely a function of these. They are ultimately a function of the relations of forces between the main classes involved in the war, and hence of political and economic goals. Class prejudice, self-perception, inhibitions and self-deception, as well as inadequate information and outright errors of judgement, can therefore all play important roles in determining military strategy. 

....errors of an essentially political nature influencing the outcome of WWI:

1. Hitler's belief that his enemies would not unite and that he could therefore take them on one by one;

2. Stalin's illusion that the USSR could avoid war with Germany;

3. the French, British and Soviet leaders' underestimation of the likely success of the German Blitzkrieg in 1939-41 in Europe and a similar underestimation by the British and Americans of Japan's 'first strike' capacity and the scope of its victories in South-East Asia in 1941-2;

4. Hitler's underestimation of British imperialism's resilience at the start of the war and the Allies' of Germany's after the tide had turned in 1943;

5. general underestimation of US war potential and its bourgeoisie's determination to go for unconditional surrender;

6. the capitalist powers' underestimation of the anti-imperialist and revolutionary dynamic unleashed by the war in Europe and Asia, one largely shared by Stalin ;

7. the capitalist powers' underestimation of the USSR's industrial and social strength.

....obstinate refusal to accept information which conflicted with both political and military-strategic prejudices.

....not just questions of personal idiosyncrasies but referred to an important problem confronting war leaders: the problem of initiative. As Mehring noted in 1914, they are faced with the terrifying choice between inertia and daring, between Wagen and wagen (in the words of von Moltke, the architect of the German victory over France in 1871), 'lucidity' and 'audacity' (as Napoleon put it).20 This problem is inherent in the very nature of action, be it military or political. Striking a correct balance between lucidity and audacity, caution and initiative, reality and desire is what the art of war is all about.

....(achieving the desired goals)lies in grasping all the possibilities offered by war. By the same token, it also resides in understanding the limitations inherent in the use of armed violence. A fundamental failure of German imperialism during its Nazi phase lay in its overestimation of the instrument of force in the pursuit of European hegemony. Having crushed its domestic class opponent, the German bourgeoisie offered the peoples of Europe nothing but subjugation.

....American and British ruling classes fought the war not in order to defeat fascism, but to break the resistance of the German and Japanese bourgeoisies to the maintenance or extension of their own particular interests. Those sections of the labour movement in Europe and Asia who entered the war supporting their national bourgeoisies in this enterprise, and without elaborating their own independent class goals, necessarily also ended up by supporting the denial or restriction of democratic and national liberties.... millions of workers and peasants in large parts of Europe and Asia, whenever these latter rose to assert interests that ran counter to those of the Western bourgeoisie. In other words, this lack of clarity regarding the social character of the war waged by the capitalist states was to lead - as confirmed by practical experience, especially after 1943 - directly to class collaboration and the strangling of the revolutionary possibilities which emerged during it.