Reading notes on Chapter 7 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [Verso: 1986

The meaning of the Second World War

 by Ernest Mandel

Verso: 1986

Chapter 7 Logistics 

....America's top strategist, General Marshall, was to call the Second World War the automobile war. 

     The use of Paris taxis during the battle of the Marne notwithstanding, World War One had largely been a railway war.

....only the American and British armed forces became thoroughly motorized from 1942 onwards, to such an extent that the landing of one million soldiers in Normandy was accompanied by no less than 140,000 motorized vehicles (100,000 in the first eleven days alone). 

Japanese....lived on local supplies, causing increasing want among the local population and ultimately among the soldiers themselves.

The crucial battle of Guadalcanal was lost mainly as a result of insufficient food; the Japanese troops had to survive for weeks on a diet of wild berries and herbs. The Imperial Navy, unable to bring enough ships to its outposts, tried to have supplies transported in cylinders towed across the sea. These efforts bore meagre fruit: of the 1,500 cylinders launched in this way, only some 300 actually reached the beaches. 

Soviet... agriculture in deep crisis ....terms of trade between industry and agriculture now changed in the peasants' favour, but the increased paper money revenue of the village brought no significant increase in agricultural production. The soldiers of the Red Army were inadequately fed, and tended to compensate by procuring food en route. 

Germany... progressive plundering of local resources caused near-starvation, especially in the food-deficient areas of the Balkans; inmates of the ghettos were literally starved to death ; hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war met with the same fate.

....Axis lost the war in Egypt essentially because of the unresolved logistical problems, above all the inability to cut the supply lines of the British Eighth Army in the Mediterranean and their own acute shortage of oil, ammunition and spare parts for tanks.

....American armed forces enjoyed nearly unlimited supplies. Roosevelt deliberately opted in favour of conducting a 'rich man's war'. German and Soviet commentators, but also British officers and men especially in the Far East mocked the GIs as 'soldiers of comfort', thereby making a virtue of necessity. Each American division consumed 720 tons of supplies a day, against barely 200 for its German counterpart. While the enormous logistical infrastructure of the US army, navy and air force tended to clog up supply lines, often interfering with the actual conduct of the war itself, it nevertheless brought about a steady increase in the armed forces' efficiency and preserved morale among soldiers fighting far from a home never threatened by invasion. Indeed, this 'policy of comfort' was socially indispensable and paid off for the American ruling class.

....Japan started the Pacific war in order to attain the rich raw materials of South East Asia required for the maintenance of its war machine in China. Although it controlled them until August 1945, it could not deliver them to its war industry after 1942. The battle of the Pacific turned out to be a key battle of the war, reflecting its global character.

.... The importance of food during the war transformed the position of at least one country: the formally neutral Argentina. The longer the war dragged on, the higher food prices rose on the world market and the stronger became Argentina's position as a main source of wheat and meat. The Argentinian bourgeoisie was able to build up a reservoir of foreign currency with these windfall profits, thereby achieving a prerequisite for the industrialization and capital accumulation relatively independent of imperialist control which became the basis for the Peronist regime. The millions of victims of the great Bengali famine and Argentina's sudden enrichment graphically confirm the link between world war and world market, irrespective of whether those who benefited or suffered from it were formally involved in the hostilities.