Reading notes on Part Two 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

Part Two:  Events and Results

Chapter 10: The Opening Gambit In Europe

....During the interlude of the drole-de-guerre, Hitler feverishly prepared the offensive against France, based upon the brilliant strategic plan by von Manstein and Guderian. Instead of trying to encircle the French armies in Eastern France (as was done success­ fully in 1870 and tried unsuccessfully with the Schlieffen plan in 1914), the Wehrmacht would attempt to encircle them in the centre of the front by a bold breakthrough at Sedan and a quick rush for the English Channel. General Gamelin walked right into the trap by sending his crack mobile divisions into Holland and Belgium on 10 May 1940. The result was not a foregone conclusion, since the actual German superiority of forces was slight.

But the German gamble paid off because of superiority in strategic conception and rapidity of military execution. 

....What stood between [Hitler] and final victory in the West was not so much the Expeditionary Corps under Lord G ort, miraculously repatriated from Dunkirk, but the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy

....RAF fought over its own territory, had a superior information and communications system (radar played a key role here) and employed better tactics

....By 13 November 1940 the Luftwaffe had lost 1733 airplanes in the Battle of Britain out of the 2,200 it had committed to the battle. By the end of March 1941, the losses rose to 2,265 planes, with 8,000 pilots or other flying personnel either killed, wounded or missing. In contrast, the RAF lost 915 planes up to November 1940. What really saved Britain was Hitler's determination not to limit himself to a purely European war but to go for world hegemony - i.e. to attack the Soviet Union. 

....Hitler's obsession with the conquest of the Ukraine (which made sense from the viewpoint of the more aggressive sectors of German imperialism), and a nagging doubt about the USSR's real industrial strength, explains the concentration of efforts on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. For him, as for Roosevelt, the Mediterranean and the Near East were not of such great strategic importance.

....For the British bourgeoisie, the loss of Egypt and Middle Eastern oil would have meant as much as losing the British homeland, for the homeland would come next. So the Mediterranean became British imperialism 's main theatre of war and would remain so for three years.

....a basic rule of war was demonstrated: the more battles are fought which do not end the war, the more the marginal cost of partial victories weighs upon the final outcome. German imperialism won an easy victory in Norway, but its navy's losses in that war made Operation Sea Lion both materially and psychologically impossible without a prior defeat of the RAF. Holland was over­ come in four days and Crete taken in seven, but the loss of para­ troops and glider planes made a similar approach to Malta impossible.  The victory against Poland was easy, but the two hundred or so Polish pilots who escaped to Britain may well have made the difference between victory and defeat for Fighter Command in September 1940

Chapter 11: The Unfolding World Battle

....Germany's attack on the Soviet Union not only endowed the war with a new geographical dimension; it partially modified its social character as well. For whilst it is true that the German imperialists were out to plunder other countries, seizing mines, factories, banks almost ubiquitously, this transfer of ownership affected other capitalists. In the case of the USSR, by contrast, the property to be plundered was not capitalist but collectively owned. Hence the intended appropriation involved a social counter-revolution on a gigantic scale. A parallel can be drawn here with armies of the European monarchies in 1793 which, had they defeated the French revolutionary army, would have restored the ancien regime-i.e. the social and economic privileges of the nobility and clergy - except that in 1941 it would have been a foreign nobility.

....Stalin found himself in a position to divert a significant proportion of battle-hardened Soviet forces from the Far East after receiving authoritative information that Japan would remain neutral in the German-Soviet war.  The successful defence of Moscow was thus intimately linked to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

    Hitler had been stung by the news of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, coming as it did so soon after the formulation of Barbarossa.

....If the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact seems reasonable in the given circumstances, the positive military alliance between the Soviet Union and Britain of July 1941, subsequently joined by the United States, appears to be another matter altogether. Why should one imperialist power ally itself with a workers' state against another imperialist power? Today, with Soviet Union having become a world power, doubt as to the wisdom of that decision is proportionately greater in the bourgeois camp. It certainly came as a shock to Hitler, who was incredulous for several weeks. In the conjuncture, however, it made sense - a case of choosing the lesser evil. Unwilling to fight the war on the European continent, the British and Americans saw the Alliance as one that would simultaneously weaken both Germany and the Soviet Union, after which they would come in for mopping-up operations. To ensure that the U S SR would bear the brunt of German aggression without collapsing under it, the two countries offered material aid.

....one should add that Churchill was not completely unconstrained in his decision to extend support to the Soviet Union after 22 June 1941. Refusal to come to her aid or an attitude of studied neutrality would have provoked enormous opposition, especially in the working class. Furthermore, at that point in time it was not at all clear how Britain could win the war without the gigantic Soviet effort in the East; the whole situation of national unity could have been imperiled by an incorrect decision - and Churchill was lucid enough not to make such a mistake.

Chapter 12: Towards The Climax

....To their military and economic pressure the Americans now added a political dimension: condemnation of the policy of colonialism practised by Western imperialist states, which was perceived by the US public as one of the main causes of defeat in the Far East. This defeat had been astonishingly rapid. By the end of January 1942 the British and Australian defence units had retreated from the Malay peninsula into Singapore, only to surrender themselves in mid-February to General Yamashita. Hong Kong, the symbol of global British commercial interests, and Singapore, the very heart of the Empire's defence system in the Far East, were now both in Japanese hands. Then, at the start of April, the Philippines were taken - a heavy blow to the American pride. By mid-May nearly all of Burma was under Japanese occupation. The Burma road to China was now cut and only the expensive air route across the Himalayas remained for the supply of China and the American forces there. British India was threatened in turn. This series of great Japanese successes represented a major turning-point in the history of Asia, which no subsequent defeat would completely erase; for once the West was humbled by the East. Only the American victory at Midway checked Japan's military momentum.

....The collapse of British power in the Far East was not just a question of the Empire's weakness there. After all, Japan had managed to conquer this huge area with less than 200,000 men. (In comparison, the British Imperial Army lost 140,000 soldiers at Singapore, most of whom became prisoners of war.) Rather, the defeat indicated the subject peoples' unwillingness to fight for the British cause. The Japanese victories reflected the decomposition of the political and social fabric of British Imperial rule. 

....Churchill, full of venom towards the movement for Indian independence, and also partly out of sheer racialist prejudice, decided against any help to alleviate the mass sufferings. Under these circumstances, Gandhi and Nehru thought it wiser to channel mass indignation through the movement of civil disobedience than risk losing control over popular forces to a more radical nationalist leadership or even a revolutionary one. 

....the Western Allies' ability to maintain themselves in the Mediterranean crucially depended on the Red Army's determination to block the German drive to the oil fields of Baku. For, if successful, it would not only have ensured plentiful fuel supplies for the German war machine (and throughout the war oil was the Achilles' heel of the Wehrmacht) but would also have lined up Turkey and Iran behind Germany, thus changing the whole geopolitical balance between the  Mediterranean and India to Britain's disadvantage. 

....1942 was the year in which the Soviet Union once again came to the verge of defeat. At the end of 1941 Stalin, intoxicated by the successful repulse of the German advance on Moscow, became convinced that the Red Army would break the enemy in the new year. At his insistence Stavka almost immediately adopted a plan for an all-out counter-offensive which was to strike simultaneously at the three Germ an Army Groups (North, South and Centre) along a thousand-mile front. The scale of the proposed operation was incompatible with current Soviet resources of skilled man­power and materiel. In addition, it was strategically unsound: both Zhukov and Voznesensky, then in charge of the war economy, were against it. They proved correct. Once the initial surprise wore off, the German commanders were able to stabilise the front line, leaving the Red Army with no strategic superiority anywhere at the end of March. Worse was to follow. 

....Stalin was once again able to override his generals' proposals in favour of his own policy of 'simultaneous attack and defence' - i.e. a policy of generalised confusion.

Chapter 13: The Decisive Turning-Points

....In early November 1942 the Western Allies began their landing in French North Africa. In February 1943 Japanese expansion in the Pacific was halted by the US Navy. In the same month Germany's advance came to an end with the Red Army's victory at Stalingrad. Thus, within a few months the Second World War turned to the advantage of the Allies. They had now conquered the initiative and would not lose it again. Battles at Tunis, Kursk and Saipan rounded out the turn.

....The  downfall of Mussolini and the withdraw al of Germ an troops from the Balkans would enable, for the first time since 1938, the reemergence of a sector of the European working class - in Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece - as an autonomous protagonist in the global drama.

....Now the time of Blitzkrieg was over. The moment had come for confrontations between ever greater concentrations of mechanised weapons - in the first place, tanks and airplanes - and their production and utilization on the battlefields with maximum efficiency and tactical skill. Goebbels formula of total war now became a reality: total war replaced Blitzkrieg to the inevitable and progressive disadvantage of Germany and Japan.

....The question of who would be recognised as French spokesman in this 'liberated' territory of France had significant implications vis-a-vis the future legitimacy and role of a reconstituted French state. Giraud had many qualifications in American eyes: he was anti-communist, anti-German and anti-British. In contrast, de Gaulle's close involvement with London and his ambition - and potential - to represent the French nation made him highly suspect to Washington. T e difference between Giraud and de Gaulle, between the United States and Great Britain, also centered on the question of whether France would be weak or strong after the war, ie. whether a capitalist Europe would be pro-American or relatively independent of the USA. T e British bourgeoisie clearly understood at this point that Britain would not be equal in power or influence to the USA and the USSR and therefore sought to constitute a kind of West European bloc. 

....the decisive element was the long resistance of the Stalingrad defenders. It was this resistance which depleted German reserves and gave Stavka the necessary time to plan and organize in minute detail the encirclement of the Sixth Army. That resistance in turn clearly reflected a social phenomenon: the soldiers' and workers' superiority in urban, house-to-house or barricade fighting. Already, during the Spanish Civil War, a similar observation could be made of the battles of Barcelona and Madrid in 1936. Chuikov, the commander of the Soviet Sixty-Second Army, which formed the backbone of Stalingrad's defence, would later w rite: 'City fighting is a special kind of fighting . . . . The buildings in the city act like breakwaters. They broke up the advancing enemy formations and made their forces go along the streets . . . . The troops defending the city learned to allow German tanks to come right on top of them - under the guns of the anti-tank artillery and anti-tank riflemen; in  this way they invariably cut off infantry from the tanks and destroyed the enemy's organized battle formation.'

....The Japanese high command sacrificed tremendous resources at unimportant points of the peripheral war, obstinately refusing to cut their losses and withdraw to the inner line of defence. A fundamental split between the army and the navy supervened. The army's priority was to cover its positions in Indonesia and the Philippines through offensive operations in New Guinea. The Imperial Navy, on the other hand, was preoccupied with defenceof its great naval base at Truk Island, covered by its strongholds in the Solomons. These differences over strategy paralysed the Japanese high command for a fatal six months. 

    A similar difference in strategic conception arose between General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz. MacArthur favoured concentrating all efforts upon the reconquest of the Philippines - in the final analysis, for political reasons. He understood the discredit suffered by the Army - and Western imperialism in general - as a result of the crushing defeats of early 1942. He was afraid that without a spectacular victory there the Philippines would be permanently lost to the USA. Nimitz, on the other hand, understood that the Japanese were capable of tremendous defensive efforts in strongholds like Rabual, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, and wanted to bypass them through island hopping, aiming straight at the Japanese homeland. In the end both commanders were allowed to follow their favoured course, with a two-pronged attack towards Japan, but with the US Navy carrying the main burden of the military roll-back.

Chapter 14: The War of Attrition

.... the reserves which the Axis powers could mobilise were much larger than initially assumed. Their previous conquests had provided them with a lot of space from which to withdraw before the war could hit directly at their homelands. Withdraw they did, but rather slowly, in good order and - at least in the case of the Wehrmacht - with a deal of military skill. 

....Their class interest was confronted with a real dilemma: how to liquidate fascism whilst preserving the foundations of the bourgeois state, i.e. their political class rule, indispensable for neutralising or, if necessary, confronting mass mobilisations and the threat of revolution. 

[Allied bombing of German cities] ..... Stubborn persistence - if not indignation - rather than demoralisation, was the net effect of the resulting wholesale destruction and massive losses imposed on defenceless civilians. The only demoralisation occurred inside the Luftwaffe (particularly affecting Goering and his immediate cronies) and, to a lesser extent, inside the High Command, where the failure to adequately protect vital war industries was recognized as a harbinger of defeat. The second objective, that of forcing Germany to its knees by destroying specific sectors of the war industry (in the first place, synthetic oil, synthetic rubber and ball bearings), could probably have met with great success had the British and American air forces concentrated on these targets, instead of conducting inhuman raids on the civilian populations of large cities, like the incendiary bomb attacks on Cologne, Hamburg and, later, Dresden.

Chapter 15: The Final Onslaught

....The Anglo-American landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944; the August 1944 and January 1945 offensives of the Red Army which brought it from the Dniester to the Danube and from the Vistula to the Oder, respectively, capturing Hitler's industrial base in Silesia; and the conquest of the Philippines between the Battle of the Leyte Gulf and the landing in the Lingayen Bay (November 1944February 1945) - these opened the final onslaught on the homelands of German and Japanese imperialism which would culminate in their collapse in May and August 1945. All these offensives ended in crushing defeats for the foes of the Allied powers. 

....The immediate purpose of the German Ardennes offensive was logistical: to capture Liege and Antwerp and, with them, huge Allied supply dumps, in the first instance oil, of which the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe were already desperately short. As for the broader strategic objective, this was based on the hope that the internal contradictions of the Allied camp, and especially the prospect of Soviet occupation of Eastern and Central Europe, would convince the Anglo-Americans to go for a separate peace. 

....German tactical victories were, in reality, huge political defeats. The battles of Arnhem and of the Ardennes confirmed that military victories are not ends in themselves, but means of obtaining political goals which must be clearly understood and prioritised. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to Kesselring's successful resistance against the Allies' attempts to effect a break­ through in Italy. Contrary to an opinion expressed by many experts, including General MacArthur, the Italian front was far from being a military 'diversion', i.e. a squandering of forces on a secondary theatre of war which might have been better employed in France or the Pacific. Given the existing superiority of the Allied armies on these two fronts, the diversion to them of the thirty Allied divisions stationed in Italy would not have made any difference to the outcome of the war. But the successful breakthrough of these divisions in the spring, summer and autumn of 1944 towards the Po valley and, from there, through the Ljubljana gap would have changed the map of Europe. Anglo-American forces would have arrived in Budapest, Vienna and Prague much earlier than the Red Army.

....a terrible tragedy evolved further to the North on the main Minsk-Berlin axis. Spurred on by the ambiguous appeals of Red Army commanders, motivated by the desire to liberate their capital by their own efforts and to establish a more favourable balance of forces for the London-based Polish government-in-exile vis-a-vis the Lublin regime set up by Stalin, and also anxious to obtain the maximum amount of weapons for self-defence against ongoing repression by the NKVD, the Polish underground Armija Krajowa (dominated by the social-democratic PPS rather than by bourgeois reactionaries) rose in Warsaw against the German occupation forces when the Soviet army reached the Vistula. The uprising was based upon a doubly-incorrect assumption: that the Red Army would join, or at least help, them (Stalin had promised this when meeting Mikolayczik the first day of the uprising - a promise he repeated in a telegram sent to Churchill on15 August 1944); and that the Wehrmacht had been decisively weakened along the Vistula. In fact, the Wehrmacht assembled a still impressive force to counter both the Red Army's drive and the Warsaw insurrection. And Stalin blocked all help to Warsaw, letting the Germans do the dirty work of liquidating the Armija Krajowa he would otherwise have had to do himself. As a result of that double miscalculation, the uprising was crushed by the Nazis, in spite of the heroism of the combatants. Their butchers took a terrible revenge: 'After two months of merciless fighting, sixty-two days of unending horror and atrocity, with 15,000 men of the 30 to 40,000 of the Armija Krajowa dead, the population forcibly evacuated or murdered on the spot, 150,000 to 200,000 civilians immolated out of one million, the dead entombed in the ruins and the wounded lying untended on the roads or suffering their last agonies in cellars, surrender could no longer be delayed. On October 2(1944) the fighting ceased: the Poles were collected for deportation or extinction in the gas chambers, after which the Germans bent to the maniacal labour of levelling Warsaw to the ground.' The Red Army's halt at the Vistula lasted five months. 

....A detailed, sometimes moving narrative of what happened in Japan prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs, of the peace overtures already under way, of the utter falsity of the thesis of the 'risk of one million American dead' (recently rehashed by Nixon) is provided in The Day Man Lost: 'At night, while the rest of the people huddled hungry in bombed out dwellings, those in power entertained one another at luxurious dinner parties, parties that often turned into nightlong orgies. It is hardly surprising that yamatodamashi was on the wane. This increasing demoralisation of the people was what chiefly preoccupied Prince Konoye who feared that if, or when, Japan lost the war, the masses would turn to communism as a panacea. . . . The only way to retain the (old imperialist) system . . . was to terminate the war as swiftly and painlessly as possible.

....By the time the atomic bomb was dropped on Japanese cities, the Americans had already clarified for their own benefit and also, where appropriate, for that of their wartime 'friends', the three basic postulates of their policy towards defeated Japan: that the occupation of the Japanese mainland would be a purely American affair; that the occupying power would retain the Emperor as a 'symbol of authority'; and that a Japan sympathetic to the United States was desirable to check the Soviet presence in Asia. As in Western Europe so also in the Far East, the USA sought to prevent any transfer of power to the local Resistance: the General Order No. 1 ensured that the collapse of Japanese power in Korea, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and Indochina would not benefit the resurgent nationalist and Communist Left. However, since only actual occupation would guarantee the fulfillment of American aims, the USA made peace with the archaic forces of colonialism or corrupt conservatism in order to restore the desirable status quo ante helium now everywhere in its death throes. Washington's global policy in the Far East met with little opposition in Moscow and it was the Chinese Revolution that decisively altered the geopolitical balance in Asia against US design.

....where [the German ruling class] stood militarily was not determined solely by force of arms: several miscalculations by the imperialist and bourgeois powers led to the final outcome. The basic miscalculation was the German bourgeoisie's. Had it capitulated in the summer of 1944 or had the 20 July 1944 conspiracy against Hitler been successful the map of Europe would have been quite different today. When German historians and politicians, and some of their covert Anglo-Saxon brethren, blame Roosevelt's insistence on 'unconditional surrender' for the Red Army's occupation of Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, it is a typical case of cutting one's nose to spite one's face. After all, what was involved was their own property and state power. Bourgeois political and military leaders who end up losing half of their state through pride, or because they hope against all the evidence to regain through last-minute political upheavals what they have lost on the battlefield are simply a bunch of incompetents who do not defend their class interests properly.

This is not to say that the 'unconditional surrender' formula was a wise one from the stand-point of the Allies (neither Churchill nor Stalin were in favour of it). It certainly prolonged the war by generating in the German High Command (though less so amongst big capital) a certain psychological resistance to suing for peace. But in the first place it prolonged the war at the expense of the German bourgeoisie, which should have known better. After all, the remnants of the Third Reich under Admiral Doenitz ultimately did surrender unconditionally in May 1945. Would it not have been wiser, from their own point of view, to have done so in the summer of 1944, when there was still not a single soldier and especially no Russians on German soil?

Chapter 16:  The Outcome

....Bourgeois political and  military leaders who end up losing half of their state through pride, or because they hope - against all the evidence - to regain through last-minute political upheavals what they have lost on the battlefield are simply a bunch of incompetents who do not defend their class interests properly.

....the German bourgeoisie should lay the blame where it belongs: on its own political blindness - for sure, Hitler's in the first place, but also that of all its main military commanders and of most of its political representatives as well.

Behind that blindness lay typical imperialist arrogance - refusal to acknowledge defeat and the stubborn clinging to the hope of a last-minute 'political miracle', i.e. the hope that the inevitable cold war' would transform itself into a new 'hot war' between Western imperialism and the U SSR before the 'hot war' with Germany was over. Such obstinacy was that of reckless gamblers, characteristic of broad layers of German imperialism 's leading personnel since its inception (for historical reasons which have been explained many times). 

....The US, on the other hand, pursued its policy of excluding not only its class enemy, but also its closest ally, Britain. Admiral King, one of main American strategists, was not the only one to oppose all aid from the Royal Navy in the 'mopping up' operations against Japan. Britain was excluded from sharing in the occupation of Japan, and in the Middle East Truman did not intervene solely to stop Stalin: what followed was a rapid substitution of the USA for Britain as the regional hegemonic power. If the way in which World War Two reshaped the map of Europe and the Far East was largely decided on the battlefield, and not on the conference tables at Yalta and Potsdam, military-diplomatic realpolitik was disrupted and partially neturalized by the irruption of independent class forces onto the political area - class forces, that is, not controlled by Big Power military commands or governments. The most telling case is that of Yugoslavia. 

....In Indonesia and Indochina, all manoeuvres by imperialism and the Kremlin to restrict the huge national liberation movements to the horizon of 'reformed' colonial empires failed. Long wars ensued which, in the case of Indochina, would eventually develop into socialist revolution, and, in the case of Indonesia, end in bloody defeat. In China especially, imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy showed themselves unable to contain or suppress peasant uprisings in the Northern plains and to halt a civil war which would result in the victory of the Chinese Revolution.

Chapter 18 The Legacy

....Powerful as it was, US imperialism could not single-handed simultaneously confront the Soviet Union, the process of permanent revolution in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, and a periodically restive and explosive working class in several imperialist countries, with its own manpower and military resources. It needed allies and it had to cultivate them, in the first place financially. As a result, US imperialism saw the law of uneven and combined development assert itself for the first time against the United States.

When the US launched the reconstruction and consolidation of West German and Japanese imperialism (just as it had previously assisted in the reconstruction and consolidation of their French and Italian counterparts), it initiated a process which, as a consequence of the defeat and destruction these powers had suffered, offered them the possibility of achieving faster growth in average industrial labour productivity and a more modern industrial profile than the USA itself. Thus the build-up of the American military machine also performed the function of pressurizing the US 's reluctant allies not to overstep certain bounds of financial, commercial and industrial autonomy within the alliance a function which was itself gradually undermined by a change in the financial and industrial balance of forces to the detriment of US imperialism. So in spite of American military hegemony, the 'reign of the dollar' and predominant American ownership/control of multinational corporations did not last longer than twenty years after World War II. And if one bears in mind the growth in Soviet industrial and military power, which broke the American monopoly on nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them in the 1950s, the 'American Century' scarcely lasted for more than a decade. Bretton Woods, the reign of the dollar, the reign of US-controlled multinational corporations, did enable American and world capitalism to avoid economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression after 1945-48. But they were gradually eroded, eventually leading to the long depression which commenced at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s....