Preface
World War II was the deadliest conflict in modern history. It continuedWorld War I's slaughter of soldiers but then added direct attacks against civilianson a scale not seen in Europe since the Thirty Years' War three centuriesearlier. On the Eastern Front, its horrors surpassed the worst battlesof the first global war. At times the death struggle between the forcesmassed by the German Wehrmacht and Red Army never seemed to stop.From the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 to the Crimea in early May 1944,military operations involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers continuedday in and day out. Then, after a pause lasting barely a month and a half,Soviet forces attacked the German Army at the end of June 1944, andthe ferocious fighting in the east continued without letup until the collapseof Hitler's regime. After 6 June 1944, a similar war began on the WesternFront. The amphibious assault of the Anglo-American forces on thebeaches of Normandy on D-Day initiated military operations in northernEurope that would not end until May 1945.
The ferocity of the war among the world's great—and small—nationsmounted with the addition of racial ideology to the nationalism, lust forglory, greed, fear, and vindictiveness that have characterized war throughthe ages. Nazi Germany espoused an ideological world view (Weltanschauung)based on belief in a "biological" world revolution—a revolution thatAdolf Hitler pursued with grim obsession from the early 1920s until his suicidein the Berlin Führerbunker in early May 1945. The Nazis' aim was toeliminate the Jews and other "subhuman" races, enslave the Poles, Russians,and other Slavs, and restore the Aryan race—meaning the Germans—toits rightful place as rulers of the world. By the end of the war, theNazis had murdered or worked to death at least 12 million non-German civiliansand prisoners.
In Asia, the Japanese did not adopt so coherent an ideology of racial superiorityas the Nazis, but their xenophobic nationalism, combined withdreams of empire and deep bitterness at the dominance of much of Asia bythe Western colonial powers, also led to vast atrocities. With the invasionof China in summer 1937, the Japanese embarked on a war that involvedmurder, rape, and devastation to a degree not seen since the Mongol conquestsin the early thirteenth century. The Japanese added a new dimensionto the slaughter when they used bacteriological weapons and poisongas against the Chinese people as well as soldiers.
Faced with this unprecedented aggression by the Axis powers, nationsespousing other ideologies, particularly Soviet Communism and liberalcapitalist democracy, responded with a fury of their own. By the time thewar was over, civilian deaths inflicted by both sides outnumbered combatdeaths by a margin of two to one. The West's ideological and moral imperativeto punish the Germans for their many crimes culminated in the CombinedBomber Offensive waged by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. ArmyAir Forces. Four years of battering air attacks, followed by invasion on theground, destroyed virtually every major city in Central Europe exceptPrague and Vienna. Dresden, Hamburg, Warsaw, Berlin, and Cologne,among others, lay in rubble. Race-tinged revenge may have shaped theUnited States' decision to firebomb Tokyo and to detonate atomic bombsover Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan—killing hundreds of thousands of civiliansand leaving those cities in ruins. Yet as distasteful as these bombingcampaigns are today to most citizens of the liberal democracies under sixtyyears of age, the Combined Bomber Offensive in Europe and the bombingof Japan reflected not only a sense of moral conviction on the part of theWest but a belief that such air attacks would end a war that daily grewmore horrible for soldiers and civilians alike.
Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy could not, in the finalanalysis, be defeated except by fighting. The United States, Britain, the SovietUnion, and their allies had to fight their opponents in air, ground, andnaval contests across the globe. Moral righteousness alone does not winbattles. Evil causes do not necessarily carry the seeds of their own destruction.Once engaged, even just wars have to be won—or lost—on the battlefield.Because of the Axis' operational and tactical skill, stiffened in battleby fierce nationalism and ideological commitment, as well as the controlsof police states, winning the "Good War" proved a daunting task.
Waging World War II required more than the mobilization and equipmentof huge military forces. It required the deployment of those forcesover enormous distances—in the case of the United States, across two vastoceans. And it required the creation of military power in three dimensions:in the air over both land and sea; across great land masses; and on and beneaththe sea. The Germans led the way toward combined arms warfarewith their Blitzkrieg of air and ground forces in May 1940, an assault ofweeks that enslaved Western Europe for four years. But the Allies adaptedand developed their own forces for air-ground warfare that eventuallyproved superior. Equally impressive, Allied amphibious forces—a fusion ofair, land, and sea units—made possible the landings in Africa, Italy, andFrance. The air-sea-undersea-amphibious naval campaign in the Pacificdoomed Japan.
Logistical superiority was crucial to the Allies' victory, and America's roleas the "Arsenal of Democracy" made a critical difference. Not only did theUnited States carry most of the burden of the naval campaign in the Pacificand an increasing load of the combat in Europe as the war progressed, butits Lend-Lease program was essential to the military operations of its alliesand to the functioning of their wartime economies. In contrast, the Germansand the Japanese, undoubtedly misled by the successes their militaryforces initially achieved, did not mobilize their own economies until thetide had already turned against them in 1942-43. Their desperate efforts tomatch the Allies soon attracted the assaults on their economic systemslaunched by Allied air and sea forces.
While the Allies' economic strength weighed heavily in their eventualvictory, reinforcing and accelerating the tempo of military operations in1943-45 material superiority never by itself proved decisive. Intelligenceabout the capabilities and intentions of their opponents became increasinglyimportant to the belligerents as the conflict deepened. In the contestof intelligence, the Allied powers won handily. A complete misestimate ofthe capabilities of the Royal Air Force cost the Luftwaffe what little chanceit had of achieving its objectives in the Battle of Britain. Worse was tocome. In planning the invasion of the Soviet Union, Germany misjudgedthe Soviet ability to absorb defeats. The result was a catastrophic stalematein front of Moscow, despite a series of impressive earlier victories in OperationBarbarossa. This failure was followed by Hitler's decision to declarewar on the United States—an unnecessary strategic error based on a completemisunderstanding of America's economic and military potential towage war against two enemies. The Allies slowly achieved an intelligenceadvantage over their opponents as the war continued. With informationgained by breaking German and Japanese codes, Anglo-American commanderswere able to shape battles to their advantage and to mount deceptioncampaigns that misled their opponents. The Russians used secretagents and signals intelligence to the same result.
With all their advantages in combined arms, logistics, and intelligence,the Allies still confronted the grim task of destroying their enemies town bytown, island by island, in terrible killing battles that exhausted victor andvanquished alike. In that struggle, the greatest advantage the Allies enjoyedover the Axis was the capacity to make strategic decisions that balancedends against means. At first the Allies were no better at strategic decision-makingthan their opponents. Perhaps the shock of their initialdefeats provided the sobering learning the Allies needed to guide theirstrategy as the war continued. The Germans, by contrast, never questionedtheir confidence in their planning superiority—a bit of hubris that provedfatal.
In this book, we have concentrated on the conduct of operations by themilitary organizations that waged the war. We have not ignored the strategicand political decisions that drove the war, but what interests us most areissues of military effectiveness. We have attempted to explain the battlefieldperformance of armies, navies, and air forces; the decisions madeby generals and admirals in the face of extraordinary difficulties; the underlyingfactors that shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns; andthe interrelationships among battles separated by hundreds or thousandsof miles. Thus, we have written a history of World War II that examines thereciprocal influence of strategy and operations. We try to explain how militarydecisions were made, and how those decisions made a difference tothe outcome of the fighting. We are aware that as historians, with access todocuments and accounts from both sides, we can understand events asthey unfolded in a way that the participants could not. In every case, wehave attempted to judge the decisions of military leaders and statesmen onthe basis of what they could reasonably have known at the time that theyhad to act.
We also believe that individuals at every level of leadership made a difference.From Lieutenant Richard Winters, whose squad-sized force captureda German battery and its protecting company behind Utah Beach, tothe German panzer commanders like Irwin Rommel and Hans von Luckwho destroyed the French Army in little over three weeks, to Dwight Eisenhowerwho kept a strong-willed group of senior commanders focusedon defeating the Wehrmacht, individuals guided the course of events. Wehave attempted to identify and discuss those who made the decisions thatturned the tide of the war. Although we have not written an everyman'shistory of the conflict, we have not overlooked the hundreds of thousandsof men in arms who bore the terrible burden of carrying out those decisions.
To the best of our ability, we have incorporated the expert research thathas become available over the last thirty years into a full analysis of thewar. The revelations of Ultra intelligence in the early 1970s and its operationalimplications have only recently achieved a balanced place alongsideother factors that contributed to the Allied victory. The partial opening ofthe Soviet archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union has alteredthe West's understanding of the war on the Eastern Front—a historicalevent too long told from the German perspective. As students and teachersof military history for much of the postwar period and as veterans whoprofited from our own modest military experiences, we believe that wehave written a history of World War II that does justice to that war's complexityand meaning. This, then, is our account.
Williamson Murray
Allan R. Millett
Copyright © 2000 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
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