35th Annual Admiral Nimitz Symposium - 2022: Jonathan Parshall Keynote Speaker

Transcript
0:06 · On the night of February 13th, 1942,
0:12 · General Sir Alan Brooke, the head of the British Chiefs of Staff, sat alone in his study, doing what he had done every night
0:19 · since his childhood, writing in his diary. Brook had perhaps the sharpest mind and certainly
0:26 · the sharpest tongue of any of the British chiefs. But he was exhausted by the trials of this particular day,
0:33 · and he managed to scribble out only a few sentences before he turned in. He wrote.
0:38 · News of Singapore getting worse and that of Burma beginning to deteriorate.
0:43 · Added to that, the Gneisenau Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen succeeded in running the gantlet of the channel yesterday without being destroyed
0:52 · whilst we lost some 40 aircraft of the 20 enemy planes we brought down.
0:58 · Brooke didn't bother relaying to his diary that in the humiliating aftermath of the channel dash when German warships had sailed in broad daylight within
1:07 · spitting distance of the cliffs of Dover and the Royal Navy was nowhere to be seen
1:13 · that he had received a phone call from a certain Winston Churchill. He had lifted the receiver to hear the Prime Minister bellow out
1:20 · a single word “why”, and then slammed the phone back down on him.
1:26 · As for Singapore, Brooke had ample cause for concern. Just two days later, Britain's Gibraltar of the Orient would surrender
1:34 · in what Churchill called the worst defeat and largest capitulation in British history.
1:39 · With 138,000 soldiers lost, more than 120,000 of them sent into the hell of Japanese captivity.
1:48 · Just ten days after that, the disaster on the Sitang river in Burma would route another British division and open Rangoon
1:56 · and the entire country to conquest. It's no wonder that Brooke punctuated his diary entry on the 13th
2:03 · with a sharp four word summation. These are black days.
2:08 · Dark words, indeed. And yet the majority of 1942 was honestly
2:14 · a series of allied calamities, punctuated by only a handful of victories that might or might not portend
2:22 · a larger turnaround in allied fortunes. Dwight Eisenhower remembered.
2:28 · None of us, not even the most sincere and analytical, can recapture in his own heart and mind the fears and worries of those days.
2:37 · So before we dive into the Pacific for the rest of the day, I'd like to create a little bit of a time capsule for everyone and recapitulate
2:44 · what was going on in the war as a whole during the first half of 1942
2:50 · In the Mediterranean, which was perhaps the British Empire's most important theater, in that it formed the connective tissue of the entire empire
3:00 · and also was the only region where the British really had the opportunity to make much of an impact
3:05 · things had gone from bad to worse. In less than a month, from November to December 1941,
3:13 · the Royal Navy had lost the carrier Ark Royal sunk off Gibraltar. Battleship Barham blown to pieces off of Egypt.
3:21 · Her squadron mates, Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, disabled in Alexandria's harbor by Italian frogmen.
3:28 · And then, of course, the Prince of Wales and Repulse sunk near Malaya. In that stretch
3:34 · the British lost more capital ships sunk or disabled than the Americans would lose at Pearl Harbor.
3:41 · Four of them permanently, as opposed to the American’s two and nearly 1700 sailors killed.
3:47 · The naval balance, meanwhile, in the Mediterranean had been completely upended. In January, Rommel counterattacked in the desert
3:56 · and had driven the British eighth army, back from El Agheila all the way through Cyrenaica, 300 miles to the town of Ghazala.
4:05 · With Cyrenaica’s Fall went the only airfields capable of covering supply convoys to the vital island of Malta and to no one's very great surprise,
4:14 · starting in April, the Luftwaffe began bombing the place to ruins. At one point, this critical bastion was down to just two weeks
4:22 · worth of aviation fuel and was hovering on the brink of starvation. Meanwhile, the axis were moving materials
4:29 · and supplies across the Mediterranean with near impunity. In late May, Rommel would attack again
4:36 · at Ghazaliya and running the defenses of Eighth Army and handing the British yet another humiliating defeat in the desert.
4:44 · He then quickly set about capturing Tobruk. To Prime Minister Churchill's utter humiliation
4:49 · news of Tobruk fall along with 32,000 men, and a mountain of supplies
4:55 · would reach him while he was sitting in the Oval Office in the White House with FDR. Rommel then started pushing ahead towards Cairo.
5:04 · In Europe, the news was a little better. Britain's strategic bombing offensive was accomplishing basically nothing.
5:12 · Being still saddled primarily with two-engined aircraft that were too small too vulnerable too short ranged and too few
5:19 · in number to do any material damage to German industry. As for the Americans, eighth Air Force would not fly
5:26 · its first combat mission until July the fourth. Borrowing a handful of American Lend-Lease
5:33 · lite bombers back from the British, hastily repainting them and then using them to run what was honestly little more than a dumb
5:41 · little PR stunt that cost a quarter of the airplanes involved. On the eastern front, the Russians and the Red Army had managed to shove the
5:50 · Germans back from the gates of Moscow and had brought the Wehrmacht’s army group center
5:56 · to the brink of collapse by early January, which was a huge accomplishment. But that same month, Stalin, in the first flush
6:04 · of success, had told the Stavka the enemy wants time and the rest were not going to give the Germans
6:11 · this rest. We're going to chase them to the West with no rest. We're going to make them expend their reserves until the summer.
6:20 · Instead of focusing on an achievable goal, the destruction of Army Group Center,
6:25 · Stalin had decided to double down and widen the counteroffensive by extending it across the breadth of the front
6:32 · in an attempt to win the entire war outright. The result was disaster as the Germans rallied
6:39 · and the Kremlin began pumping too few divisions over much too wide a frontage.
6:45 · By March, when the muddy season took over and brought combat to a halt. Both sides had beaten themselves bloody, but it was the Red Army
6:54 · that had suffered far more heavily because of its lack of tactical and technical competence. In army group centers
7:00 · portion of the front alone, the Red Army lost 1.6 million men in the first three months of the year,
7:07 · paying six soldiers to one for every village and torched hamlet that they managed to recover.
7:13 · Ironically, as terrible as Army Group Center's ordeal had been, once the Germans had been forced onto the defensive,
7:20 · their monthly casualties actually decreased compared to what they'd been suffering during the summer's advance on Moscow.
7:28 · Once the muddy season abated, things continued going downhill as the Red Army was handed two new disasters,
7:36 · the first being at the Kerch Peninsula in Crimea, where the Germans basically pushed an army group into the Sea of Azov,
7:43 · and the second being the huge kettle battle around Kharkov. Towards the end of the latter,
7:50 · Army Group South Commander Field Marshal Fedor von Bock made his way down from his HQ at Kharkov to take in the spectacle.
7:59 · It wasn't every day that you got to see the destruction of a complete enemy army group.
8:05 · From a hilltop near Losavanka, which ironically is about ten miles from where the front lines and the Donbas used to be as of last week.
8:15 · Von Bock looked out over what he described as an incredible, overwhelming scene.
8:21 · Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were being were crammed into perhaps 20 square miles of wooden scrub,
8:27 · which is being systematically blasted by every Stuka and field gun that the Germans could bring to bear.
8:34 · Von Bock wrote, I could see that the pounding the smoking pocket was taking from our batteries on all sides was being answered only weakly by the Russians.
8:44 · Masses of prisoners streamed to the rear where our Panzers passed them on the way to attack.
8:51 · Kerch would cost the Russians 176,000 casualties. Kharkov another 266,000, along with 1400 tanks,
9:02 · 5000 artillery pieces and 1000 aircraft flushed down the attritional loo.
9:08 · The Germans had lost only one man for every 13 suffered by the Red Army during what historian John Eriksson
9:16 · aptly termed a nightmare of confusion and incompetence.
9:25 · The Germans had regained the initiative and nobody doubted that worse lay in store. The result in late June would be Operation Blue. Von Bock’s
9:35 · Legions would tear into the south of Russia and inflict fresh catastrophes on the Red Army
9:40 · as they drove through the Donbas towards the Caucasus and Stalingrad.
9:45 · Finally, behind the lines, it cannot go unmentioned. that 1942 would also see the opening of Belsec,
9:52 · Sobibor and Treblinka. Along with Chelmno, during a horrific 100 day period in the fall,
9:59 · these four camps would massacre 1.4 million people, a quarter of the total Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
10:07 · The rate of killing only slowed dramatically by October for the simple reason that there were hardly any Jews left in Poland left to murder.
10:15 · None of this was known in the West at the time, although by late November, many US papers would report the 2
10:21 · million European Jews had already been systematically killed. Closer to home,
10:28 · as soon as the war began, Admiral Karl Donitz’s U-boat force began turning America's Eastern Seaboard into a shooting gallery.
10:36 · Nobody had expected German submarines to be able to run patrols of this length and the result was that the U.S.
10:42 · was caught totally unprepared. The first quarter of 1942 had seen more than 1.3 million tons of shipping sunk.
10:51 · More than half of the tankers. In that same quarter, total imports to the UK
10:56 · had fallen by 25%, food by 16%. In April alone.
11:01 · German submarines destroyed more ships than they'd sunk in the entire fourth quarter of 1941, more than 400,000 tons worth.
11:10 · In June, the toll rose to over 600,000 tons. Having narrowly survived a similar crisis in mid 1941, Britain
11:19 · was operating without much of a safety net at this point. Commander Roger Winn, who ran the Admiralty’s U-boat tracking
11:27 · room, remarked rather testily to an American visitor during February.
11:32 · The trouble is, Admiral, it's not only your bloody ships, you are losing. A lot of them are ours.
11:39 · By June, Admiral Ernest King, Commander in chief of the US Navy, was being raked over the coals
11:46 · first by his counterpart, General George Marshall, who noted shipping losses threaten our entire war effort, adding,
11:55 · “we are aware of the very limited number of escort craft available but has every conceivable improvised means
12:02 · been brought to bear on this situation?” Just days later, FDR piled on
12:09 · with a memo that read, I realize the problem of making up escorts for convoys, but frankly,
12:15 · I think it has taken an unconscionable time to get things going. Putting it mildly, being subjected to a good old fashioned cole-
12:24 · raking was not exactly a custom territory for Admiral King, who reputedly shaved with a blowtorch himself.
12:32 · And honestly, he has taken much unwarranted criticism, in my opinion, regarding his culpability during this time.
12:38 · But the fact remains that the shipping situation was quickly turning disastrous and the fact that much of the carnage was being wrought in plain sight of
12:46 · beachgoers in places like Cape Hatteras and Miami made it even more embarrassing.
12:53 · Which brings us finally to the Pacific. We, as Americans, understandably, tend to overfocus on Pearl Harbor and its aftermath.
13:02 · But it's important to remember that Pearl Harbor was just one component in a much larger plan of campaign that was primarily oriented towards
13:11 · the southern resource areas in Borneo, Malaya, Sumatra and Java.
13:16 · For It was here that the rubber, tin and above all, the oil that Japan needed for its war was to be found.
13:24 · For the US Navy, now having been knocked temporarily hors de combat, the Japanese
13:29 · launched an incredibly complex and audacious campaign across the breadth of Southeast Asia.
13:35 · And no, there will not be a quiz on this slide at the happy hour tonight.
13:40 · December witnessed Japanese thrusts into the Philippines, China and Malaya. Neutral
13:46 · Thailand was suborned. Attacks were launched against Guam, Wake and Hong Kong with all of them falling by Christmas.
13:54 · It was actually the nationalist Chinese who scored the only major land victory that the allies would see in Asia until August,
14:02 · when they defeated a Japanese attack at Changsha. But this news was barely noticed amidst the welter of the ruinous Allied defeats.
14:12 · January and February saw Japan's campaign rapidly advancing to the south around Borneo and Celebes.
14:19 · A bold multi axial attack took advantage of Japanese superiority in the air and at sea to move forces steadily closer to Java.
14:28 · Captured air bases were rapidly put back into operation to extend Japan's air umbrella and cover follow up landings. At the Battle of Java Sea
14:37 · at the end of February, allied naval power in the region was exterminated, leaving Java
14:42 · open to invasion. In the Philippines, the Americans had been completely isolated on the Bataan Peninsula since New Year's.
14:50 · Singapore was lost in mid-February and Burma rapidly falling apart. Meanwhile, Japanese forces swooped down from Saipan
14:59 · to grab the critical port of Rabaul at the tip of New Britain, which would be the linchpin of Japan's later offensives
15:06 · aimed at the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. By March, Java was surrounded on
15:11 · all sides and was invaded from east and west. Dutch resistance quickly collapsed. In Burma
15:18 · Rangoon fell at the same time, allowing Japanese forces to begin pushing north
15:23 · into the interior with the capture of Lashio in the center of the country. The Burma road was lost and nationalist China was now completely cut off
15:33 · from the outside world, except via air transport from India. The northern coast of New Guinea was captured and Japanese forces began
15:41 · fanning out from Rabaul and working their way into the Solomon Islands toward the supply lines running to Australia.
15:48 · In the Philippines, the battling Bastards of Bataan had been cut off for months now, with no chance of rescue.
15:55 · The Pentagon was forced to watch helplessly as the garrison was slowly ground down by malnutrition and disease.
16:02 · Everybody knew what was coming. In the grim words of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, there are times when men must die.
16:12 · In early April, the Japanese launched their final offensive against the Bataan Peninsula.
16:17 · 75,000 Phil-American troops went into the horrors of Japanese P.O.W.
16:22 · camps. Within two months, 20,000 of them would be dead.
16:28 · A month later, Corregidor fell and General Jonathan Wainwright was shortly
16:33 · left with no choice but to order his remaining troops in the Philippines to lay down their arms.
16:38 · It was the largest surrender of American troops in history. At the same time, Bataan was falling.
16:45 · Admiral Nagumo’s powerful carrier force, launched a raid into the Indian Ocean, sinking the British carrier Hermes, and two cruisers,
16:54 · along with 140,000 tons of merchant shipping. In the aftermath of the debacle, the British Royal Navy was forced
17:02 · to rebase from Ceylon all the way back to the east coast of Africa. The white ensign, which had ruled the world's oceans for centuries, had now
17:11 · been driven ignominiously from both the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. Admiral Sir James Somerville, commander of the British Pacific Fleet,
17:20 · knew what it was to be hunted when he wired to the Admiralty until powerful capital ships are sent to reinforce me,
17:29 · I can take no effective action against even a moderate Japanese concentration.
17:34 · My present intention is to create diversions and false sense, since I am now the poor fox.
17:47 · By May, Japan's plan of conquest was essentially complete
17:52 · and it was in possession of huge new swathes of Asia. The emperor now had more than 516 million subjects
18:00 · under his control, far more than Hitler would ever be able to boast. If the Japanese were given time to mobilize their empire's
18:07 · economic potential. They stood to create a powerhouse. All in all, Japan's offensive had been remarkably economical.
18:14 · A grand total of just 11 divisions had sufficed to capture one of the largest empires in history.
18:21 · The Imperial Army had proven itself ferocious on the attack and obdurate in defense.
18:27 · They played an aggressive, up tempo, smash mouth brand of warfare that had utterly
18:32 · outclassed the British, Indian, Dutch and American forces that they had fought.
18:37 · It was an open question in many people's minds whether or not the Sons of Democracy honestly had the skill, let alone the guts,
18:46 · to go up against toe to toe with the sons of the son of heaven. In the air
18:51 · Japanese fighters had swept the skies clean of allied air power, with the zero gaining a reputation of something of a superweapon in the process.
19:00 · The Imperial Navy likewise had demonstrated to that it was every bit the match of its opponents, particularly
19:06 · with respect to carrier warfare and surface combat. Admiral Nagumo’s carrier formation Kito Butai
19:13 · was the most potent naval aviation force on Earth, and for the first six months of the war, they had roamed the world's oceans
19:20 · like a pack of killer whales, destroying whatever was in their path. Unsurprisingly, the litany of disasters
19:27 · being foisted upon the allies was not going unnoticed. On the home front. The Dow Jones Industrials, which is a fairly reliable
19:36 · indicator of the business community's mood, descended to 92 in April.
19:42 · That was the lowest had been since 1934. A full 10% below where it had been in 1906 and about representing
19:51 · just a quarter of the value before the great crash of 1929. If the Dow was any indication, Wall Street's optimism was in the toilet.
20:01 · Two months later, in The New York Times, which could normally be relied upon to be pretty favorable to FDR administration,
20:08 · there appeared an opinion piece stating that the war was too big and complex for the president to manage and calling on FDR to give up his role
20:17 · as commander in chief and turn it over to a military man. What makes this so fascinating to me is that this opinion piece
20:24 · came out in the weeks just following the Battle of Midway. And that shows you, though, that in the broader context of ongoing
20:31 · worldwide disaster, even a victory that would be seen later as seminal was by no means a cure all for the nation's mood.
20:40 · Indeed, the mid-term elections in November would cost the Democrats 60 seats in the House.
20:46 · So at this point, you can see that FDR clearly was not seen in the same way that he would be in 1944
20:53 · when he was viewed as a very successful wartime president. Across the Atlantic on July 2nd.
20:59 · A stung and angry Winston Churchill was obliged to rise from his seat on the Treasury bench in the House of Commons, advanced
21:08 · to the despatch box and defend his record of running the war. As Churchill would admit, later this month of July was
21:16 · when I was politically at my weakest and without a gleam of military success. Across from him sat the opposition leading the vote of no confidence.
21:25 · As one of them put it, when the Prime Minister who said that we would hold Singapore, that we would hold Crete, that we had smashed the German army in Libya
21:34 · now tells us that we are going to hold Egypt. My anxieties became greater.
21:40 · How can one place reliance in judgments that have so repeatedly turned out to be misguided?
21:46 · In the end, Churchill easily won the vote, but it was clear in the words of Sir Stafford Cripps, that there was a general feeling of dissatisfaction
21:55 · that something is wrong and should be put right without delay. That same general unease clearly existed in the US, and there can be little doubt
22:04 · that the mood in the street in the USSR was much the same. All in all, I think you can understand now why Richard Overy wrote in his seminal
22:12 · Why the Allies won that on the face of things, no rational man in early 1942 would have guessed
22:20 · that the eventual outcome of the war. As Rich Frank has pointed out to all outward appearances, what was going on in 1942
22:28 · was merely a continuation of an almost unbroken string of victories that the totalitarian nations had been reeling off since the Italians
22:36 · successfully invaded Abyssinia in 1935. To return to Brooke’s diary then,
22:42 · on March 31st, he summed up the matter nicely. The last day
22:48 · of the first quarter of 1942, a fateful year in which we have already lost a large proportion of the British Empire
22:56 · and are on the high road to lose a great deal more of it. The last day during this fortnight,
23:02 · I have had for the first time since the war started, a growing conviction that we are going to lose this war
23:08 · unless we control it very differently and fight it with more determination. But to begin with, a democracy is at a great disadvantage
23:15 · against a dictatorship when it comes to war. It is all desperately depressing.
23:21 · Further, it is made worse by the lack of good military commanders. Half our corps and divisional commanders are totally unfit for their appointments.
23:29 · And yet, if I were to sack them, I could find no better. I wonder if we shall muddle through this time, as we have done in the past.
23:37 · There are times when I wish to God I had not been placed at the helm of a ship that seems to be heading inevitably for the rocks.
23:44 · It is a great honor to find oneself entrusted with such a task, and the hope of saving the ship is a most inspiring thought and one that does override all others.
23:53 · But may God help me in my task. I'd like to step back from this picture of gloom and doom
24:01 · to point out some of the structural interconnectedness of this war and the ways in which the Pacific Theater had impacts elsewhere in the world,
24:09 · and likewise the ways in which worldwide events impacted the Pacific.
24:15 · The first universal constant in everything that the Western allies did was shipping.
24:20 · Both Britain and particularly the U.S. were fighting largely or even exclusively overseas,
24:27 · particularly in remote or undeveloped locales like North Africa and the Pacific.
24:32 · Everything needed for modern warfare had to be shipped in tanks, aircraft,
24:37 · petrol tents, locomotives, concrete, railroad ties, atabrine, rat poison, everything.
24:45 · Admiral Donitz then was correct in his view that the Allied shipping pool was one
24:50 · vast, fungible asset that a British tanker sunk off of Cape Hatteras now might be carrying tanks to Egypt
24:58 · next month, or maybe Murmansk or aircraft to New Zealand. Shipping was the linchpin for the allies ability to wage war, which explains why
25:06 · Dönitz depredations were so very dangerous to the overall war effort. The same sensitivity around shipping also helps explain
25:15 · the ferocity with which the Allies defended oceanic supply lines. In a very real sense, the Battle of Coral Sea and the subsequent
25:23 · campaign at Guadalcanal were fought over the right to continue supplying Australia.
25:29 · The Allies took horrific risks running supplies into places like Murmansk and Malta.
25:35 · And, of course, the primary center of undersea warfare in the North Atlantic was waged over the right to hold open Britain's supply lines.
25:43 · Supply and logistics were the heart of a modern war. Likewise, Japan's rampage in April into the Indian Ocean,
25:51 · although it was not subsequently capitalized on briefly created a nightmare scenario wherein Japan might sit astride
25:59 · not only Britain's supply lines to the Middle East and India, but also block Lend-Lease aid to the USSR via the Red Sea.
26:08 · And the problem might be even further compounded if the Germans were to come into this area as well. As flowed
26:14 · cargo ships, then so too flowed battles and campaigns. And this raises the interconnectedness of the various theaters of the war.
26:23 · There's a very real argument to be made that the fall of France in 1940
26:28 · led directly to the fall of Singapore in 1942. That losing the French Navy's ability to check the Italians in the Mediterranean
26:37 · meant that the British had to overstretch and couldn't devote the resources needed to hold Malaya.
26:42 · Likewise, had the Japanese not attacked the British in the Far East in December 1941, the British might have been able
26:50 · to polish off Rommel and the Italians in Libya. But as the situation in Malaya and Burma began spiraling out of control,
26:59 · the Middle East cupboards were robbed bare. The fate of British 18th Infantry Division is illustrative.
27:05 · It left Britain in October 1941, bound for Egypt. But where did it land? In Singapore.
27:12 · It was rerouted there in one of Churchill's stupidest moves as a wartime commander, disembarking between 29 January and five February, just in time to do
27:22 · absolutely no good in a campaign that was clearly past redemption and then go straight into captivity when the city fell just ten days later.
27:32 · Throughout the war, there was to be a constant struggle between the British and the Americans regarding the relative balance
27:38 · of material for the Pacific versus the European theaters. The British viewed any American shipments to places like Tonga, Fiji
27:46 · and the Solomons as one less soldier or airplane that should rightly be in either the British Home Islands or somewhere
27:52 · in their preferred theater of operations in the Mediterranean. And yet, in July, when the British finally scuttled the notion
28:00 · of a cross-channel invasion that year, one of the fallouts was that the Americans diverted about 800 aircraft to the Pacific, which Admiral
28:08 · King promptly scarfed up and used for his forthcoming campaign in Guadalcanal.
28:13 · The same tension over resources, of course, played out between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy.
28:19 · General Marshall and the Army were focused on invading northern Europe as rapidly as possible and getting to grips with the Wehrmacht. Admiral
28:27 · King, however, was insistent that the war be prosecuted vigorously in the Pacific.
28:32 · Some of this was simply making a virtue of necessity in that the enormous carrier oriented fleet that the Americans already
28:39 · had on the building ways could be of little use in the Atlantic against German U-boats or against the Reich itself.
28:45 · Another connection point, as I've already alluded to, concerns the critical role of China,
28:51 · particularly during this year when the Soviets were on the ropes. The ability of China to continue tying down large
28:57 · numbers of Japanese troops was seen as absolutely vital. Losing the Burma Road then potentially had
29:04 · a direct impact on Stalin's ability to fight the Germans. If the Red Army had been obliged to keep more formations in Manchuria,
29:12 · it would have affected the Kremlin's options during this war. This, in turn, made the retention of India paramount because air transport
29:20 · over the Himalayas was now the only way to get a trickle of supplies into Shang. This also partly explains why the British were so brutal in putting down
29:29 · the Quit India rebellion in August of 1942. Not only was India the crown jewel of Britain's colonies,
29:37 · but it was the last remaining linkage with China as well.
29:44 · So now I'd like to put up this heretical slide for just a little bit,
29:50 · because there's a final matter that I need to turn to. Our speakers roster for the rest of the day
29:56 · includes a number of prominent members of what my friend Rich Frank laughingly refers to as the cult of Pacific War historians.
30:05 · He says that by way of indicating that has been true for decades, that for every book that comes out on the Pacific, you can usually count on
30:12 · at least 3 to 4 books emerging on the European theater, including a fresh look at D-Day or the Bulge.
30:20 · Europe has always gotten the lion's share of both the book sales and historical inquiry.
30:25 · Recently, though, the locus of that inquiry has swung further east. In the past 10 to 15 years, there has been a growing ascendancy
30:34 · of what I would call Eastern Front determinism. The school of thought argues that with the defeat of Operation
30:41 · Barbarossa in the summer or fall of 1941, depending on where you want to put it, that Germany could no longer defeat the USSR
30:48 · and that the war was essentially lost for the axis as a result. On the face of it, you can see why this might be true.
30:55 · The Eastern Front was by far the largest theater in terms of act of soldiers, the 6 million man Wehrmacht against the 12 million man Red Army.
31:04 · It also generated the bulk of the military and civilian casualties between 34 and 43 million dead, including 13 to 17 million soldiers.
31:13 · The Wehrmacht would lose at least three quarters of its casualties on this front as well. If Germany, which was by far the most dangerous of the
31:21 · the Axis powers, was defeated here, then how could the axis have won? On the face of it
31:26 · then it seems that as swung the outcome in the USSR, so swung the war as a whole.
31:33 · It pains me to take issue with this notion because some of its proponents are individuals who scholarship I hold in genuinely deep respect,
31:42 · who have helped me with my own book and who are honestly personal friends of mine.
31:47 · The distinguished Evan Mawdsley, the brilliant David Stahel, the prolific and terrific Robert Citino.
31:55 · But the notion that the outcome on the Eastern Front was solely responsive for determining who won and who lost World War Two,
32:02 · it seems to me, fails in several respects. First, if you take this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, it's basically
32:10 · saying that the outcome of World War Two was essentially decided before Japan and America had even entered the war.
32:19 · I find that notion absurd that the presence or absence of
32:24 · by far the world's largest economy was somehow irrelevant to the outcome
32:30 · that all the Western allies were apparently playing for was some sort of consolation prize, seeing how much of Western Europe they could manage to liberate
32:38 · before the invincible Red Army steamrollered its way to Berlin. At the very least, one must acknowledge that if one believes
32:46 · in the notion of causality, then even if the Germans were doomed to defeat
32:51 · after the failure of Barbarossa, they most certainly were not doomed to defeat on the same timetable that they did or in the same manner.
33:01 · Respect for causality raises a second issue. There was absolutely no guarantee that the military reforms that the Red Army
33:08 · put in train began beginning in July 1941 were actually going to take effect.
33:13 · One of the things I spend a lot of time looking at in my book is how the Red Army ripped up its org chart not once,
33:20 · but twice in the course of 15 months, changed its doctrine, changed its weapons,
33:25 · mix, all while conducting a fighting retreat against the most professional army on the planet.
33:30 · There was no certainty that any of this would actually pan out and thus no certainty that Operation Uranus around Stalingrad in November
33:38 · would not fail as disastrously as its equally large sister, Operation Mars
33:43 · failed in the Rzhev at exactly the same time. Third, and most important, I think there is a tendency amongst
33:50 · Eastern front determinist to overfocus on the military dimension of the war while glossing over the very parlous state of the Soviet homefront
33:58 · during this year. Mark Harrison, the foremost Western expert on the Soviet wartime
34:03 · economy, noted that during 1942, the productive miracles occurring in the Urals were constantly threatened
34:11 · by the danger of overall economic collapse. Put simply, if Russia’s economy disintegrated, Soviet resistance
34:18 · would be snuffed out just as effectively as if its armies had been defeated in the field. And if that came to pass, the war would have gone to hell in
34:25 · a handbasket. It's easy to forget that the Russian economy actually had collapsed
34:31 · just 20 years prior during World War One, and under circumstances that weren't in many ways nearly as dire as the ones the USSR was now facing.
34:40 · By 1942, household consumption in the USSR was 40 below its already wretched pre-war levels.
34:49 · Agricultural output plummeted by 60% for two years. In an already poor country
34:56 · decreases in household consumption weren't just some sort of academic abstraction.
35:01 · They meant grossly inadequate shelter and clothing, much less food in people's stomachs and widespread hardship.
35:08 · Millions of Soviet citizens died from starvation and disease, and not just in Leningrad.
35:13 · Meanwhile, the economy limped along on an industrial base only 60% large, as large as it had been the year prior.
35:20 · Stripped of most of its raw materials with its factories manned by dirty Scarecrow, people dressed in rags, working seven days a week on empty stomachs.
35:31 · At the beginning of July, during Germany's summer offensive, when the army began once again, the Red Army
35:38 · began falling apart during its terrible retreat through the Donbass. Joseph Stalin issued his infamous order Number 227
35:47 · “Not a step back”. Carried with it the threat of death for anyone who disobeyed.
35:55 · Most historians look at this order strictly in military terms, a device for stiffening the Red Army spine.
36:02 · But I see it differently. If you read the orders text Stalin frames the crisis
36:07 · the USSR is facing in economic terms, liberally employing words like territory,
36:13 · population, metal, plants and factories. At the top of the list mentioned seven times is bread.
36:22 · Stalin wasn't being exactly subtle here. The economy was on a knife's edge. The USSR had already traded away 40% of the country's population,
36:31 · the economy and raw materials in 1941 just trying to buy the time to stay alive.
36:37 · They couldn't very well play that card a second time this summer. It's also worth noting that the rate of political executions
36:44 · in the USSR spiked in 1942. Stalin didn't repress for fun.
36:50 · He did it as a reflexive reaction when he was scared and angry. In 1942, it seemed clear he was struggling to keep the lid on. Eastern front
36:59 · expert Jonathan House echoed this in an email to me last year. My strong impression has always been that in July through
37:06 · November 1942, the Kremlin almost lost control of the nation. As Mark Harrison notes, we cannot measure the distance of the Soviet economy
37:15 · from the point of collapse in 1942, but it seems beyond doubt the collapse was near without Lend Lease, it would have been nearer.
37:24 · If Barbarossa’s failure had indeed doomed Hitler and the Reich, it sure doesn't seem like Stalin had gotten the memo.
37:33 · Finally, I’d note that horrifically large death tolls were hardly exclusive to Europe, as you can see in this slide.
37:41 · Yes, the Eastern Front accounted for the majority of the deaths in World War Two, perhaps 43 million people.
37:47 · That's about 54% of the total, just over half. But the Pacific probably saw about 30 million dead or 38% of the total.
37:56 · China alone suffered between 15 and 20 million fatalities.
38:01 · For all these reasons, then I am very skeptical of Eastern Front determinism and reductionist accounts of the war in general.
38:09 · I am very much and Richard Overy’s his camp when he wrote the explanation of allied victory requires a broad canvas and a wide brush.
38:19 · The war was unique in its scale and geographical extent. The battlefield was a world battlefield in a very literal sense.
38:27 · For the allies, there was no question of winning the war in some defined area of engagement. It had to be won in every theater and on every dimension; land, sea and air.
38:37 · And if you take a look at the front page of The New York Times from almost any day during the year, it drives home the same basic point.
38:43 · The war was dizzying in its scope and complexity, and it was happening everywhere all the time.
38:50 · And all at once. I maintain that the sprawling, chaotic year of 1942 was the one year in which either the axis
38:59 · or the Allies could have created the basis for ultimate victory in this vast conflict.
39:05 · 1942 was crucial in that it was the first year that all the big dogs were finally in the fight, and yet so many questions remained unanswered
39:14 · regarding their military and economic performance. As we are witnessing in Ukraine at this very moment, far fewer wars
39:23 · than one might think have outcomes that are actually preordained. Wars are conditional.
39:29 · Their outcome depends on a chain of events, each affected by the ones coming before and likewise influencing the ones that come after.
39:39 · Even with the failure of Operation Barbarossa, the Allies were far from being in a position.
39:45 · To simply mail it in. 1942 was a nail biter, very evenly matched, full of plot twists, unlikely heroes and surprising
39:54 · victories and defeats that confounded military experts and civilians alike.
39:59 · Had the allies proven less resilient, less crafty, less determined, less organized, had they failed to use every resource at their disposal,
40:10 · had they fought less savagely and desperately at places like Alamein, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal, or the icy waters of the North Atlantic,
40:19 · the axis might have driven one or more of them from the war with ruinous consequences for the remainder.
40:26 · Likewise, I'd argue that there was no single turning point in this war. Not Barbarossa, not Midway. Heresy
40:33 · I know. Not Stalingrad. Indeed, 1942 presents us with a collection of important inflection points.
40:41 · I think as many as a couple dozen each serving to move the helm of this huge man of war.
40:47 · Slightly in one direction or the other. Superficially, one can point to a quartet of victories
40:55 · for the Allies at the end of the year at Alamein, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad and Torch as being decisive.
41:02 · But these military victories were working in concert with other things behind the scenes, the stunningly quick rearmament of the United States,
41:10 · the failure of the Germans and the Japanese to marshal their own economic resources efficiently.
41:15 · The survival of the Soviet homefront and the rapid increase in the quality of allied military performance,
41:22 · particularly amongst the Americans and the Soviets. Japanese failing to land a knockout blow in the early months of the war
41:31 · that would bring the Americans to the bargaining table. The Americans and the British managing without too much yelling
41:38 · to create a workable alliance structure, the coordinated strategy, resources and operations in a reasonably intelligent manner.
41:46 · No small feat in itself. And the list goes on. All of this is to say that the outcome of the Second World
41:54 · War was crucially shaped by what occurred in the Pacific. The Pacific mattered.
41:59 · What we're going to be talking about for the rest of the day mattered. And with that, I would like to stop being in lecture mode
42:06 · and step back and actually answer people's questions. Thank you very much for your attention.
42:20 · Thank you so much. Please raise your hand if you have a question. Are volunteers in the Red Shirts?
42:26 · We'll get a mic over to you so that everybody can hear, including our virtual audience. Thank you. Further to your counterattack against Eastern Front determinism,
42:36 · what do you think would have happened if the Germans had taken Stalingrad on the run in the early fall of 1942?
42:44 · How do you think the Eastern Front would have turned out then? The question is yeah, if we go into counterfactuals,
42:50 · what happens if the Germans take Stalingrad off the march? That with respect to causality, I think that's an important variable
42:57 · in 1942 campaigns, the original shape of Operation Blue was that
43:04 · once the Donbass had been secured, that the Germans would move immediately to take Stalingrad and then turn to the south
43:11 · and move towards the Caucasus and try to take Russian oil resources at Baku and so forth.
43:20 · I think that would have been better. I don't know that that necessarily is is a war winner for the Germans necessarily.
43:27 · But if nothing else, it would have concentrated German assets instead of, you know, dispersing them across the vast expanses of the Kalmyk step
43:37 · and had been going after just one thing at a time rather than simultaneously trying to go after both Stalingrad and the Caucasus.
43:44 · I think at the end of the day, the Russians are probably going to be able to launch some sort of a counterattack along the German flank.
43:52 · It's going to be so long and extended, but there's no guarantee that that counterattack takes the same shape that operation ends up taking.
44:01 · And we have to bear in mind that the Red Army didn't have a very sterling track record of doing, you know, mobile
44:08 · combined arms warfare at this point in time. So, you know, I don't have a crystal ball on that one.
44:13 · I have no idea what the effects would have been. But I do think that that would have been a sounder move than the one that Hitler
44:19 · ended up enacting, which was a bifurcated drive.
44:31 · Okay. So as American industry was
44:37 · gearing up to ship more material to Russia,
44:43 · you know, towards the end of 1942, I'm kind of reminded that
44:49 · there was very large number of trucks made by Studebaker,
44:55 · maybe in memory over 70,000. Can you speak to the volume
45:01 · of not only things like trucks, but also aircraft that were, you know, flown from Buffalo, New York, to, I think or is it right.
45:12 · Up through Alaska? Actually, Yeah, right. Can you speak to that? Absolutely, yes. So regarding the impact of Lend-Lease, it's
45:20 · it's difficult to gauge it with respect to exactly 1942. I mean, by 43 and 44 obviously it had ramped up enormously.
45:28 · And, you know, the total volume of Lend-Lease shipments is $51 billion.
45:33 · And a large proportion of that did go to the Soviet Union.
45:39 · It was absolutely crucial to the Soviets on a number of levels.
45:44 · First of all, just in terms of raw materials, we made up a great deal of their deficit in aluminum.
45:50 · And aluminum doesn't seem terribly important. But then if you realize that the engine block of every Soviet
45:56 · t-34 was actually an aluminum engine block and that they had lost more than half of their aluminum resources when Tikhvin
46:04 · and the environs had been taken by that by the Germans in their initial campaign aluminum becomes really important.
46:10 · Regarding trucks, the impact of those Studebaker is not going to be felt in 1942
46:16 · and there's sort of a myth around the fact that actually American trucks did not comprise the bulk of the Soviet truck part,
46:23 · but what they did comprise was the bulk of the truck park that had significant cross country capabilities.
46:29 · And so there's no question that those trucks played an important role in 43 and 44.
46:35 · I think if you look at 1942, the real impact of Lend-Lease that you can that you can talk about intriguingly is actually British tanks.
46:44 · That the British took a number of their armored vehicles and they said, okay, we know we're going to get Shermans later on down the road for these things.
46:50 · We're going to send them to the Russians right now. And a large number of those vehicles were actually used
46:57 · in the Moscow counteroffensive in December 41 and January 42.
47:03 · Now, the Russians, you know, sort of pooh pooh the quality of British tanks. But if you look at the the quantity of armored vehicles in that offensive
47:13 · and also the mix of those vehicles, a lot of those Russian tanks were actually lighter models.
47:18 · And as much as you pooh pooh something like a Valentine, it was a heck of a lot better than a T60 or T70.
47:25 · So there's a credible argument to be made that British tanks played a pretty important role in the Battle of Moscow.
47:34 · Okay, you mention how the Japanese pushed the British out of the Indian Ocean
47:39 · and the threat to the supply lines. I was wondering, could you address why the Germans
47:45 · and the Japanese could never cooperate on a strategic level
47:51 · like the Americans and the British did? You know, so the question is why the lack of of access, cooperation?
47:58 · I mean, there's there's a couple of things that are driving that. First is just their physical separation. That's that's the first main issue.
48:05 · It's really tough to to coordinate forces that are literally half a planet apart.
48:10 · The German official war histories makes the point that the real area of problem there was just the timing
48:18 · that the Japanese were sort of at their high water mark coming into April, you know, May of 1942.
48:26 · And if you're going to be serious about attacking the Middle East, you would want to come down, not only come over through
48:34 · Egypt with Rommel, you'd want to come down through the Caucasus as well, given the muddy season and that sort of thing.
48:41 · And the fact that you're still wrapping up the campaigns in Kerch and Kharkov, there was no real opportunity
48:46 · for the Germans to put together an offensive that would mesh time wise with when the Japanese might have had the ability to do that.
48:55 · I am also very up in the air regarding were there realistic prospects for the Japanese
49:02 · to make a more concerted effort into the Indian Ocean? Historian H.P.
49:08 · Willmott, who was brilliant, he made the argument that he thinks the Japanese operations against
49:15 · the Indian subcontinent could have been crucial and maybe have driven the British completely out of the war.
49:21 · I'm a little more skeptical about that, just because the logistical lines that would have been running up from Singapore across the Indian Ocean to someplace like Ceylon
49:30 · were much more exposed to British air power on the subcontinent.
49:35 · So, you know, I don't know what the prospects would have been there, but certainly if you read the British accounts of the time, they were absolutely
49:42 · terrified that there would be some sort of an operation in that neck of the woods.
49:48 · So I have a question. I'm a professor at San Jacinto College in Houston, Texas, and I had a question
49:55 · on how could you incorporate the topic of 1942 into a U.S. history survey course?
50:00 · And then also kind of as a kind of as a follow up, how would you teach military history
50:07 · into a topic surrounding World War Two to kind of balance it between what's occurring on the home
50:13 · front as well as what's occurring in Europe, in the Pacific? Okay. So yeah, what's the question is basically how would Big Johnny teach World
50:23 · War two history. And I'm fortunate not to be a lecturer. My dad, that was my dad's gig.
50:28 · So I don't I don't do that gig. That's a really interesting question. I think that
50:34 · it is really difficult to balance the military and the home front aspects of this conflict, and it's so big and so varied,
50:43 · but I and to that too, I do think that there is a tendency on the part of us as war geeks to overfocus on
50:52 · on the military story, because the military story in many cases also contains characters that people can relate to.
51:01 · You've got MacArthurs and Paytons and that sort of ilk running around, whereas, you know,
51:07 · are we really going to talk about how we geared up Willow Run or switched over GM to aircraft production?
51:13 · You know how I don't know how you make that exciting to an average college student, to be honest with you.
51:21 · I nerd out on economic military history. I just think it's fascinating. But I do think it's really, really difficult to relay that.
51:29 · I will say that there are some characters on the economic side of things.
51:35 · You know, if you look at, you know, the War Production Board and Donald Nelson and that sort of thing, there are characters that you can relate to.
51:42 · But I will admit that in my own manuscript I'm constantly looking for like, where is my narrative angle to kind of hook this in?
51:49 · Because it's it is difficult. I think that's a long way of saying, good luck to you. Thank you.
51:55 · Next question, please. We have a question for the virtual audience from Dennis, who says, “Does a Phillips Payson O'Brien
52:03 · thesis Allied Air Sea Power Winning the War fit any better with your views, or do you believe that it is still too limited a perspective?
52:12 · Okay, brutal confession. Here I am actually in the middle of reading Phillips Payson O'Brien's book
52:19 · at this very moment, and so I am not going to answer that question because I haven't gotten all the way through the book yet.
52:24 · So, Dennis, please forgive me. And I have one other statement from Ethan who says
52:31 · that he's eager to know more about situations that illustrate the differences between competing
52:37 · government types and... Yeah, okay. That's that's a really interesting question.
52:44 · Competing government types. What did the impact of those governments have on the war? And I think I think they are widespread and profound.
52:53 · If you look at 1942 from the allied side, one of the things that that impresses me about the American
53:00 · effort is how incredibly chaotic it is, how desperately improvizational it is,
53:07 · and yet ultimately successful because we had a lot of really very skilled and educated worker bees
53:13 · that were comfortable in an improvizational environment. That contrast very strongly with the Soviet Union.
53:21 · And yet you also have to give the Soviets credit for tremendous adaptability during this year. That whereas their model
53:28 · is very much top down driven, it was also incredibly clear eyed.
53:35 · Again, if we look at these military reforms that the Red Army puts in place starting in 1941, this is all being driven by Stalin and the Stavka
53:43 · and they are incredibly lucid in identifying the shortcomings in their army
53:51 · and taking brutal steps to make sure that these reforms that they want to put in place are, in fact, carried out.
53:59 · And then you get to the German model of things where one of the sort of fascinating subtexts going on during this year
54:09 · is the contest between these two dictators, Stalin and Hitler, and how they both are changing as wartime leaders.
54:16 · You see Stalin, despite his incredible paranoia, being able to after the disaster at Karakoff,
54:24 · loosen the reins just enough that he allows professionals like Vasilevskiy and Zhukov
54:32 · to be given the freedom to do what it is that they needed to be able to do. And meanwhile on the other side, you see Hitler firing his generals
54:41 · and drawing more and more of those reins of command, literal operational command into his own hands and very unsuccessfully.
54:49 · So I think the overall question is a fascinating one. There certainly were large impacts driven by the respective
54:57 · governmental structures of these combatants. Thank you so much.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.