Antony Beevor – The Second World War – Edinburgh Book Festival

This is the first of a number of rather belated posts on talks by military historians that I attended at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August 2012.

Antony Beevor talked about his recent book on The Second World War on 21 August 2012. He began by pointing out that every country has its own perspective on the war, as memories and experiences of different countries are so different. It was an agglomeration of many conflicts. The German and Japanese did not co-ordinate their strategies.

Beevor related a number of stories from his book. It follows his usual format of combining analysis of strategy with stories of the experience of ordinary soldiers and civilians.

He begins in January 1939 with the Khalkin Gol conflict between Japan and the USSR. It was small but influenced the war. The victory of the Red Army under Georgi Zhukov discouraged the Japanese from later attacking north.

As an example of the global nature of the conflict, Beevor described the story of a Korean called Yang Kyoungjong who was captured by US paratroopers in 1944. He had been conscripted by the Japanese at the age of 18 in 1938, captured by the Red Army in 1939, conscripted into the Red Army in 1941, captured by the Germans in 1943 and conscripted into Normandy as part of an Ost Battalion composed of men from the USSR. He lived out the rest of his life in Illinois in the USA, so had a better fate than many.

Beevor was surprised to see that a memorial to French Jews murdered in the Holocaust described them as having ‘Died for the Glory of France.’ A local explained to him that the French Jews had insisted that their memorial should have the same wording as that on other French war memorials.

The fighting on the Eastern Front was brutal. The Germans carried out mass killings and the Soviets retaliated. Soviet snipers shot starving children who were taking bread from Germans at Stalingrad. Zhukov was ruthless, even threatening to execute the families of PoWs. This measure, which was not implemented, would theoretically have included Josef Stalin, whose son was captured by the Germans.

In November 1942 the Red army launched two major operations; Operation Uranus to encircle the Axis forces attacking Stalingrad and Operation Mars near Moscow. Beevor disagrees with David Glantz’s opinion that Mars was the main operation.

Glantz argues that the Soviets subsequently claimed that Mars was only a diversion for Uranus because Uranus succeeded and Mars failed. Beevor points out that far more artillery was allocated to Uranus. He argues that an NKVD double agent betrayed Mars to the Germans as part of the Soviet plan to distract them from Uranus, which he believes to have been the main operation.

Much has been said about the differences between armies, especially comparing those of democracies with those of dictatorships. Much less has been said about the similarities of the majority of soldiers. Most men did little fighting. A few always fight, a few always run and most follow the majority.

In Asia the Japanese benefitted from the complacency of European colonists, who failed to learn from the Sino-Japanese War. It was also ignored by Adolf Hitler, who failed to recognise that an army could withdraw into the interior when faced by a superior but smaller opponent.

The war in Asia was vicious. Japanese society was militaristic. Soldiers feared disgracing their family and village. They were treated brutally by their officers, leading to them treating the enemy brutally.

The Japanese claimed to be liberators, but Beevor argues that their racial arrogance made the British colonial administration look like a model of liberal tolerance. Japanese officers not only condoned but actively encouraged cannibalism.

The US Marines were more aggressive and faster moving than the US Army in the Pacific. Hatred of the Japanese was reinforced by their suicidal resistance and brutal treatment of PoWs.

Beevor concluded his talk by stating that the Second World War defies generalisation, before taking questions. Some points that came out from these were that:

The pivotal moments were:
May 1940: Winston Churchill rejected Lord Halifax’s proposal to request peace terms from Germany via Italy.
June 1941: German invasion of the USSR.
December 1941: The geopolitical turning point. The Allies could no longer lose, but might have taken much longer than they actually did to win.
November 1942: The Axis lost the initiative.

The British were not good at prioritisation.

Hitler’s main weakness was pride. He would not retreat or give up capital cities.

The Press at army headquarters were not able to report military details so reported on the generals. Some, including Mark Clark, Bernard Montgomery and Douglas MacArthur, were obsessed with PR.

The best commanders were Erich von Manstein, who was not an admirable man, Bill Slim, who was the most admirable commander and Chester Nimitz. In the Pacific Nimitz’s island hopping strategy was superior to MacArthur’s plan to invade the Philippines. MacArthur was a political threat to President Franklin Roosevelt, making it hard to reject his ideas, and the USA had the resources to do both.

The Allied bombing campaign continued for too long, but a lot of effort was invested in it, making it hard to stop. It did have a military effect. The Germans had to withdraw fighters and anti-aircraft guns from the Eastern Front to the homeland, leaving them with no aerial reconnaissance on the Eastern Front. German bombing raids killed 500,000 Soviet civilians.

Dunkirk was appalling ground for tanks. Hitler was convinced by Hermann Göring that the Luftwaffe could prevent the Allied evacuation, but he underestimated the RAF. Hitler, who wanted to save the tanks for operations against the French, was unfairly criticised by the army.

Alan Brooke was an excellent Chief of the Imperial General Staff, but his strategic ideas were not original. He supported the move throught Italy to save Eastern Europe, which Beevor called ‘mad’ because of the mountains. He opposed the US landings in the south of France, which were an excellent idea.

He described the atomic bombs as being the ‘best thing that could happen to Japan’. Only the shock of the second one led to Emperor Hirohito insisting on surrender. The Japanese military proposed forcing civilians to fight to the last armed only with sharpened sticks.

Arnhem and the Allied failure to secure the Scheldt Estuary in 1944 were big Allied mistakes.

An excellent presentation about what seems to be an excellent book, but the market for single volume histories of the Second World War is quite crowded.

Later the same day Beevor chaired a presentation by Anna Reid on her book about the siege of Leningrad. See this blog entry on her talk at the Aye Write book festival in Glasgow in March 2012.