11.7 — The Second World War in Europe

Around 80 percent of German military casualties in the Second World War were inflicted on the Eastern Front.

The Soviet Union lost approximately 27 million people, military and civilian — around 13 percent of its pre-war population.

Britain lost around 450,000. The United States around 420,000.

Those numbers are not a criticism of anyone's contribution. They are the essential context for a war whose popular memory in the English-speaking world centres on the Western Front, and this chapter is written to place the events where they happened.

France in six weeks

May–June 1940. The German army defeated France, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands in about six weeks.

And the standard explanations are wrong.

Germany did not have more tanks. France and its allies had roughly comparable numbers, and French tanks were in several respects better — the Char B1 had thicker armour than anything the Germans fielded.

Germany did not have more men. The forces were broadly comparable in size.

What Germany had was a different way of using them, and four elements of it mattered.

Concentration. French tanks were distributed along the line in support of infantry. German tanks were concentrated into ten Panzer divisions and used as a mass at one point.

Radio. Every German tank had one. French tanks largely did not, so a French unit could not react to a changing situation and a German one could.

Combined arms. Tanks, motorised infantry, artillery and dive bombers operating as one formation under one commander. The Stuka was not a good aircraft; it worked because it was integrated into the ground formation's communications.

And the plan. The German attack came through the Ardennes — hilly forested country the French had judged unsuitable for armour and had therefore left lightly held. The Panzer divisions crossed it, reached the Meuse, broke through, and drove for the Channel, cutting the best Allied armies off in Belgium.

Dunkirk evacuated around 338,000 men without their equipment, which preserved the British Army and lost its entire armament.

And the French collapse was as much political as military. The government fell, Marshal Pétain sought an armistice, and France was divided into an occupied north and a collaborationist Vichy state in the south.

Britain alone

The Battle of Britain, summer 1940. The Luftwaffe attempted to destroy the RAF as the precondition for invasion.

Britain's advantages were specific. Radar — the Chain Home network — combined with an integrated system linking radar, observers, plotting rooms and fighter control by telephone. This is the first modern air defence system and it is the reason a smaller force could concentrate at the right place. Fighting over home territory meant a bailed-out British pilot could fly again the next day and a German one was captured. And German fighters had only minutes of fuel over southern England.

The Blitz — the bombing of British cities from September 1940 — killed around 40,000 civilians and did not break morale, a finding that should have informed later strategy and did not.

The Eastern Front

Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941. Around three million German and allied troops on a front of nearly 3,000 kilometres — the largest invasion in history.

The initial success was overwhelming. Soviet aircraft destroyed on the ground; enormous encirclements at Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners each. By December German units were within sight of Moscow.

Why the Soviets were so unprepared is partly the purge of the officer corps (Chapter 11.5) and partly Stalin's refusal to believe the extensive intelligence warnings, including from his own agents and from Britain, because he believed Hitler would not attack while Britain was undefeated.

And it failed for reasons that were structural.

Space. The front widened as the Germans advanced, because the Soviet Union is wider further east. A force that is adequate at the border is thin at Moscow.

Logistics. Soviet railways used a wider gauge, so every kilometre of track had to be relaid. German supply depended substantially on horses — the Wehrmacht used several hundred thousand — and on roads that turned to deep mud in autumn.

Soviet manpower and industry. The Soviets mobilised far more men than German intelligence had estimated existed. And over 1,500 factories were physically dismantled and moved east of the Urals in 1941 and restarted, which is one of the great logistical achievements of the war and which is why Soviet tank production exceeded German production every year from 1942.

And the war's character. This was a war of annihilation by German policy. The Commissar Order required the execution of captured political officers. Around 3.3 million of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity, mostly of deliberate starvation. The Hunger Plan envisaged the deliberate starvation of tens of millions of Soviet civilians to feed Germany. This is not an incidental brutality; it was the stated purpose of the campaign, which was to acquire Lebensraum by removing the population.

Which had a military consequence. A population that might have welcomed liberation from Stalin — and in parts of Ukraine and the Baltics initially did — learned within months what German rule meant, and partisan warfare grew accordingly.

Stalingrad, August 1942 to February 1943. A battle for a city on the Volga, fought room by room. The Soviet counter-offensive struck the weaker Romanian and Hungarian forces on the flanks, encircled the German Sixth Army, and destroyed it. Around 250,000 men were trapped; roughly 91,000 surrendered and about 6,000 returned home after the war.

Kursk, July 1943. The largest tank engagement in history, and the last German strategic offensive in the east. The Soviets knew it was coming through intelligence, built defences in enormous depth, absorbed the attack and counter-attacked. After Kursk the Germans never regained the initiative.

The Western contribution

Understated in Soviet accounts and overstated in Western ones, and both matter.

Lend-Lease. The United States supplied the Soviet Union with enormous quantities of material — around 400,000 trucks and jeeps, locomotives, rolling stock, aviation fuel, aluminium, explosives and food. Soviet historiography minimised it; Zhukov privately acknowledged it was essential. The specific point is that American trucks gave the Red Army the mobility to exploit its breakthroughs after 1943.

The bombing campaign. Its effect is genuinely argued.

What it achieved: the destruction of German synthetic fuel production from mid-1944, which grounded the Luftwaffe; the diversion of enormous German resources to air defence — over a million people and a large share of artillery production tied up defending the homeland; and the destruction of transport networks.

What it did not achieve: German armaments production rose until late 1944 despite the bombing. And area bombing of cities did not break civilian morale, exactly as the Blitz had not.

And the cost. Around 400,000 to 600,000 German civilians killed. Hamburg in July 1943 and Dresden in February 1945 produced firestorms — fires so intense they generate their own winds — killing tens of thousands in single nights. Around 55,000 RAF Bomber Command aircrew died, a casualty rate comparable to First World War infantry.

The moral argument about area bombing was made at the time by a minority and has been made continuously since, and this book records that it is unresolved and that the strategic case for it is weaker than its advocates claimed.

The Mediterranean and Italy tied down German divisions and progressed slowly and at high cost.

D-Day, 6 June 1944. Around 156,000 men landed in Normandy on the first day, in the largest amphibious operation ever conducted. The deception operation that convinced Germany the main landing would come at Calais held for weeks after the invasion.

Its significance. It opened the second front the Soviets had demanded since 1941, it liberated western Europe, and — this is the strategic point usually left out — it determined where the Red Army would stop. Without a western invasion, Soviet forces would have continued into a Germany with no opposing army, and the political map of post-war Europe would have been drawn considerably further west.

The end

Germany was fighting on three fronts by 1944 with no strategic reserves.

The Ardennes offensive of December 1944 — the Battle of the Bulge — was a last attempt to split the Western allies and failed, consuming the last German armoured reserves.

The Soviets reached Berlin in April 1945. The battle for the city cost the Red Army around 80,000 dead. Hitler killed himself on 30 April. Germany surrendered on 7–8 May.

And the treatment of German civilians by advancing Soviet forces included mass rape on a very large scale, which is documented and was suppressed in Soviet historiography for decades. It belongs in the record alongside everything the German army did in the Soviet Union, and neither cancels the other.

Why Germany lost

Four reasons, in order.

It fought a two-front war against powers with far greater combined resources. Combined Allied output of nearly every category — steel, oil, aircraft, tanks, trucks — exceeded Germany's by large multiples.

Oil. Germany had almost none and depended on Romanian fields and synthetic production, both of which were bombed.

Strategic errors. Attacking the Soviet Union before defeating Britain. Declaring war on the United States in December 1941 when not obliged to. And repeated interference in operational decisions, including the refusal to permit withdrawal at Stalingrad.

And ideology defeating strategy. The war of annihilation in the east created the partisan movement and ensured no negotiated outcome was possible. The Holocaust consumed transport and manpower that the war effort needed (Chapter 11.9). A regime built on racial doctrine could not treat the populations it conquered as anything other than enemies, which meant it could never consolidate what it took.

Where this shows up in your life

The European Union began as an attempt to make war between France and Germany materially impossible by integrating the coal and steel industries that armaments require.

The United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention all date from immediately after this (Chapter 12.1).

And the memory is contested and worth being careful about. In Russia, 9 May is the central national commemoration and the war is called the Great Patriotic War. In the English-speaking world the memory centres on 1940 and 1944. Both are true and incomplete, and a person who knows only one of them will misunderstand a great deal of current European politics.

What the next page covers

The war in Asia began before the war in Europe and is even less well covered in Western accounts. Chapter 11.8 covers the Pacific and Asian war — Japan's invasion of China from 1931 and 1937, what happened at Nanjing, why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the island campaign, the treatment of prisoners and occupied populations, the Bengal famine's place in it, and the state of Japan by mid-1945.