THE SECOND WORLD WAR ANTONY BEEVOR SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd iixx 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199 A PHOENIX PAPERBACK First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson This paperback edition published in 2014 by Phoenix, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd, Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA An Hachette UK company 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © Antony Beevor 2012 The right of Antony Beevor to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers would be happy to acknowledge them in future editions. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978­1­7802­2564­7 Typeset by Input Data Services Ltd, Bridgwater, Somerset Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. www.orionbooks.co.uk SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd xx 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199 INTRODUCTION In June 1944, a young soldier surrendered to American para­ troopers in the Allied invasion of Normandy. At fi rst his captors thought that he was Japanese, but he was in fact Korean. His name was Yang Kyoungjong. In 1938, at the age of eighteen, Yang had been forcibly conscripted by the Japanese into their Kwantung Army in Man­ churia. A year later, he was captured by the Red Army after the Battle of Khalkhin Gol and sent to a labour camp. The Soviet mili­ tary authorities, at a moment of crisis in 1942, drafted him along with thousands of other prisoners into their forces. Then, early in 1943 he was taken prisoner by the German army at the Battle of Kharkov in Ukraine. In 1944, now in German uniform, he was sent to France to serve with an Ostbataillon supposedly boosting the strength of the Atlantic Wall at the base of the Cotentin Pen­ insula inland from Utah Beach. After time in a prison camp in Britain, he went to the United States where he said nothing of his past. He settled there and fi nally died in Illinois in 1992. In a war which killed over sixty million people and had stretched around the globe, this reluctant veteran of the Japanese, Soviet and German armies had been comparatively fortunate. Yet Yang remains perhaps the most striking illustration of the help­ lessness of most ordinary mortals in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming historical forces. Europe did not stumble into war on 1 September 1939. Some his­ torians talk of a ‘thirty years’ war’ from 1914 to 1945, with the First World War as ‘the original catastrophe’. Others maintain that the ‘long war’, which began with the Bolshevik coup d’état of 1917, continued as a ‘European Civil War’ until 1945, or even lasted until the fall of Communism in 1989. History, however, is never tidy. Sir Michael Howard argues SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd xxxxvv 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199 2 introduction persuasively that Hitler’s onslaught in the west against France and Britain in 1940 was in many ways an extension of the First World War. Gerhard Weinberg also insists that the war which began with the invasion of Poland in 1939 was the start of Hitler’s drive for Lebensraum (living space) in the east, his key objective. This is indeed true, yet the revolutions and civil wars between 1917 and 1939 are bound to complicate the pattern. For exam­ ple, the left has always believed passionately that the Spanish Civil War marked the beginning of the Second World War, while the right claims that it represented the opening round of a Third World War between Communism and ‘western civilization’. At the same time, western historians have usually overlooked the Sino­ Japanese War from 1937 to 1945, and the way that it merged into the world war. Some Asian historians, on the other hand, argue that the Second World War began in 1931 with the Jap­ anese invasion of Manchuria. Arguments on the subject can go round and round, but the Second World War was clearly an amalgamation of confl icts. Most consisted of nation against nation, yet the international civil war between left and right permeated and even dominated many of them. It is therefore important to look back at some of the cir­ cumstances which led to this, the cruellest and most destructive confl ict which the world has ever known. The terrible effects of the First World War had left France and Brit­ ain, the principal European victors, exhausted and determined at any price not to repeat the experience. Americans, after their vital contribution to the defeat of Imperial Germany, wanted to wash their hands of what they saw as a corrupt and vicious Old World. Central Europe, fragmented by new frontiers drawn at Versailles, faced the humiliation and penury of defeat. Their pride shattered, offi cers of the Kaiserlich und Königlich Austro­Hungarian army experienced a reversal of the Cinderella story, with their fairytale uniforms replaced by the threadbare clothes of the unemployed. The bitterness of most German offi cers and soldiers at their defeat was intensifi ed by the fact that until July 1918 their armies had been unbeaten, and that made the sudden collapse at home appear all the more inexplica ble and sinister. In their view, the mutinies and revolts within Germany during the autumn of 1918 which SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd 22 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199 introduction 3 precipitated the abdication of the Kaiser had been caused entirely by Jewish Bolsheviks. Left­wing agitators had indeed played a part and the most prominent German revolutionary leaders in 1918–19 had been Jewish, but the main causes behind the unrest had been war­weariness and hunger. The German right’s perni­ cious conspiracy theory – the stab­in­the­back legend – was part of its inherent compulsion to confuse cause and effect. The hyper­infl ation of 1922–3 undermined both the certainties and the rectitude of the Germanic bourgeoisie. The bitterness of national and personal shame produced an incoherent anger. German nationalists dreamed of the day when the humiliation of the Versailles Diktat could be reversed. Life improved in Ger­ many during the second half of the 1920s, mainly due to massive American loans. But the world depression, which began after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, hit Germany even harder once Brit­ ain and other countries left the gold standard in September 1931. Fear of another round of hyper­infl ation persuaded Chancellor Brüning’s government to maintain the Reichsmark’s link to the price of gold, making it over­valued. American loans had ceased, and protectionism cut off German export markets. This led to mass unemployment, which dramatically increased the opportu­ nity for demagogues promising radical solutions. The crisis of capitalism had accelerated the crisis of liberal democracy, which was rendered ineffective in many European countries by the fragmentary effect of voting by proportional representation. Most of the parliamentary systems which had sprung up following the collapse of three continental empires in 1918 were swept away, unable to cope with civil strife. And ethnic minorities, which had existed in comparative peace under the old imperial regimes, were now threatened by doctrines of national purity. Recent memories of the Russian Revolution and the violent destruction of other civil wars in Hungary, Finland, the Baltic states and indeed Germany itself, greatly increased the process of political polarization. The cycle of fear and hatred risked turning infl ammatory rhetoric into a self­fulfi lling prophecy, as events in Spain soon showed. Manichaean alternatives are bound to break up a democratic centrism based on compromise. In this new collectivist age, violent solutions appeared supremely heroic SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd 33 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199 4 introduction to intellectuals of both left and right, as well as to embittered ex­ soldiers from the First World War. In the face of fi nancial dis­ aster, the authoritarian state suddenly seemed to be the natural modern order throughout most of Europe, and an answer to the chaos of factional strife. In September 1930, the National Socialist Party’s share of the vote jumped from 2.5 per cent to 18.3. The conservative right in Germany, which had little respect for democracy, effectively des­ troyed the Weimar Republic, and thus opened the door for Hitler. Gravely underestimating Hitler’s ruthlessness, they thought that they could use him as a populist puppet to defend their idea of Germany. But he knew exactly what he wanted, while they did not. On 30 January 1933, Hitler became chancellor and moved rapidly to eliminate all potential opposition. The tragedy for Germany’s subsequent victims was that a crit­ ical mass of the population, desperate for order and respect, was eager to follow the most reckless criminal in history. Hitler man­ aged to appeal to their worst instincts: resentment, intolerance, arrogance and, most dangerous of all, a sense of racial superiority. Any remaining belief in a Rechtsstaat, a nation based on respect for the rule of law, crumpled in the face of Hitler’s insistence that the judicial system must be the servant of the new order. Public institutions – the courts, the universities, the general staff and the press – kowtowed to the new regime. Opponents found themselves helplessly isolated and insulted as traitors to the new defi nition of the Fatherland, not only by the regime itself, but also by all those who supported it. The Gestapo, unlike Stalin’s own secret police, the NKVD, was surprisingly idle. Most of its arrests were purely in response to denunciations of people by their fellow Germans. The offi cer corps, which had prided itself on an apolitical tradition, also allowed itself to be wooed by the promise of in­ creased forces and massive rearmament, even though it despised such a vulgar, ill­dressed suitor. Opportunism went hand in hand with cowardice in the face of authority. The nineteenth­century chancellor Otto von Bismarck himself once remarked that moral courage was a rare virtue in Germany, but it deserted a German completely the moment he put on a uniform. The Nazis, not sur­ prisingly, wanted to get almost everyone into uniform, not least the children. SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd 44 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199 introduction 5 Hitler’s greatest talent lay in spotting and exploiting the weak­ ness of his opponents. The left in Germany, bitterly divided between the German Communist Party and the Social Demo­ crats, had presented no real threat. Hitler easily out­manoeuvred the conservatives who thought, with naive arrogance, that they could control him. As soon as he had consolidated his power at home with sweeping decrees and mass imprisonment, he turned his attention to breaking the Treaty of Versailles. Conscription was re introduced in 1935, the British agreed to an increase in the German navy and the Luftwaffe was openly constituted. Britain and France made no serious protest at the accelerated programme of rearmament. In March 1936, German troops reoccupied the Rhineland in the fi rst overt breach of the Versailles and Locarno treaties. This slap in the face to the French, who had occupied the region over a decade earlier, ensured widespread adulation of the Führer in Germany, even among many who had not voted for him. Their support and the supine Anglo­French reaction gave Hitler the nerve to continue on his course. Single­handed, he had restored German pride, while rearmament, far more than his vaunted public works programme, halted the rise in unemployment. The brutality of the Nazis and the loss of freedom seemed to most Germans a small price to pay. Hitler’s forceful seduction of the German people began to strip the country of human values, step by step. Nowhere was the effect more evident than in the persecution of the Jews, which progressed in fi ts and starts. Yet contrary to general belief, this was often driven more from within the Nazi Party than from above. Hitler’s apocalyptic rants against Jews did not necessarily mean that he had already decided on a ‘Final Solution’ of physical annihilation. He was content to allow SA (Sturmabteilung) stormtroopers to attack Jews and their businesses and steal their possessions to satisfy an incoherent mixture of greed, envy and imagined resent­ ment. At that stage Nazi policy aimed at stripping Jews of civil rights and everything they owned, and then through humiliation and harassment to force them to leave Germany. ‘The Jews must get out of Germany, yes out of the whole of Europe,’ Hitler told his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels on 30 November 1937. ‘That will take some time yet, but will and must happen.’ SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd 55 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199 6 introduction Hitler’s programme to make Germany the dominant power in Europe had been made quite clear in Mein Kampf, a combina­ tion of autobio graphy and political manifesto fi rst published in 1925. First he would unite Germany and Austria, then he would bring Germans outside the borders of the Reich back under its control. ‘People of the same blood should be in the same Reich’, he declared. Only when this had been achieved would the German people have the ‘moral right’ to ‘acquire foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come.’ His policy of aggression was stated clearly on the very fi rst page. Yet even though every German couple had to purchase a copy on marriage, few seem to have taken his bellicose predic­ tions seriously. They preferred to believe his more recent and oft­repeated assertions that he did not desire war. And Hitler’s daring coups in the face of British and French weakness confi rmed them in their hopes that he could achieve all he wanted without a major confl ict. They did not see that the over­heated German economy and Hitler’s determination to make use of the country’s head­start in armaments made the invasion of neighbouring coun­ tries a virtual certainty. Hitler was not interested merely in reoccupying the territory lost by Germany after the Versailles Treaty. He despised such a half­hearted step. He seethed with impatience, convinced that he would not live long enough to achieve his dream of Germanic supremacy. He wanted the whole of central Europe and all of Russia up to the Volga for German Lebensraum to secure Ger­ many’s self­suffi ciency and status as a great power. His dream of subjugated eastern territories had been greatly encouraged by the brief German occupation in 1918 of the Baltic states, part of Belorussia, Ukraine and southern Russia as far as Rostov on the Don. This followed the 1918 Treaty of Brest­Litovsk, Germany’s own Diktat to the nascent Soviet regime. The ‘bread­basket’ of Ukraine especially attracted German interest, after the near star­ vation caused largely by the British blockade during the First World War. Hitler was determined to avoid the demoralization suffered by Germans in 1918, which had led to revolution and collapse. This time others would be made to starve. But one of the main purposes of his Lebensraum plan was to seize oil production SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd 66 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199 introduction 7 in the east. Some 85 per cent of the Reich’s oil supplies, even in peacetime, had to be imported, and that would be Germany’s Achilles heel in war. Eastern colonies appeared the best means to establish self­ suffi ciency, yet Hitler’s ambition was far greater than that of other nationalists. In line with his social­Darwinist belief that the life of nations was a struggle for racial mastery, he wanted to reduce the Slav population dramatically in numbers through deliberate starvation and to enslave the survivors as a helot class. His decision to intervene in the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936 was not as opportunistic as has often been por­ trayed. He was convinced that a Bolshevik Spain, combined with a left­wing government in France, presented a strategic threat to Germany from the west, at a time when he faced Stalin’s Soviet Union in the east. Once again he was able to exploit the democ­ racies’ abhorrence of war. The British feared that the confl ict in Spain might provoke another European confl ict, while the new Popular Front government in France was afraid to act alone. This allowed Germany’s fl agrant military support of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Nationalists to ensure their ultimate victory while Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe experimented with new air­ craft and tactics. The Spanish Civil War also brought Hitler and Benito Mussolini closer together, with the Italian Fascist gov­ ernment sending a corps of ‘volunteers’ to fi ght alongside the Nationalists. But Mussolini, for all his bombast and ambitions in the Mediterranean, was nervous about Hitler’s determination to overturn the status quo. The Italian people were not ready, either militarily or psychologically, for a European war. Eager to obtain another ally in the coming war with the Soviet Union, Hitler established the Anti­Comintern Pact with Japan in November 1936. Japan had begun its colonial expansion in the Far East during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Profi ting from the decay of the Chinese imperial regime, Japan established a presence in Manchuria, seized Formosa (Taiwan) and occupied Korea. Its defeat of Tsarist Russia in the war of 1904–5 made it the major military power in the region. Anti­ western feeling grew in Japan with the effects of the Wall Street Crash and the world­ wide depression. And an increasingly nationalistic offi cer class SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd 77 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199 8 introduction viewed Manchuria and China in a similar way to the Nazis’ de­ signs on the Soviet Union: as a landmass and a population to be subjugated to feed the home islands of Japan. The Sino­Japanese confl ict has long been like a missing section in the jigsaw of the Second World War. Having begun well before the outbreak of fi ghting in Europe, the confl ict in China has often been treated as a completely separate affair, even though it saw the largest deployment of Japanese ground forces in the Far East, as well as the involvement of both the Americans and the Soviet Union. In September 1931, the Japanese military created the Mukden Incident, in which they blew up a railway to justify their seizure of the whole of Manchuria. They hoped to turn the region into a major food­producing region as their own domestic agriculture had declined disastrously. They called it Manchukuo and set up a puppet regime, with the deposed emperor Henry Pu Yi as fi gure­ head. The civilian government in Tokyo, although despised by offi cers, felt obliged to support the army. And the League of Na­ tions in Geneva refused Chinese calls for sanctions against Japan. Japanese colonists, mainly peasants, poured in to seize land for themselves with the government’s encouragement. It wanted ‘one million households’ established as colonial farmers over the next twenty years. Japan’s actions left it isolated diplomatically, but the country exulted in its triumph. This marked the start of a fateful progression, both in foreign expansion and in military infl uence over the government in Tokyo. A more hawkish administration took over and the Kwantung Army in Manchuria extended its control almost to the gates of Peking. Chiang Kai­shek’s Kuomintang government in Nanking was forced to withdraw its forces. Chiang claimed to be the heir of Sun Yat­sen, who had wanted to introduce a western­style de­ mocracy, but he was really a generalissimo of warlords. The Japanese military began to eye their Soviet neighbour to the north and cast glances south into the Pacifi c. Their targets were the Far Eastern colonies of Britain, France and the Netherl ands, with the oilfi elds of the Dutch East Indies. The uneasy stand­off in China was then suddenly broken on 7 July 1937 by a Japanese provocation at the Marco Polo Bridge outside the former capital of Peking. The Imperial Army in Tokyo assured Emperor Hirohito SSeeccoonndd WWoorrlldd WWaarr mmmmpp pp44..iinndddd 88 0077//0088//22001144 1100::1199