Book Review: The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won Victor Davis Hanson

The daunting historiography of World War II in some ways shows a pendulum-like movement. That also applies to one of the most frequently asked questions about the most destructive conflict in human history: Was its outcome inevitable? In other words, were the Axis powers destined to loose from the start? For long, the answer to that question seemed obvious, historians and other academics simply pointing at the huge difference in numbers of troops and industrial power of the Allies compared to the Axis countries.

However, halfway through the 1990s, Richard Overy published his justifiably acclaimed Why the Allies Won, in which he – generally speaking – stated that the answer to the above question was not that straightforward at all and that ‘God does not always march with the big battalions’. ⁶ In his recent and dazzling masterpiece The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, Victor Davis Hanson does indeed claim that the Axis were destined to lose from the start, but then works his way backward analysing why this was the case, pointing not only at industrial power and manpower resources but also at leadership, fighting quality, the various warlords, and the role of air power.

In a gripping style that makes for a fascinating and very enjoyable read, Hanson also makes clear that, despite its ferocity, scale, and unspeakable crimes against humanity, World War II in many respects was a ‘normal’ war, for example, with regard to the influence of weather factors, which ‘was also never superseded by twentieth-century technology, but as in ancient times often shaped the battlefield’ (p. 10). Moreover, in line with other historians, Hanson points to the fact that Nazi Germany’s stunning victory over France in 1940 was as much a result of the Wehrmacht’s tactical and motivational superiority, as of the weaknesses of its opponent. In essence, Germany remained a middle-sized power, although by late 1941 it controlled most of Europe and its industrial resources. In the words of Hanson, ‘The consequences of Blitzkrieg were too often vastly exaggerated and falsely equated with inherent military superiority’. When the Soviet Union was invaded on 22 June 1941, it soon became clear that Germany could not sustain a prolonged war of attrition:

That proved an impossible task for a nation whose forces relied on literal horsepower and had little domestic oil, no real long-range bombing capability or blue water navy, and a strategically incoherent leadership. German blitzkrieg [. . .] would die a logical if not overdue death at Stalingrad in the late autumn of 1942. (p. 29)

The same basically applied to Japan, let alone Italy. Hanson – like Phillips Payson O’Brien in How the War Was Won ⁷ – pays much attention to the importance of air and sea power in the eventual Allied victory, a large part of their expenditure going to the production of aircraft and ships. In the words of Hanson, in one of many great phrases, ‘A rookie pilot in a strafing Typhoon or Thunderbolt above Normandy [was capable of] easily wiping out a crack German veteran Waffen SS platoon that had survived three years of nightmarish battle on the Eastern Front’ (p. 76).

Although it was true, Hanson states, that the individual German (and to a certain extent Japanese) soldier was a superior fighter, ‘and foot soldiers ultimately decided every theater in World War II’ (p. 210), this was essentially nullified by superior Allied air power and, perhaps above all, far better logistics and supply to their armies. Indeed, the Germans and Japanese did not just face their Allied opponents, ‘but also an array of strafing and bombing planes, as well as vast convoys of freighters that brought food, ammunition, and weapons to Allied armies in a manner completely unmatched by the Axis powers’ (p. 244). Hanson also makes crystal clear that the Third Reich lost the war on the Eastern Front, something between 70 and 80 per cent of all German soldiers killed, wounded, missing, and captured were due to Russian action (p. 225), at the cost of around 27 million Soviet dead.

Hanson devotes an entire, indeed gruesome chapter, to the enormous number of deaths in World War II. A figure of 60-65 million ‘is the most likely guess’ (p. 463). The numbers are indeed staggering, especially taking into account that many more civilians died than soldiers, for the first time in history. Somewhere between 18,000 and 23,000 civilians died on average each day of the war, ‘almost four times the number of dead at the Battle of Gettysburg’ (p. 485). Hanson states that World War II was a preventable conflict (p. 529), and he makes quite a convincing argument for this, one of many, provocative statements. He shows that it is also not easy to give a moral appraisal of this conflict, which ‘is not as nuanced as we sometimes are led to believe’ (p. 528).

Hanson has written a truly fascinating study, packed with details that masterfully underline the general theme of the book. Although some statements are debatable – for example, the claim that the Dutch army had adequate arms (p. 251) is simply not true, nor was it in a position to fight the Wehrmacht on something like an equal footing – this book cannot be missed by anyone studying World War II. A minor mistake as with the picture on page 391 (the gun is neither an 88 mm nor an anti-aircraft model) is wholeheartedly forgiven. This is a truly daunting and thought-provoking book.