This week we commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, 6 June 1944, when American, British, Canadian and French troops landed on five beaches along the coastline of Normandy in Northern of France to begin the liberation of Western Europe.
This is your best post ever. When your series is complete, please bring it out as a book. Not an academic book with copious endnotes. but a book with many charts and maps, battle photos, etc. Something that will catch the popular eye. Mythology is a tough nut to crack but you are the man who can do it. Accompany the book with a second volume, a teaching tool for high schools and colleges which is based on a series of questions for discussion. We are approaching the hundred year mark. It is time to understand that coalitions lead to overconfidence and brutal wars.
Yes, Mr. Tooze, write that book (along with everything else you're doing). Charts + maps would be great, get FT folks to sign on for that and please make sure these charts and graphs are legible when reading your book in e-book format
It's a fantastic post. As for a book -- Wages of Destruction already exists! I can see how this is a different project (particularly in terms of bringing down the academic level, and maybe more focus on the postwar historiography, mythmaking and "what it means today"), but nothing in this post comes as exactly new.
Living as businessman in Moscow from 1993 to 2023, I would sometimes get coaxed into a debate by Russian men , who explained that WW2 was fought by Russia with Germany , and the rest of it was a series of pretentious ,unimportant side shows ,.. I often said. "Let's not argue about this. I only have one thing to say. and it's a number. , 476,000. " 'What's that' , they sometimes asked. It's the number of. 6x6 ,all wheel drive, diesel powered 5 ton load trucks which were delivered from the USA, on American ships to Murmansk Russia port during the calendar year 1944 . 1300 per day. Those 5 t trucks were filled with goods and munitions , including millions of tons of SPAM (pork) which fed Russians for long after V-E day.. End of conversation.
And no doubt they reply that pretty much everyone agrees that WW2 was won by spring 1943, and in proper hindsight had been won in 1941 by Germany's failure to destroy the Russian army in the one real chance it would get.
Sure a lot of Russia's 27m died in 43/44 and a million or so POWs starved to death while waiting for the west to emerge from Britain.
I'm guessing you were not popular in Moscow.
You will have ended a lot of conversations with those remarks.
It's excellent to see Adam tackling this subject, and the article was very interesting indeed. However, let's have some pushback on the Soviet Union and the whole 'it was won on the Eastern Front' argument.
1. Arguably it was won when Hitler issued his stop order outside Dunkirk, allowing a rump British army to escape. That added to an island fortress, the world's best navy/merchant navy, a global empire, and a nascent air force. Hitler could not win without knocking out Britain, and his (political and military) chance had gone.
2. Thereafter the War was won on the Atlantic. Not just in supplying Britain for the strategic bombing campaign, the Africa/Italy fronts, and then France. But also - with staggeringly large quantities - the USSR (check out Sean McMeekin's 'Stalin's War' for figures). This was the US as an economic giant and the British/US/Canadian efforts to keep the Atlantic open.
3. The USSR began the war by invading Poland and the Baltics as a Nazi partner. It only became an ally because one dictatorship invaded another. It rapidly folded, saved only by Western supplies and its nature as an evil dictatorship that could blithely sacrifice millions of men in a Vernichtungskrieg (oddly enough, exactly what stopped Germany capitulating from 1943 onwards). Adam sounds a bit squeamish that the Western Allies prefered saving soldiers' lives through material ascendency, rather than the more honest and bloody approach of Stalin. I think they got it right.
4. Moreover, as Phillips Payson O'Brien has shown, Germany's biggest battle was not the Eastern Front, but... the battle for Germany, also known as the strategic bombing campaign. This was the big suck for their guns, materials, and every form of industrial production - both that being destroyed or disrupted by British and US bombers, and that being diverted to stop the bombers (think aluminium, guns, planes, petrol, everything). Lots of manpower went East, but without the means to fight the inexhaustable distances, the brutality, and the willingness of Stalin to show that quantity had its own quality. Just think about how much harder it would have been for the USSR if the Nazis had been able to deploy proper air resources.
"3. The USSR began the war by invading Poland and the Baltics as a Nazi partner."
Sounds like you're still upset that Adolf didn't get to conquer & keep all of Poland in '39, which was the available alternative once the German Army had cut the Polish Army in the West into 8 pieces, 5 surrounded, 2 already capitulated, by 14 Sept '39, 3 days before the Red Army moved an inch.
" It only became an ally because one dictatorship invaded another. “
In July/August of ’39, The (Brit) Chiefs of Staff, the Deputy Chiefs of Staff, and the guy who would be the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (General Sir Edmund Ironside) were telling Chamberlain that the only thing the British Empire could do to prevent the Germans promptly overrunning Poland was to conclude an alliance with the Soviets. In his war diary, Ironside records Chamberlain’s reply: “The one thing we cannot do!” The DCoS, writing on 16 Aug ‘39 even predicted that the Soviets would most likely “divide the spoils” with the Germans if the alliance talks failed, which as we’ve seen, Chamberlain was determined to make fail.
“It rapidly folded,"
False. The Barbarossa plan called for 4-6 weeks of combat ops to destroy all battle-worthy elements of the Soviet Army before they could retreat over the Dnepr. What they got was a war of attrition that by 31 December would see both Army Groups North and Center bled so white they could not be made capable of offensive ops in '42, and even Army Group South was down to about 60% effective infantry strength, and it would take pretty much all of the new German recruits available for '42 to restore AG South to a state fit to resume offensive ops in '42,.
"saved only by Western supplies"
By the end of '41, the USSR were saved by their own fighting, and overwhelmingly, their own supplies, and had the German Army gut-shot & bleeding out.
P O'Brien's thesis is wrong in a very elementary way: It conflates munitions production and resources. In 1942, munitions production was only 10% of German GDP. Germany spent ~50% of GDP on the war that year, mostly in the form of soldier pay and non-munitions requisitions (realize that wars involve massive logistical and basic supply spending that usually exceeds munitions spending).
Furthermore, soldier pay is a vast underestimate of the resource commitment to land war: conscripted soldiers' services are valued at an arbitrary level, not a market price level (obviously). A truer valuation of soldier pay is in their OPPORTUNITY COST - e.g. how much munitions production could one get from leaving a man in a factory versus pulling him into the army? This was a dilemma faced repeatedly and explicitly by all combatants - Speer discusses at length in his biography, for example, his fights with the army for industrial vs military manpower. Hitler specifically justified Barbarossa as a measure to free army manpower for the production war against the West (after USSR defeated, no need for a big army to guard the East).
By 1944 Germany had 2mil men producing aircraft and had drafted (net) >13mil into the Wehrmacht. Most of those drafted men faced the USSR or were buried there. By far the biggest German resource deployment was in the East. O'Brien just has a simplistic understanding of what resources are.
Thanks for the interesting answer. I agree that there is far more to Germany's resource commitment than production figures or some other simple metric. And undoubtedly the East was an enormous manpower sink, which in itself also imposed a massive cost on the economy (with women largely unmobilised but with a large slave/forced labour input from abroad). Speer was right to be aggrieved!
But Germany was running short of far more than just sheer manpower, and material shortages were absolutely devastating. For example look at the new research on how much wastage there was in armour outside combat compared to losses at Kursk, or look at the figures for aircraft frames, or 88mms used for defence of the Reich.
I'm certainly not arguing that the enormous manpower sink of the Ostfront wasn't important - just that it's ridiculously over-simplistic, probably naive, to say things like "Meanwhile, in Europe D-day would simply never have been possible without the huge weight of casualties inflicted by the Red Army on Germany’s military".
What I think hasn't received enough attention is how the very nature of vicious totalitarian mid-20th century regimes allowed them to fight beyond what had been considered the surrender point. The USSR only survived because its leaders would rather sacrifice everything than surrender, and were traumatised and perverted by the blood spilling of the 20s and 30s; likewise Germany - rationally - should have quit in '43, but were in the grip of a racist death cult that would rather go down in flames than think of a future after defeat. That matters because the Nazis quite reasonably could have expected the USSR's leadership to have folded in '41, and the Allies struggled with the concept of the Germans still fighting after there was no way to win/survive.
Manpower was at the root of all German shortages besides natural oil/rubber/etc. Even with oil, more manpower would have enabled higher synthoil production (more miners, railway workers, factory workers along the production chain - the loss of coal miners to the army was a massive impediment to the German war economy).
It isn't simplistic to say that D-Day was impossible without the Soviets. That is EXACTLY what US Army leaders said. "The retention of [SU] in the war...is vital to Allied victory,’’ ...chief of staff McNarney had emphasized on April 12 [1942], "if German armies were allowed to turn west, ‘‘any opportunity for a successful
offensive against the European Axis would be virtually eliminated.’’
I also disagree with the notion that totalitarianism explains Soviet resistance. There's a lot of literature here saying otherwise. See Fortress Dark and Stern by Goldman and Filtzer, for example. Soviet peoples saw Nazi victory as an existential threat (rightly). They hated Nazism and preferred not to die. The democratic French sacrificed a similar proportion of their young men stopping Germany in WW1. Countries don't like to be conquered by enemies...
Re Germany's prolonged resistance - yeah you feasibly need the Nazi death cult to get that. OTOH the fear and loathing of "Judeo-Bolshevism" wasn't solely a Nazi invention - Germans didn't love their Slavic and lefty neighbors much prior to Hitler.
1. Manpower + almost everything else = they were screwed. Agreed, and we can argue about the emphasis!
2. I think it's enormously simplistic. D-Day on that particular date was of course heavily contingent upon the Ostfront, AND the strategic air campaign, the Atlantic, Libya/Tunisia/Italy and so on. A landing in France was bloody hard, and it's hard to imagine what it would have taken without the Ostfront OR any of the other elements. Maybe the answer is that it might have taken the nuclear bomb.
3. The USSR as totalitarian: my take is that it took a very particular kind of state and political situation in the summer (even autumn) months of '41 for there not to have been some sort of implosion or coup at the top (see 1917), with untold results thereafter. And that's also what Stalin had expected. But once that didn't happen, the fightback depended heavily upon: 1. Soviet blood in massive quantities, spilled in a way that only totalitarian states can; 2. Allied everything in massive quantities; 3. Enormous German overstretch in both the USSR and in its other military adventures, including over German cities and even smaller theatres like Tunisia (260k prisoners alone, against 500k total losses in Stalingrad).
4. Nazi racist death cult. This is the bit that my mind still struggles to comprehend. What on earth were they thinking?
"1. Manpower + almost everything else = they were screwed."
That's undoubtedly true for as long as the USSR remained undefeated but kind of besides the point we're discussing. Again, all US/UK leaders realized by 1942 that Germany couldn't be defeated (conventionally) if the USSR fell. A-bombs were a far away contingency unknown to most then and could have changed things. It's not clear, however, that the US/UK publics would have stayed in what would seem to be a forever war against Germany had USSR gone down in, say, 1942. Three years of total war with no hope of final victory (i.e. of liberating Europe)? It's also questionable whether UK would have allowed US to begin dropping A-bombs on Germany in this post-USSR scenario, as the anticipated/certain German response would have been to dump deadly chemicals on UK (eg Sarin gas), resulting in millions of British deaths. WW2 probably sees a Fascist-Democracy Cold War replace the historical Cold War had USSR been defeated.
Re 2:
D-Day had lots of necessary conditions. One of them was continued Soviet resistance. It isn't simplistic to point to a single necessary condition as necessary to a thing occurring. Indeed it's mandated by logic.
Re 3:
Possibly Stalin's iron fist was necessary prevent a coup. Possibly the Great Purges were - contrary to common wisdom - necessary to winning the war and defeating Nazism (and this was indeed Stalin's thought at the time). Also necessary to Soviet survival was the immense sacrifice and heroism of everyday people in the Soviet Union.
Re 4: Perfect comprehension is probably not desirable.
I like the flights of historical fancy at the top of your answer. Without the USSR I also think a conventional defeat of Germany was unlikely, and any use of the atom bomb would have depended heavily on what the settlement would have been. Presumably some sort of guarantees for western Europe, the British empire (let's not forget Japan!), and US trade would have been in order. But how long would this have held, and would it have shadowed the Communist/Capitalist Cold War?
I think it would, especially in one critical way - just as the Sovbloc imploded in '89-'91, I think Nazi Germany and its eastern empire would ultimately have collapsed into decadent, laughable ruin, with its people fleeing for places to the west, run on better logic and with less murder.
So thank you USSR, along with all the others who suffered to defeat the bastards.
Today is the 80th anniversary of Midway, where an outnumbered US fleet went 'all in' under Adm. Nimitz, stopping the 7 months of Japanese rampage and ascendancy in the Indo-PAC. The 1944 invasions of Guam, Saipan and Tinian took place at the same month as D-Day. This was a staggering US accomplishment to accomplish both invasions simultaneously.
Meanwhile, the USSR/Stalin were Hitler's partner in carving up Poland in 1939, and the USSR also grabbed the Baltic states, and would have sat out the war if Hitler had not been so doubly foolish as to declare war on the US on Dec. 11, 1941, and attack his 'treaty partner', Stalin in 1941. The US benefited from fighting with the only other super power of the day, the UK as its ally, and during the war the UK provided 3.500 ships to D Day and built more warplanes than Hitler's Germany.
I look forward to your continued reevaluation, but we can never forget that Stalin left us a linear descendant in Putin, and Mao the ideology and inspiration for Xi.
Adam Tooze, you and I and many more of us have been searching through our families' histories, the history and current affairs we have read to deal with the harms in the US, around the world and to the earth itself. Your knowledge and the connections you make will inform us and help us think about now as well as organize our own search for understanding. Thank you.
Sounds like a Herculean effort. I have read much of the Western Alliance efforts in WWII but not much about the Russian, Chinese, Japanese, or Italian background. Especially the logistics. Looking forward to the results.
For those of us who gave their heart then it will always be "Last Christmas".
And yes it is quite amazing that Biden is the first President since Bush Senior (1989-93) to have been born during or before WW2.
Thanks for another demonstration of who determined the result of WW2. I only finished Wages of Destruction about 4 weeks ago, but the media is so pressing. Of course there is no reporting of history now, everything is about moving Overton's window (or pretending to be inside it when not).
War has and always will be about bringing economic power to bear and having the logistics to deliver and project that power wherever it needs to go. We simply have not thought about it in such a way. We get fixated on battles, capturing lands, and personalities. The question, once we acknowledge this predicate, is the political will to use and project that economic power and at what cost to other interests and objectives of the state? Existential wars such as WW II do not happen often and necessity is the mother of innovation and invention as you point to in this pieces, Adam. And it was no greater than in WW II. The Cold War allowed the US to pour money and people into coming up with newer, better technology and methods that not only benefitted the military, but benefited the nation at large. We see this innovation happening again, but now in Ukraine, which is also fighting an existential war of survival. Much will come out this that will later benefit Ukraine and Europe overall once Russia is defeated.
The performance of the Confederate armies against the Federal Armies in the US Civil War shows economics and logistics are not everything. There are many examples, but that is likely the most known to readers here, even for us who don't live in the US.
I have to respectfully disagree, Hugh. While I can agree that initially the Confederate army was better led, and possibly better trained, in the end, it was the economic power of the Union with its manufacturing base for weapons, and finally getting its logistics in order and could manage extended supply lines be a use of its economic power. This economic power also allowed the Union navy to choke off exports and imports of weapons. The confederacy, in contrast, was largely agrarian and based on exports on cotton and other goods. What the Confederacy hoped for was a fast knockout blow against a poorly led Union army, but when that did not happen, it was only a matter of time.
I used the word "performance" to signify the whole war, not the end stages.
Clearly the Confederates lost. but for the first part, they were fairly dominant even though the North had much better industry, much better railroads and railroaders, and much more manpower.
I see where you are going with your argument and it makes more sense to me now. The WW I analogy is an interesting one in that Germany, France, and the UK were roughly speaking economic equals. But what tipped the scale was the US entry into the war with its economic heft and helping solve logistics problems in combating u-boats.
WW II is interesting for a different reason in that initially the French and British were totally unprepared, and it showed early on. That was poor leadership and a lack of vision and imagination. The Soviets were also ill prepared for what would happen and poorly led as could be seen in the Winter War with Finland.
The stories of war are all too simplified. When two stories conflict, there is a lot of disagreement, generally hard to resolve. Emotions run high when the stories conflict with national myths. Many stories are simultaneously true.
Here, for example, is my Just So story about WWI. It's my myth and it might not match yours. Particularly since I'm not in the US and I guess you are.
Don't forget the eastern front in WWI. But I will ignore it.
In WWI, GB did not consider itself a land power. That was kind of France's job. Most of the British Army was in India, doing things far from combat. Splendid Isolation only ended in 1902.
France had this doctrine of Elan, which didn't work out well. Besides, if I remember correctly, France had fallen behind Germany in many metrics.
The Germans started the war (i.e. they pushed the Austrians to give the Serbians an ultimatum that could not be accepted) so of course they determined the initial course of the war. Attacking through a neutral country (Belgium) just wasn't the done thing.
The US started solving the Entente's logistics problem long before it entered the war (very late). US industry plus the British blockade meant that US exports went disproportionately to the Allies. US pressure prevented unrestricted submarine warfare for quite a while; when it didn't, the US entered the war.
The US did not do this for free. Britain was the richest country in the world but was essentially bled dry by the war, with most of the inter-country transfers going to the US, which became the new richest country.
Actual US troops were probably not decisive. The "Black Day of the German Army" was 1918 August 8. That was about when the war stopped being static ("the last 100 days"). The Meuse–Argonne offensive, the first battle with significant US formations, started 1918 September 26. The war was over in less than a month and a half. US casualties were quite high, perhaps because the soldiers or generals were unblooded (just a sloppy guess on my part).
There is a lot to unpack in your response. I agree we all have myths, US, UK, Canadian, Australian, etc from WW I and WW II. Yes, wars like any human endeavor are complex, and that is because there are so many moving parts.
Keep in mind France had been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian war a mere 40 years earlier, so no doubt France was likely inferior to the German army.
As for the US involvement, the “cash and carry” policy was a veneer to help the Entente as you point out Germany had been successfully blockaded by the British navy. And even before the official US entry into the war, many in the US fought with Canadian units for Britain.
The fact that Germany went back to unrestricted submarine warfare was a desperate measure, a “Hail Mary” of sorts as they were being choked to death by the blockade and its only hope was to return the favor in kind. Then there was the ham handed Zimmerman note trying to enlist Mexico to take back parts of the US Southwest hoping to pin down US attention…and because it coincided with the raids by Pancho Villa and Emilio Zapata it delayed US entry into the war…see also the failed “Punitive Expedition” led by Pershing.
Yes, I am in the US and I am guessing you are in Canada from your other posts. Same continent, similar foundations, totally different mindsets. I see this working in Alberta quite a bit.
The generation that directed WWII were appalled by the slaughter and stalemate of WWII trench warfare on the western front. The eastern front is a different story.
As an histoian of World War II myself, I am looking forward to your series. You are presenting an original point of view that has been needed for quite awhile.
June 6 1944 really is the day in which the United Stats demonstrated it had become a planetary power. In addition to sending the largest invasion fleet in history to the shores of Normandy, on the other side of the planet that same day saw the largest battle fleet in history - the US Fifth Fleet and in particular the fast carrier striking force, Task Force 58 - weigh anchor in Majuro Lagoon and head toward the Marianas, where two weeks after the Normandy landings, the largest naval battle in history - the Battle of the Philippine Sea -took place, with the result making the US Navy the dominant force in the Pacific, ending the ability of the Imperial Navy to mount a credible offensive operation for the rest of the war.
While a good analysis and one that corrects many western myths and fairytales, one quibble:
I would not call Biden's attachment to Israel "fierce". For a sociopath, relationships are ever always only transactional. Biden likes Zionist carrot and fears Zionist stick.
That’s a fairly lazy and entirely ahistorical comment. Maybe start your education by reading Michael Oren’s “Faith, Power, Fantasy. America and the Middle East from 1776 to the present.” Then I suggest Walter Russell Meade’s “Arc of a Covenant” to add to the learning curve.
Simply put, the attachment of the American people began well before the political movement of Zionism and persists to this day. It’s a matter of seeing a reflected origin story and a history of shared values.
The most recent HarvardCAPS-Harris poll still shows over 80% of Americans (and a majority of the 18-24 demographic) support Israel. That’s not the result of any conspiracy or purchasing power. It’s a longstanding view that we share much more with the Jewish people than with any of the countries that surround it.
And that remains the case today, notwithstanding the rhetoric heard from Hamas partisans, a vanishingly small group receiving disproportionate media coverage. Most Americans aren’t fooled by information coming from Hamas controlled entities and their sloganeering supporters who inevitably come across as anti-American, a far greater sin than just anti-Jew.
I understand some claim that WW2 warns us against “appeasing”. An expansionist power. I don’t know if this really applies to the current tensions, but it seems to me that it would be Russia that has reason to complain about appeasing an expansionist NATO. After all, the West did promise not to expand NATO, but it kept expanding. And also, it was the West (France and Germany) that failed to uphold the Minos agreement, which would have given us “peace in our time”. Had the West insisted on upholding the Minsk agreement, Ukraine would still control Donbas and possibly even regain Crimea.
Ukraine could have applied China’s one country two systems solution to maintaining its territorial integrity while giving the peoples of Crimea and Donbas Hong Kong style autonomy from Kiev. That would have been an outcome the Russians might accept.
The only recent NATO expansion was prompted by the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Britain, US, and Russia agreed to respect Ukraine's borders and sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum, confirming that aspect of the Helsinki Accords.
China's "one country, two systems" is very clearly an anti-pattern.
There are other examples of autonomous sub-states. It isn't clear how stable these arrangements are.
I am quite sure the promises (not to expand NATO) were made when Gorbachev agreed to disband the Warsaw Pact. Jeffrey Sachs says there is an archive of all this stuff.
Putting the issue of a “promise” - which, whatever else may be said about it was never committed to writing allowing for the various interpretations we now see - aside, NATO unlike the Warsaw Pact of old is a voluntary alliance. No country is forced to join.
So the best that can be said about this entire discussion is that those countries, formerly part of the Soviet block or the Soviet Union itself, that sought to preserve their independence against a potentially revanchist Russia by joining NATO should have seen their applications rejected and the countries left open to invasion - as happened in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine.
Leaving such countries at such risk seems an odd strategy for peace and stability as it is self-evident (to me, anyway) that had they been NATO members, Russia would never have attacked.
You are probably right that all the ex-Warsaw Pact countries that have joined NATO did so voluntarily. But it would have been better in the long run to disband NATO altogether and replace it with a security structure that addressed all countries’ legitimate security requirements.
Thanks for reading my comment and contributing to the discussion.
Here’s Jeffrey Sachs (an American academic and past advisor to Poland and other Eastern block countries) discussing his claim that NATO broke its promise to the Russians not to expand.
That's a silly point: Sachs talks about Putin demanding an end to further NATO expansion and a reversal, in the Autumn of 2021. Nothing to do with any imaginary agreement in 1989.
Putin's hands were very dirty by this point (Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova).
The source is NATO itself? How can you cite NATO as a source when the issue is that NATO has broken its promise to the Russians. It would be like citing Russia’s Foreign Ministry as a source for claiming that NATO has broken its promise? With respect, might you be the one who has been propagandised?
Prof. Tooze writes, “As I outlined in an Chartbook 258 earlier this year the remaking of the map of the Middle East and the formation of the Western-sponsored state of Israel were part of that process of territorial and demographic rearrangement that also included the ethnic cleansing of over 12 million Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945.”
The statement is historically inaccurate. The “territorial” process for what became Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq was set under international law through a series of League of Nations Mandates, all completed by 1923.
The only variance in territorial lines upon independence occurred in the Mandate for Palestine where the Arabs wanted full control, rejected all attempts at compromise and invaded.
The “demographic rearrangements” which resulted in some 600,000 Arabs fleeing (with the Arab elites by and large leaving before hostilities even began) what became Israel as a result of a war they initiated. By its end in 1949, Israel still retained a sizable Arab population - in stark contrast to the complete ethnic cleaning of all Jews in areas illegally seized by Egypt and Jordan.
The tale of the 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern and Central Europe at war’s end in 1945 would have been a good analogy to the fate of the Arabs of Palestine had Israel expelled the remaining Arabs from its territory after it defeated the invading Arab armies - but that did not happen. The analogy holds for the proposition that if you start a war of annihilation and lose, don’t expect to be welcomed back as if nothing had happened.
As to the contemplated articles, if this one is any indication, I hope that Prof. Tooze writes henceforth as if he does not know how the story ends. For instance, he writes as if the U.S. conversion from a civilian to a wartime economy was an easy fix and bound to succeed or, more broadly, that we knew from the beginning that we would defeat Germany and Japan. Neither was clear to anyone at the time.
This is your best post ever. When your series is complete, please bring it out as a book. Not an academic book with copious endnotes. but a book with many charts and maps, battle photos, etc. Something that will catch the popular eye. Mythology is a tough nut to crack but you are the man who can do it. Accompany the book with a second volume, a teaching tool for high schools and colleges which is based on a series of questions for discussion. We are approaching the hundred year mark. It is time to understand that coalitions lead to overconfidence and brutal wars.
Yes, Mr. Tooze, write that book (along with everything else you're doing). Charts + maps would be great, get FT folks to sign on for that and please make sure these charts and graphs are legible when reading your book in e-book format
It's a fantastic post. As for a book -- Wages of Destruction already exists! I can see how this is a different project (particularly in terms of bringing down the academic level, and maybe more focus on the postwar historiography, mythmaking and "what it means today"), but nothing in this post comes as exactly new.
I agree. The best post ever.
Living as businessman in Moscow from 1993 to 2023, I would sometimes get coaxed into a debate by Russian men , who explained that WW2 was fought by Russia with Germany , and the rest of it was a series of pretentious ,unimportant side shows ,.. I often said. "Let's not argue about this. I only have one thing to say. and it's a number. , 476,000. " 'What's that' , they sometimes asked. It's the number of. 6x6 ,all wheel drive, diesel powered 5 ton load trucks which were delivered from the USA, on American ships to Murmansk Russia port during the calendar year 1944 . 1300 per day. Those 5 t trucks were filled with goods and munitions , including millions of tons of SPAM (pork) which fed Russians for long after V-E day.. End of conversation.
And no doubt they reply that pretty much everyone agrees that WW2 was won by spring 1943, and in proper hindsight had been won in 1941 by Germany's failure to destroy the Russian army in the one real chance it would get.
Sure a lot of Russia's 27m died in 43/44 and a million or so POWs starved to death while waiting for the west to emerge from Britain.
I'm guessing you were not popular in Moscow.
You will have ended a lot of conversations with those remarks.
Allied shipments to the Soviet Union[50]
Year Amount (tons) %
1941 360,778 2.1%
1942 2,453,097 14%
1943 4,794,545 27.4%
1944 6,217,622 35.5%
1945 3,673,819 21%
Total 17,499,861 100
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#U.S._deliveries_to_the_Soviet_Union
Trucks from America and dead soldiers from Russia, Pigman.
It's excellent to see Adam tackling this subject, and the article was very interesting indeed. However, let's have some pushback on the Soviet Union and the whole 'it was won on the Eastern Front' argument.
1. Arguably it was won when Hitler issued his stop order outside Dunkirk, allowing a rump British army to escape. That added to an island fortress, the world's best navy/merchant navy, a global empire, and a nascent air force. Hitler could not win without knocking out Britain, and his (political and military) chance had gone.
2. Thereafter the War was won on the Atlantic. Not just in supplying Britain for the strategic bombing campaign, the Africa/Italy fronts, and then France. But also - with staggeringly large quantities - the USSR (check out Sean McMeekin's 'Stalin's War' for figures). This was the US as an economic giant and the British/US/Canadian efforts to keep the Atlantic open.
3. The USSR began the war by invading Poland and the Baltics as a Nazi partner. It only became an ally because one dictatorship invaded another. It rapidly folded, saved only by Western supplies and its nature as an evil dictatorship that could blithely sacrifice millions of men in a Vernichtungskrieg (oddly enough, exactly what stopped Germany capitulating from 1943 onwards). Adam sounds a bit squeamish that the Western Allies prefered saving soldiers' lives through material ascendency, rather than the more honest and bloody approach of Stalin. I think they got it right.
4. Moreover, as Phillips Payson O'Brien has shown, Germany's biggest battle was not the Eastern Front, but... the battle for Germany, also known as the strategic bombing campaign. This was the big suck for their guns, materials, and every form of industrial production - both that being destroyed or disrupted by British and US bombers, and that being diverted to stop the bombers (think aluminium, guns, planes, petrol, everything). Lots of manpower went East, but without the means to fight the inexhaustable distances, the brutality, and the willingness of Stalin to show that quantity had its own quality. Just think about how much harder it would have been for the USSR if the Nazis had been able to deploy proper air resources.
But it was a very interesting read. Thank you.
"3. The USSR began the war by invading Poland and the Baltics as a Nazi partner."
Sounds like you're still upset that Adolf didn't get to conquer & keep all of Poland in '39, which was the available alternative once the German Army had cut the Polish Army in the West into 8 pieces, 5 surrounded, 2 already capitulated, by 14 Sept '39, 3 days before the Red Army moved an inch.
" It only became an ally because one dictatorship invaded another. “
In July/August of ’39, The (Brit) Chiefs of Staff, the Deputy Chiefs of Staff, and the guy who would be the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (General Sir Edmund Ironside) were telling Chamberlain that the only thing the British Empire could do to prevent the Germans promptly overrunning Poland was to conclude an alliance with the Soviets. In his war diary, Ironside records Chamberlain’s reply: “The one thing we cannot do!” The DCoS, writing on 16 Aug ‘39 even predicted that the Soviets would most likely “divide the spoils” with the Germans if the alliance talks failed, which as we’ve seen, Chamberlain was determined to make fail.
“It rapidly folded,"
False. The Barbarossa plan called for 4-6 weeks of combat ops to destroy all battle-worthy elements of the Soviet Army before they could retreat over the Dnepr. What they got was a war of attrition that by 31 December would see both Army Groups North and Center bled so white they could not be made capable of offensive ops in '42, and even Army Group South was down to about 60% effective infantry strength, and it would take pretty much all of the new German recruits available for '42 to restore AG South to a state fit to resume offensive ops in '42,.
"saved only by Western supplies"
By the end of '41, the USSR were saved by their own fighting, and overwhelmingly, their own supplies, and had the German Army gut-shot & bleeding out.
P O'Brien's thesis is wrong in a very elementary way: It conflates munitions production and resources. In 1942, munitions production was only 10% of German GDP. Germany spent ~50% of GDP on the war that year, mostly in the form of soldier pay and non-munitions requisitions (realize that wars involve massive logistical and basic supply spending that usually exceeds munitions spending).
Furthermore, soldier pay is a vast underestimate of the resource commitment to land war: conscripted soldiers' services are valued at an arbitrary level, not a market price level (obviously). A truer valuation of soldier pay is in their OPPORTUNITY COST - e.g. how much munitions production could one get from leaving a man in a factory versus pulling him into the army? This was a dilemma faced repeatedly and explicitly by all combatants - Speer discusses at length in his biography, for example, his fights with the army for industrial vs military manpower. Hitler specifically justified Barbarossa as a measure to free army manpower for the production war against the West (after USSR defeated, no need for a big army to guard the East).
By 1944 Germany had 2mil men producing aircraft and had drafted (net) >13mil into the Wehrmacht. Most of those drafted men faced the USSR or were buried there. By far the biggest German resource deployment was in the East. O'Brien just has a simplistic understanding of what resources are.
Thanks for the interesting answer. I agree that there is far more to Germany's resource commitment than production figures or some other simple metric. And undoubtedly the East was an enormous manpower sink, which in itself also imposed a massive cost on the economy (with women largely unmobilised but with a large slave/forced labour input from abroad). Speer was right to be aggrieved!
But Germany was running short of far more than just sheer manpower, and material shortages were absolutely devastating. For example look at the new research on how much wastage there was in armour outside combat compared to losses at Kursk, or look at the figures for aircraft frames, or 88mms used for defence of the Reich.
I'm certainly not arguing that the enormous manpower sink of the Ostfront wasn't important - just that it's ridiculously over-simplistic, probably naive, to say things like "Meanwhile, in Europe D-day would simply never have been possible without the huge weight of casualties inflicted by the Red Army on Germany’s military".
What I think hasn't received enough attention is how the very nature of vicious totalitarian mid-20th century regimes allowed them to fight beyond what had been considered the surrender point. The USSR only survived because its leaders would rather sacrifice everything than surrender, and were traumatised and perverted by the blood spilling of the 20s and 30s; likewise Germany - rationally - should have quit in '43, but were in the grip of a racist death cult that would rather go down in flames than think of a future after defeat. That matters because the Nazis quite reasonably could have expected the USSR's leadership to have folded in '41, and the Allies struggled with the concept of the Germans still fighting after there was no way to win/survive.
Manpower was at the root of all German shortages besides natural oil/rubber/etc. Even with oil, more manpower would have enabled higher synthoil production (more miners, railway workers, factory workers along the production chain - the loss of coal miners to the army was a massive impediment to the German war economy).
It isn't simplistic to say that D-Day was impossible without the Soviets. That is EXACTLY what US Army leaders said. "The retention of [SU] in the war...is vital to Allied victory,’’ ...chief of staff McNarney had emphasized on April 12 [1942], "if German armies were allowed to turn west, ‘‘any opportunity for a successful
offensive against the European Axis would be virtually eliminated.’’
I also disagree with the notion that totalitarianism explains Soviet resistance. There's a lot of literature here saying otherwise. See Fortress Dark and Stern by Goldman and Filtzer, for example. Soviet peoples saw Nazi victory as an existential threat (rightly). They hated Nazism and preferred not to die. The democratic French sacrificed a similar proportion of their young men stopping Germany in WW1. Countries don't like to be conquered by enemies...
Re Germany's prolonged resistance - yeah you feasibly need the Nazi death cult to get that. OTOH the fear and loathing of "Judeo-Bolshevism" wasn't solely a Nazi invention - Germans didn't love their Slavic and lefty neighbors much prior to Hitler.
Thanks for the reply.
1. Manpower + almost everything else = they were screwed. Agreed, and we can argue about the emphasis!
2. I think it's enormously simplistic. D-Day on that particular date was of course heavily contingent upon the Ostfront, AND the strategic air campaign, the Atlantic, Libya/Tunisia/Italy and so on. A landing in France was bloody hard, and it's hard to imagine what it would have taken without the Ostfront OR any of the other elements. Maybe the answer is that it might have taken the nuclear bomb.
3. The USSR as totalitarian: my take is that it took a very particular kind of state and political situation in the summer (even autumn) months of '41 for there not to have been some sort of implosion or coup at the top (see 1917), with untold results thereafter. And that's also what Stalin had expected. But once that didn't happen, the fightback depended heavily upon: 1. Soviet blood in massive quantities, spilled in a way that only totalitarian states can; 2. Allied everything in massive quantities; 3. Enormous German overstretch in both the USSR and in its other military adventures, including over German cities and even smaller theatres like Tunisia (260k prisoners alone, against 500k total losses in Stalingrad).
4. Nazi racist death cult. This is the bit that my mind still struggles to comprehend. What on earth were they thinking?
"1. Manpower + almost everything else = they were screwed."
That's undoubtedly true for as long as the USSR remained undefeated but kind of besides the point we're discussing. Again, all US/UK leaders realized by 1942 that Germany couldn't be defeated (conventionally) if the USSR fell. A-bombs were a far away contingency unknown to most then and could have changed things. It's not clear, however, that the US/UK publics would have stayed in what would seem to be a forever war against Germany had USSR gone down in, say, 1942. Three years of total war with no hope of final victory (i.e. of liberating Europe)? It's also questionable whether UK would have allowed US to begin dropping A-bombs on Germany in this post-USSR scenario, as the anticipated/certain German response would have been to dump deadly chemicals on UK (eg Sarin gas), resulting in millions of British deaths. WW2 probably sees a Fascist-Democracy Cold War replace the historical Cold War had USSR been defeated.
Re 2:
D-Day had lots of necessary conditions. One of them was continued Soviet resistance. It isn't simplistic to point to a single necessary condition as necessary to a thing occurring. Indeed it's mandated by logic.
Re 3:
Possibly Stalin's iron fist was necessary prevent a coup. Possibly the Great Purges were - contrary to common wisdom - necessary to winning the war and defeating Nazism (and this was indeed Stalin's thought at the time). Also necessary to Soviet survival was the immense sacrifice and heroism of everyday people in the Soviet Union.
Re 4: Perfect comprehension is probably not desirable.
I like the flights of historical fancy at the top of your answer. Without the USSR I also think a conventional defeat of Germany was unlikely, and any use of the atom bomb would have depended heavily on what the settlement would have been. Presumably some sort of guarantees for western Europe, the British empire (let's not forget Japan!), and US trade would have been in order. But how long would this have held, and would it have shadowed the Communist/Capitalist Cold War?
I think it would, especially in one critical way - just as the Sovbloc imploded in '89-'91, I think Nazi Germany and its eastern empire would ultimately have collapsed into decadent, laughable ruin, with its people fleeing for places to the west, run on better logic and with less murder.
So thank you USSR, along with all the others who suffered to defeat the bastards.
Your revisionism fools nobody, Walton, least of all someone as well schooled in the facts as Tooze himself.
Today is the 80th anniversary of Midway, where an outnumbered US fleet went 'all in' under Adm. Nimitz, stopping the 7 months of Japanese rampage and ascendancy in the Indo-PAC. The 1944 invasions of Guam, Saipan and Tinian took place at the same month as D-Day. This was a staggering US accomplishment to accomplish both invasions simultaneously.
Meanwhile, the USSR/Stalin were Hitler's partner in carving up Poland in 1939, and the USSR also grabbed the Baltic states, and would have sat out the war if Hitler had not been so doubly foolish as to declare war on the US on Dec. 11, 1941, and attack his 'treaty partner', Stalin in 1941. The US benefited from fighting with the only other super power of the day, the UK as its ally, and during the war the UK provided 3.500 ships to D Day and built more warplanes than Hitler's Germany.
I look forward to your continued reevaluation, but we can never forget that Stalin left us a linear descendant in Putin, and Mao the ideology and inspiration for Xi.
It's actually the 82nd anniversary (June 4, 1942), but who's counting? :-)
thanks. You are of course correct. I hit send too fast.
A common error for many of us.
Adam Tooze, you and I and many more of us have been searching through our families' histories, the history and current affairs we have read to deal with the harms in the US, around the world and to the earth itself. Your knowledge and the connections you make will inform us and help us think about now as well as organize our own search for understanding. Thank you.
Sounds like a Herculean effort. I have read much of the Western Alliance efforts in WWII but not much about the Russian, Chinese, Japanese, or Italian background. Especially the logistics. Looking forward to the results.
George Michael singing “White Christmas” in 1984,
For those of us who gave their heart then it will always be "Last Christmas".
And yes it is quite amazing that Biden is the first President since Bush Senior (1989-93) to have been born during or before WW2.
Thanks for another demonstration of who determined the result of WW2. I only finished Wages of Destruction about 4 weeks ago, but the media is so pressing. Of course there is no reporting of history now, everything is about moving Overton's window (or pretending to be inside it when not).
War has and always will be about bringing economic power to bear and having the logistics to deliver and project that power wherever it needs to go. We simply have not thought about it in such a way. We get fixated on battles, capturing lands, and personalities. The question, once we acknowledge this predicate, is the political will to use and project that economic power and at what cost to other interests and objectives of the state? Existential wars such as WW II do not happen often and necessity is the mother of innovation and invention as you point to in this pieces, Adam. And it was no greater than in WW II. The Cold War allowed the US to pour money and people into coming up with newer, better technology and methods that not only benefitted the military, but benefited the nation at large. We see this innovation happening again, but now in Ukraine, which is also fighting an existential war of survival. Much will come out this that will later benefit Ukraine and Europe overall once Russia is defeated.
I look forward to the next installment.
The performance of the Confederate armies against the Federal Armies in the US Civil War shows economics and logistics are not everything. There are many examples, but that is likely the most known to readers here, even for us who don't live in the US.
I have to respectfully disagree, Hugh. While I can agree that initially the Confederate army was better led, and possibly better trained, in the end, it was the economic power of the Union with its manufacturing base for weapons, and finally getting its logistics in order and could manage extended supply lines be a use of its economic power. This economic power also allowed the Union navy to choke off exports and imports of weapons. The confederacy, in contrast, was largely agrarian and based on exports on cotton and other goods. What the Confederacy hoped for was a fast knockout blow against a poorly led Union army, but when that did not happen, it was only a matter of time.
I used the word "performance" to signify the whole war, not the end stages.
Clearly the Confederates lost. but for the first part, they were fairly dominant even though the North had much better industry, much better railroads and railroaders, and much more manpower.
So we're kind of agreeing.
I see the same pattern in WWI and WWII.
I see where you are going with your argument and it makes more sense to me now. The WW I analogy is an interesting one in that Germany, France, and the UK were roughly speaking economic equals. But what tipped the scale was the US entry into the war with its economic heft and helping solve logistics problems in combating u-boats.
WW II is interesting for a different reason in that initially the French and British were totally unprepared, and it showed early on. That was poor leadership and a lack of vision and imagination. The Soviets were also ill prepared for what would happen and poorly led as could be seen in the Winter War with Finland.
All wars a complex. Humans make things complex.
The stories of war are all too simplified. When two stories conflict, there is a lot of disagreement, generally hard to resolve. Emotions run high when the stories conflict with national myths. Many stories are simultaneously true.
Here, for example, is my Just So story about WWI. It's my myth and it might not match yours. Particularly since I'm not in the US and I guess you are.
Don't forget the eastern front in WWI. But I will ignore it.
In WWI, GB did not consider itself a land power. That was kind of France's job. Most of the British Army was in India, doing things far from combat. Splendid Isolation only ended in 1902.
France had this doctrine of Elan, which didn't work out well. Besides, if I remember correctly, France had fallen behind Germany in many metrics.
The Germans started the war (i.e. they pushed the Austrians to give the Serbians an ultimatum that could not be accepted) so of course they determined the initial course of the war. Attacking through a neutral country (Belgium) just wasn't the done thing.
The US started solving the Entente's logistics problem long before it entered the war (very late). US industry plus the British blockade meant that US exports went disproportionately to the Allies. US pressure prevented unrestricted submarine warfare for quite a while; when it didn't, the US entered the war.
The US did not do this for free. Britain was the richest country in the world but was essentially bled dry by the war, with most of the inter-country transfers going to the US, which became the new richest country.
Actual US troops were probably not decisive. The "Black Day of the German Army" was 1918 August 8. That was about when the war stopped being static ("the last 100 days"). The Meuse–Argonne offensive, the first battle with significant US formations, started 1918 September 26. The war was over in less than a month and a half. US casualties were quite high, perhaps because the soldiers or generals were unblooded (just a sloppy guess on my part).
There is a lot to unpack in your response. I agree we all have myths, US, UK, Canadian, Australian, etc from WW I and WW II. Yes, wars like any human endeavor are complex, and that is because there are so many moving parts.
Keep in mind France had been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian war a mere 40 years earlier, so no doubt France was likely inferior to the German army.
As for the US involvement, the “cash and carry” policy was a veneer to help the Entente as you point out Germany had been successfully blockaded by the British navy. And even before the official US entry into the war, many in the US fought with Canadian units for Britain.
The fact that Germany went back to unrestricted submarine warfare was a desperate measure, a “Hail Mary” of sorts as they were being choked to death by the blockade and its only hope was to return the favor in kind. Then there was the ham handed Zimmerman note trying to enlist Mexico to take back parts of the US Southwest hoping to pin down US attention…and because it coincided with the raids by Pancho Villa and Emilio Zapata it delayed US entry into the war…see also the failed “Punitive Expedition” led by Pershing.
Yes, I am in the US and I am guessing you are in Canada from your other posts. Same continent, similar foundations, totally different mindsets. I see this working in Alberta quite a bit.
The paradoxical logic of war and peace suggests that wrapped inside every victory is a future defeat.
This sounds like a book waiting to be written. I’d read it.
I think that the scale of World War I in Europe was not much smaller that World War II in Europe.
For example, there were about 68k Canadian military deaths in WWI and 47k in WWII. Even though the population of Canada increased considerably between the wars. https://www.cips-cepi.ca/2011/11/11/the-scale-of-sacrifice-canadian-military-deaths-in-five-wars-chart/
The generation that directed WWII were appalled by the slaughter and stalemate of WWII trench warfare on the western front. The eastern front is a different story.
As an histoian of World War II myself, I am looking forward to your series. You are presenting an original point of view that has been needed for quite awhile.
June 6 1944 really is the day in which the United Stats demonstrated it had become a planetary power. In addition to sending the largest invasion fleet in history to the shores of Normandy, on the other side of the planet that same day saw the largest battle fleet in history - the US Fifth Fleet and in particular the fast carrier striking force, Task Force 58 - weigh anchor in Majuro Lagoon and head toward the Marianas, where two weeks after the Normandy landings, the largest naval battle in history - the Battle of the Philippine Sea -took place, with the result making the US Navy the dominant force in the Pacific, ending the ability of the Imperial Navy to mount a credible offensive operation for the rest of the war.
While a good analysis and one that corrects many western myths and fairytales, one quibble:
I would not call Biden's attachment to Israel "fierce". For a sociopath, relationships are ever always only transactional. Biden likes Zionist carrot and fears Zionist stick.
Anyway, I know where this story ends
AIPAC says they will spend $100m this calendar year on electing pro-Israel candidates and Trump .
Biden also a major AIPAC recipient, although Zionist power neither begins nor ends with AIPAC.
That’s a fairly lazy and entirely ahistorical comment. Maybe start your education by reading Michael Oren’s “Faith, Power, Fantasy. America and the Middle East from 1776 to the present.” Then I suggest Walter Russell Meade’s “Arc of a Covenant” to add to the learning curve.
Simply put, the attachment of the American people began well before the political movement of Zionism and persists to this day. It’s a matter of seeing a reflected origin story and a history of shared values.
The most recent HarvardCAPS-Harris poll still shows over 80% of Americans (and a majority of the 18-24 demographic) support Israel. That’s not the result of any conspiracy or purchasing power. It’s a longstanding view that we share much more with the Jewish people than with any of the countries that surround it.
And that remains the case today, notwithstanding the rhetoric heard from Hamas partisans, a vanishingly small group receiving disproportionate media coverage. Most Americans aren’t fooled by information coming from Hamas controlled entities and their sloganeering supporters who inevitably come across as anti-American, a far greater sin than just anti-Jew.
Even if true, irrelevant as to Biden.
I understand some claim that WW2 warns us against “appeasing”. An expansionist power. I don’t know if this really applies to the current tensions, but it seems to me that it would be Russia that has reason to complain about appeasing an expansionist NATO. After all, the West did promise not to expand NATO, but it kept expanding. And also, it was the West (France and Germany) that failed to uphold the Minos agreement, which would have given us “peace in our time”. Had the West insisted on upholding the Minsk agreement, Ukraine would still control Donbas and possibly even regain Crimea.
Ukraine could have applied China’s one country two systems solution to maintaining its territorial integrity while giving the peoples of Crimea and Donbas Hong Kong style autonomy from Kiev. That would have been an outcome the Russians might accept.
Odd viewpoint.
"The West" did not promise not to expand NATO.
The only recent NATO expansion was prompted by the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Britain, US, and Russia agreed to respect Ukraine's borders and sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum, confirming that aspect of the Helsinki Accords.
China's "one country, two systems" is very clearly an anti-pattern.
There are other examples of autonomous sub-states. It isn't clear how stable these arrangements are.
I am quite sure the promises (not to expand NATO) were made when Gorbachev agreed to disband the Warsaw Pact. Jeffrey Sachs says there is an archive of all this stuff.
Putting the issue of a “promise” - which, whatever else may be said about it was never committed to writing allowing for the various interpretations we now see - aside, NATO unlike the Warsaw Pact of old is a voluntary alliance. No country is forced to join.
So the best that can be said about this entire discussion is that those countries, formerly part of the Soviet block or the Soviet Union itself, that sought to preserve their independence against a potentially revanchist Russia by joining NATO should have seen their applications rejected and the countries left open to invasion - as happened in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine.
Leaving such countries at such risk seems an odd strategy for peace and stability as it is self-evident (to me, anyway) that had they been NATO members, Russia would never have attacked.
You are probably right that all the ex-Warsaw Pact countries that have joined NATO did so voluntarily. But it would have been better in the long run to disband NATO altogether and replace it with a security structure that addressed all countries’ legitimate security requirements.
Thanks for reading my comment and contributing to the discussion.
You have been listening to propaganda. This seems like a good place to start:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220222223845/https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_111767.htm#c203
Here’s Jeffrey Sachs (an American academic and past advisor to Poland and other Eastern block countries) discussing his claim that NATO broke its promise to the Russians not to expand.
Two links for you to check out:
https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/nato-chief-admits-expansion-behind-russian-invasion?format=amp
https://metacpc.org/en/jeffrey-sachs-2/
That's a silly point: Sachs talks about Putin demanding an end to further NATO expansion and a reversal, in the Autumn of 2021. Nothing to do with any imaginary agreement in 1989.
Putin's hands were very dirty by this point (Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova).
Check out this link. Apparently it archives the historical records. I couldn’t access it to check. Just going by what Sachs says.
The source is NATO itself? How can you cite NATO as a source when the issue is that NATO has broken its promise to the Russians. It would be like citing Russia’s Foreign Ministry as a source for claiming that NATO has broken its promise? With respect, might you be the one who has been propagandised?
You can click through to a Gorbachev interview in 2014. Surely he would know the USSR side! Did you?
There are other relevant links there.
I couldn’t find the link to the interview. Could you copy the link in your reply.
Prof. Tooze writes, “As I outlined in an Chartbook 258 earlier this year the remaking of the map of the Middle East and the formation of the Western-sponsored state of Israel were part of that process of territorial and demographic rearrangement that also included the ethnic cleansing of over 12 million Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945.”
The statement is historically inaccurate. The “territorial” process for what became Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq was set under international law through a series of League of Nations Mandates, all completed by 1923.
The only variance in territorial lines upon independence occurred in the Mandate for Palestine where the Arabs wanted full control, rejected all attempts at compromise and invaded.
The “demographic rearrangements” which resulted in some 600,000 Arabs fleeing (with the Arab elites by and large leaving before hostilities even began) what became Israel as a result of a war they initiated. By its end in 1949, Israel still retained a sizable Arab population - in stark contrast to the complete ethnic cleaning of all Jews in areas illegally seized by Egypt and Jordan.
The tale of the 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern and Central Europe at war’s end in 1945 would have been a good analogy to the fate of the Arabs of Palestine had Israel expelled the remaining Arabs from its territory after it defeated the invading Arab armies - but that did not happen. The analogy holds for the proposition that if you start a war of annihilation and lose, don’t expect to be welcomed back as if nothing had happened.
As to the contemplated articles, if this one is any indication, I hope that Prof. Tooze writes henceforth as if he does not know how the story ends. For instance, he writes as if the U.S. conversion from a civilian to a wartime economy was an easy fix and bound to succeed or, more broadly, that we knew from the beginning that we would defeat Germany and Japan. Neither was clear to anyone at the time.
Fabulous post, one of your best.