The Storm of War

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welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson by the way be sure to join us on facebook at facebook.com forward slash punk knowledge facebook.com forward slash UNC knowledge by the way we'll have some extra content from this show with Andrew Roberts on our Facebook page Andrew Roberts holds a doctorate from Cambridge is a fellow of the Royal Society of literature and is the author of works such as masters and commanders Napoleon and Wellington eminent Churchill Ian's Salisbury and a history of the english-speaking peoples since 1900 completing Winston Churchill's work of his history of the english-speaking peoples up until 1900 historian Robert service called Andrew Roberts most recent book sparkling historian Paul Johnson called it engrossing and The Economist magazine called it simply magnificent today on uncommon knowledge Andrew Roberts and the storm of war a new history of the Second World War Andrew Roberts thank you for joining us noticeable thank you very much for having me on the show segment one why the wrong side might have one you spend a good deal of time in the storm of war assessing why the Germans in particularly why the axis but why the Germans in particular lost which requires particularly for this generation establishing the premise that there were good reasons to suppose they might have won the ordinary soldier let me quote the storm of war quote it is indisputable that the Germans were the best fighting men of the Second World War close quote explain that well the way in which the Second World War unfolded was not in any way predestined any more than any other war is it was a series of successes against Poland in nineteen 89 against France of course which collapsed in six to eight weeks in 1940 successes in Scandinavia earlier than that in the April of 1940 and then all the way through in 1941 up to the invasion of Russia one thinks of Yugoslavia collapsing in three weeks any objective and Britain being flung off the continent from Crete any normal objective observer at that stage would think that the Nazis were unbeatable and if they had adopted a different strategy if they had come down into the Mediterranean flung Britain off the North African littoral this of course is long before America comes into the war which is also something that they could have done with a fraction of the three million men that they unleashed in Operation Barbarossa against Russia then Iran and Iraq where we had 80 percent of Britain's oil coming from would have been closed off we only had skeleton forces there and Hitler could then in his own good time have attacked Russia from the south and not necessarily just had to have come a thousand miles across from Poland which of course is what he did in June 1941 so adopting different strategies could have won in the war and what about the assured technical ability of the Germans as a fighting force you write that the soldiers the German soldiers I can't quite remember the figures but there's something like they it sounds quite brutal but you're assessing the German mish war making machine as a war making machine the ver mocked the war making capacity that the Germans killed twenty to thirty percent more Americans and British and a much higher ratio of Russians whenever they encountered them that's right well this is us and this is true whether whether they had whether they were winning or losing the battle whether they were had air superiority in in pretty much every case now that isn't true in after the Battle of the Bulge once the Battle of the Bulge had been won in January 1945 then these ratios were very different but up until the final what six seven months of the war exactly right up until that point the German war fighting capacity was superior to anybody else is in the world but one has to remember of course but the Germans knew when the Second World War was going to break out they had been training for it they had their army had been in training for it from the moment that Hitler came to power in 1933 whereas the Allies certainly weren't your country only had the 17th largest army in the world in 1939 it was Britain of course which continued along with France to appease the Germans didn't build up in the way that it needed to secondly their equipment was absolutely superb the German tanks German the 88 millimeter there their rifles their submarines to an extent were just simply superior and of course their generals many like Erich von Manstein GERD von Rundstedt Owen Rommel Heinz Guderian these were world-class generals and had Hitler allowed them their say and and listen to what they were saying then he would have done an awful lot better than he did so so we've got superb equipment we've got brilliant generals we have a war making tradition you write in the storm of war that the Germans were fighting their fifth war of aggression in 75 years and they were simply better than the Allies as a war making machine this was impressive yes and I think him we can make too much of the of the weaponry because by of course the time that the United States came into the war and certainly when Roosevelt in his January 1942 speech said that America was going to become the arsenal of democracy he definitely followed through on that by by the calendar year in 1944 when the Germans and Russians were producing 40,000 more planes each and Britain produced 28,000 warplanes the Americans produced no fewer than ninety eight thousand warplanes as almost as much as the rest of the world put together and they were especially with the p-51 Mustang capable of taking on and beating pretty much anything that the Germans could put in the air so it's important to remember that although we started off behind the Germans in terms of weaponry capacity we ended up far ahead of them right segment to how Hitler got it wrong I'd like to go through a couple I mean is it very frustrating of course because this is several hundred magnificent pages and we have a few moments of which to try to compress it you mentioned just a moment ago that right up to Operation Barbarossa the Germans had encountered nothing but success and had they had Hitler stopped there he'd have commanded the entire center of Europe the Low Countries northern France he'd have had much of Scandinavia alright instead in June 1941 he decides to invade Russia in what you call his cardinal error of the war why did he invite why didn't he simply stop and consolidate his what he had achieved politics he constantly whenever the best interests of the Reich and bifurcated from the best interests of the Nazi Party he always did what was good for the Nazi Party what it was in his in his ideological fanatical Nazi mind and a conservative man like like Bismarck for example von Moltke would not have gone down the route that Hitler did this was because he was a fanatical under general Nazi the reasons he invaded Russia were not to do with the the best strategic interest for the ver mark but instead because he wanted to have a final reckoning as he put it with the Bolsheviks he'd been fighting on street corners against communism since the nineteen twenties in Munich he wanted to to wipe out the Bolsheviks he wanted also of course to wipe out the Jews over half of whom lived of Europe's Jews lived in the USSR in 1941 and Thurber he wanted Levens ram he absolutely believed that this idea of living space for the German people in the East would be one very easily he thought the whole campaign would be over in four or five months he told gurbles we will kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down and he believed that was because the master race the ubermensch and the Germans were just superior fighting men to the to the Slava Gunther mensch and that as a result he couldn't lose he didn't take into account factors such as the Russian capacity for building tanks especially the t-34 all the sheer grit of the Russians in holding on all the sheer numbers of Russians all their willingness to take appalling losses and not surrender 1.1 million people Russians died in the siege of leningrad but leningrad did not fall mmm error number two this I quote you Andrew from the storm of war Hitler should have studiously ignored all provocations from Franklin Roosevelt instead the Fuhrer unnecessarily declared war on the uninvaded United States Japan attacks Pearl Harbor three days later I as I recall four days later Hitler who's not involved in this declares war on the United States and and didn't need to he's not he's not under any treaty obligation to do this and he just completely misunderstood the nature of the United States none of the senior leaders had actually been to America apart from yoke invulnerable trop who came here in the 1920s to try unsuccessfully to sell champagne for a few years and therefore that made him the great expert and he said I quoted in the book and how can a Jew aside nation like America ever create an army or fight it will become fighter a aces it was all done on race it comes back to this idea that ideology was central they believe that because America was run by blacks and Jews that therefore they couldn't fight the the idea is is so monstrous in so many ways not least of course because he Hitler knew perfectly well the Jews are very good fighters he had got his Iron Cross first class from his adjutant who was a Jew in the in the First World War but it comes back again to this idea that America couldn't actually put any men in the into the European theater until Adolf Hitler said the 1970 as it was of course by the 9th of November 1942 you were landing a vast force on the North West African coast and knocked the axes out of Africa by May 1943 error 3 here again let me quote the storm of war wound stats defense of Normandy in June 1944 was badly hampered by Hitler indeed this is one of the striking statements from the book indeed Hitler could hardly have helped the Allies better had he been working for them so right up to Operation Barbarossa Hitler seems to get nothing wrong and from the invasion of Normandy he might as well have been working for the enemy was his enemy yes and then that's what Churchill said as well at the time of the bomb plot of the 20th of July 1944 when the generals attempted unsuccessfully to blow up Hitler Churchill said in the House of Commons that he was pleased that the bomb plot had failed because Hitler was such a bad strategist that he was actually helping the Allies and it was true he made every mistake in the book he wound up believing very quickly what Goebbels had been saying about him up until 1941 which was that he was the greatest warlord of all time and he he drank the kool-aid as you say in America mmm segment 3 this brings us to the Fuhrer in the storm of war Andrew you're right it is impossible to devor to divorce axis strategy from the centrality of Adolf Hitler of the 650 major legislative orders issued during the war all but 72 were decrees or orders issued in his name or over his signature now here's the problem more than half a century after the war has ended how do you make Hitler intelligible to to the 20 year old student at Stanford University where we're shooting this now who looks back and sees a monster the man responsible for the Holocaust a strategic incompetent something like a madman and yet here he is central to this massive effort on the part of one of the most important and civilized nations in the very heart of Europe how do you make that comprehensible well you're quite right it's not easy I think we have quite enough evil in the world today one thinks of fortunately Orzabal bin Laden's no longer in the world today one thinks of him when thinks they also have said out his saying and others who can who do who are evil when therefore people can understand the concept of a human leader of a country or an organisation and movement being fundamentally utterly evil but the difficult thing is to understand a European country a country of culture a country of Beethoven and of Goethe and being taken over by a monster such as Hitler and and then of course for him to go off he spent over half of the war in the valjean sir his his headquarters in East Prussia and he was 1,500 miles behind the lines and he would meet German generals who would fly out to heaven and he would listen to them we have every word that he said from December from sorry January 1942 onwards at his Fuhrer conferences stenographers would take down every word that everybody said and so we know that he listened for up to an hour to various generals who are far better strategists than he men like Guderian and Rommel endure instead and so manche night and yen at the end of the meeting he would go back and do precisely what he'd originally intended to mmm alright on august 2nd 1934 Hindenburg dies and Hitler assumes command of the Armed Forces you right in the storm of war pote with the complete support of the army two weeks later a vote takes place on whether Hitler should serve both as Chancellor head of government and president head of state and commander of the Armed Forces quoting you once again more than 38 million Germans or 89.9% voted yes make that moment comprehensible to us well with regard to the army it was pretty straight forward there had been with the brown shirts the SA a an internal coup on the night of the Long Knives in July 1944 where Hitler they had wanted to take over the army - to actually be in control of the German army and the German army did a straightforward deal with Hitler but if Hitler dealt with the Blackshirts then he would be able to demand an oath of allegiance to have the swastika as the as the ver mark symbol and all the various other things that he needed as commander-in-chief to establish control over the army and so as a result Hitler did his side of the deal he killed the senior leadership of the SA and one night the night of the Long Knives and so he got everything he needed much more difficult of course to explain is the 89% vote in favor but you know in 1923 Hitler only had 2.3 percent of the popular vote he was a job leader of a J political party by the time of the Great Depression he was getting 30 percent of the votes it really did require this appalling global recession and depression indeed to to fling him into power because he used scapegoats and he used demagoguery and he used a anti-capitalist message which went down very well with people who had been broken and forced into unemployment and penury and without that there's no way he'd have got an 89% term vote all right you also write about Chamberlain he returns from meeting with Hitler Berchtesgaden in 1938 and he writes I'd never come across this before he writes to his sister and you quote it in the storm of war in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face he sees it I got the impression that here was a man Hitler who could be relied upon when he had given his word close quote explain that well then of course it's not just Chamberlain lots of people lots of people lots of lots of people well exactly and well these people actually many of them Victorians grew up in the Victorian age were dealing with other members of the House of Commons in British politics they basically hadn't come across a gangster at all they thought he was a gentleman I thought he was Edmund they hadn't released even they didn't think he was a gentleman they thought he was someone with whom they could do business and they were very bad at looking into the into the soul of the the Beast Winston Churchill on the other hand who also was a Victorian but had led a much more wide and varied life than the Neville Chamberlain had seen evil face to face and and recognized it very early on and where have you seen evil Oh throughout the empire and you know he'd he'd seen friends of his chopped pieces by Muslim fundamentalist terrorists effectively in the Northwest Frontier he'd fought in the Boer War he'd escaped from a prisoner of war camp II taken part in the last cavalry charge of the British Empire he'd fought in Lee he'd been a war reporter in the spanish-american war I mean this man fully understood the nature of horror of evil up close and in a way that somebody like Neville Chamberlain who had rarely strayed outside the confines of Westminster simply couldn't understand segments for the Allies Britain we're used to hearing these days that Churchill saved Western civilization your assessment is a little colder and a little more delimited quote Britain forced Germany into a two-front war and that's about where you ended it some level for all the Magnificent rhetoric we also know and I think I also point out that we bought vital year of time in between the the fall of France in June 1940 and Hitler's invasion of Russia in June 1941 that 12-month period we were the the British Empire was the only force in the world that was opposed to Hitler was a war with Hitler and of course the Soviet Union was actually allied to Germany at the time and so whilst the Russians produced oceans of blood yes I'm almost the most amazing amount of material and obviously you fought the Japanese you were you landed in in Africa Italy France and the rest what we did produce was the time which was vital in 1940 because it allowed the rest of the civilized world to rearm and how close how close was Britain to collapse in 1940 well if the British Expeditionary Force had been captured we might well have been forced into some kind of ignoble peace in the same way that happened to France when its army was captured in that in the May and June of 1940 but fortunately we firstly of course had Winston Churchill's leadership and his and his sublime oratory and he is really he truly is utterly indispensable there's no one else on the scene who would have done what he did is that correct no one at all right now I mean people you won't have heard of like George Lloyd a very obscure cabinet minister who says that he wanted to do the same thing as Winston Churchill but he simply didn't have Churchill's persona background and vitally this concept of Churchill having four years said this is going to happen if you continue to appease appease Germany this will happen and then being proved right he's a wonderful thing in a politician the United States I quote the storm of war the American contribution was not primarily in blood but in the production and distribution of armaments and the overall financing of the conflict material and money now can you add a little something yes that to make me feel a little bit better well there's not you know you don't want to win a war you don't want to make care - it's a spill oceans of blood 600,000 Americans died it's a significant contribution but compared to the 27 million Russians well of course it it's a drop in the ocean the key thing is though you also were vital in the combined bomber offensive which stopped German stopped German military the increase in military production in its tracks you were vital of course in the whole of the Pacific War which which had to be fought after the attack on Pearl Harbor and in so many other areas of the of the war at sea for example and then landing the forces of d-day you know that was an astonishing achievement on the day of d-day itself when the Luftwaffe flew 319 sorties over Normandy the Allies primarily of course the USAAF flew thirteen thousand six hundred and eighty eight you had been staggering got total air superiority by that by that period and then you landed in the armies of pattern and Bradley and so on did you know wind tremendous victories in the rest the Soviet Union once again entered the storm of war quote it was the Russians who provided the oceans of blood necessary to defeat Germany and it cannot be reiterated enough that out of every five Germans killed in combat that is on the battlefield four died on the Eastern Front it is the central statistic of the Second World War Britain kept the Germans fighting in the West the United States provided money in material but the Soviets broke the Nazis yes they did of course and what effectively what we in the West did the Western Allies Canada America Britain and so on was to kill the fifth German but the other four were killed in these massive battles on the on the Eastern Front when one thinks the invasion of Normandy a massive invasion nonetheless in almost exactly the same time in July of 1944 on the Eastern Front when Operation Bagration crushed the Army Group center the Germans Army Group center no fewer than five hundred and thirteen thousand Germans were killed or wounded over half a million Germans and this is a vey size and that's just one battle alone you can think of Kursk you can think of what happened at starting grad and Leningrad and Moscow and finally Berlin these were the battles that broke the Germans know let's deal with the Soviets for a big partly because this is what in this country this 27 million dead in the Soviet Union tends to get overlooked at least in my generation it was part of the Cold War you see it was it wasn't seen anyone's political interest in the West to make much of this so again the storm of war quote the full cost to the Russians amounted to the truly obscene figure of around 27 million dead but much of the responsibility for the catastrophe lay with Stalin himself if he had not signed the nazi-soviet pact if he had not trusted Hitler so totally if he had not wiped out so much of the Red Army officer corps in the purges if he'd not gone to war with Finland if he not sent his troops so far forward after his hyena like pounce on eastern Poland if he'd not refused to allow strategic withdrawals after Barbarossa and on and on it goes this is a very crude way of getting at it but if there's 27 million Soviet dead how many as I say this is crude but you'll get the idea you'll get what I'm trying to get it how many died because of the Nazis and how many died because of Joseph Stalin gosh you know do you know what you're getting at yes and it's a fascinating question and of course one that is completely unknowable because it's a and he of course shot very large numbers of his own men if during the battle Stalingrad alone he killed the equivalent of two divisions anybody who tried to to to run anybody who didn't obey orders immediately was shot the NKVD that the predecessors for the KGB had entire battalions just shooting deserters willy-nilly and then vast numbers of them thousands well so let's address that I just wanna stick with the Soviets we've already raised a bit the point about the Cold War but this massive Soviet loss and the knowledge that they were the ones who broke the german wehrmacht is often used to justify the occupation of eastern europe and those what of course it became a 45-year occupation do you buy that no not for a moment as I as I mentioned and as you close it Stalin made every mistake in the book the book he made almost as many blunders as Hitler and he was the only person he only ever trusted one man in his entire life done it and it was at all and why is that because another exactly seem to understand each other they seem to understand each other but they never met of course but nonetheless the nazi-soviet pact was a disaster ultimately for for russia and yet he went into it in the hope that the war that the germans were there for attack in the West he believed like many other generals also believed that there would be a trench warfare in the same way as there was in 1914 to 18 so he thought he was being brilliant in lulling the Germans off into the other side of the continent and was there was an ideological component in Stalin's thinking as well as the north of the capitalist would would bleed each other yes exactly I mean this goes back to Lenin his thought and and the assumption that that would happen however he was given on no fewer than 80 occasions the warning that in fact Barbarossa was going to take place including from some of his own spies giving him the actual day that it was going to happen and he ignored all of them he put it down to English provocation as he put it he believed it was Winston Churchill's plot to try and draw Russia into the war and so as a result of course and what happened was on the first day of Barbarossa no fewer than 40 percent of the of the Soviet bomber force was destroyed on the ground it didn't even get a chance to take off and it's commander left-hand and general Ivan carpets that afternoon shot himself which as I point out in Stalin's Russia was a sensible career move right right right a segment v what we need to know the second world war ended more than half a century ago hundreds of vines have been written about it why did you choose to write I'm very I want you to know I'm happy you did but I must asked all the same why did you choose to write the storm of war well I was really fortunate in that I have found new information important new information in this book I there's a British businessman Gordian saya who's has an archive of a hundred thousand letters and papers and documents and photographs and things and books but vast numbers of unpublished diaries and in the course of and he never allowed any historians in so I'm the first historian to be able to use this and and there's an enormous amount that I've discovered there including the real and why Hitler stopped the Panzers above Dunkirk on the 24th of May 1940 and didn't capture danke which of course if he had would have meant that the British Expeditionary Force would not have been able to have got away from the beaches and and I found in these papers this letter from Major General Alfred Yertle Hitler's military operations chief that who explains that that the Fuhrer was expecting that the whole of the BEF and large parts of the French army was going to be captured in the next three days and that completely knocks up two pieces the conspiracy theory that Hitler didn't want to capture the BEF and wanted to make peace with Britain and didn't mind that they escaped back to Britain for example let me try a little revisionism on you Patrick Buchanan wrote a book called Churchill Hitler and the unnecessary war let me quote from Pat Buchanan's book just to see what you make of it what made a European war inevitable was not Hitler's occupation of Prague but Britain's guarantee to Poland had there been no war guarantee there would have been no British declaration of war on September 3rd there might have been no German invasion of France in May 1940 or ever there was nothing inevitable about Hitler's war in the West all right you've already acted I've debated against Pat in in Westminster in fact in London he is personally irresistible well most charming man you've ever miss but he talked complete tripe when it comes to the Second World War and and just to give you an idea of this of the 1820 people who turned up to my debate against him something like 1700 voted for me at the end and about 180 or so voted for Pat so let me explain that that it completely fails to take into account the psychology of Adolf Hitler the idea that he'd have been happy with Poland and would have stopped there does not take into account any of the key reasons why he attacked Russia his hatred of the Jews his desire for Lebensraum his desire to have a final reckoning with the with the Bolsheviks that would have been held him on further he also of course the Versailles Treaty and the hatred of everything to do with the Versailles Treaty was an absolutely central part of the Fuhrer principle and so of course he was ultimately going to clean the slate with France and also he had no right to invade Poland of course we have the right to guarantee Poland we didn't actually say that we were going to go to war for Czechoslovakia which we probably should have done and but it's absolutely fine to say if you invade a country then we will go to war with you and because you know the moral and the spiritual responsibility is entirely that of the man who who crosses the line not the person who draws the line well what do you make of the point I don't have the book in front of me it's been a while since I read it but Pat makes quite a lot of the point that Wilson Woodrow Wilson in Paris negotiating the treaty opens a box and out comes this notion of national legitimacy and so when they carve up Europe you end up with Germans in Czechoslovakia the so Dayton Germans were Germans yes and Danzig was an almost entirely German city and so Hitler's acting on in where we was wrong where we went wrong with Versailles was in not splitting up Germany the reason we had Germany so peaceful from 1945 has become a completely Pacific country is that a trivial if it was it was divided I mean Germany in 1815 was 365 states have a lovely place it was a wonderful place it was two from the moment that it actually became one state it once Prussia had established itself in the mid 19th century it went to war with Denmark with Austria with France and with us twice so actually if anything the Versailles Treaty wasn't hard enough right Andrew Europe today the Berlin wall is gone and yet the populations are aging and shrinking and since 1970 or 75 or so it depends a little bit on which statistics you're looking at European seem on average do you have chosen vacations rather than a longer period of work and their productivity is relative to that of the United States and certainly relative to that of Asia dropping unemployment has remained high chronically high in France unemployment a young among the young has remained at over 10 percent for a couple of decades now and now of course we have this crisis concerning the euro and and just tuned instead and all say large-scale Islamic immigration into Europe yes well on the scale which has never been seen before and yes European history and so is this the Europe for which the Allies fought well um I'm obviously an Englishman and do not consider myself to be a European and one of the best things that lady Thatcher did and some of her successors all of our successors did was to keep Britain out of the euro keep Sterling separate and so you know it's a tragedy for them but not thank God for Britain but yes Europe has got fundamental problems and the coalescing of Europe into one nation state has not helped because obviously different countries at different times of their economic development need different interest rates and you can't have that within a single currency as we're seeing with Greece and Portugal and others so it was a mad idea it might be coming towards its last gasp but the fact that an idea doesn't work and is a terrible idea it doesn't mean that it won't happen look at Bolshevism which for 75 years took hostage of of Europe into the wrong direction into one of history's great cul-de-sacs right soso well I guess what I'm getting at is this notion of Churchill talked about Christian civilization he talked speed that was the phrase he used that that that if Hitler were permitted to triumph it would mean the end of Christian civilization or at least a couple of speeches in which you use that phrase and you one just gets the feeling that somehow or other was it because of the act did was it somehow involved in the effort of the second war you get the feeling after the first world war that's something that there's been a smash-up of European civilization I might say it's hard where did where did things go wrong what would Churchill say if we could somehow revive him and they'd look at across the cutting be appalled wouldn't he German militarism in the run-up to the first world war there was no need they were already dominating the content continent economically they had the most successful economy in in Europe and the time including Bretton Woods and the Kaiser and his advisors did not need to unleash this horrific Cataclysm on Western civilization Christian civilization as you say and but but they had within them this inability to appreciate the true horrors of what war means which is astonishing considering they'd already started for the three M's you know earlier so it was ultra-nationalism it was militarism and fortunately is is in something that has been entirely burnt out of the German soul and you don't see it at all today a last question we're shooting today at Stanford where this year's graduating class will have been born after the end of the Cold War let alone the Second World War we want them all to read the storm of war why should they what is it that remains relevant about that experience to 22 year olds today well whole world has been shaped by the Cold War look at this re the Second World War look at the people who are sitting on the Security Council permanent members why should Russia France Britain America and China be there well they were all of them the victors of the Second World War every time you you look around the world you see constant reminders of the stories and the and the lessons of the dangers of appeasement the fact that you do have true evil coming up in the world and needs that which needs to be faced as well as the facts of course that these characters people like Winston Churchill and FDR and General brewer can General Patton and I can Montgomery know these are giants for any age and so the story in itself is something that is is quite mesmerizing in my VA andrew roberts author of the storm of war thank you very much thank you I'm Peter Robinson for uncommon knowledge thanks for joining us you

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Channel: HooverInstitution

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Keywords: HooverInstitutionUK, WWII, war, engagement, Germany, Allied, Powers, Nazi

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Length: 38min 15sec (2295 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2012

Reddit Comments

Am I the only one who thinks that what the field of military history needs the least is yet another history of World War II?

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/FranticGoat 📅︎︎ Nov 05 2013 🗫︎ replies