Jeremy Black is Professor of History at Exeter University, and specialises in post-1500 military history, Britain in the 18th Century, international relations, cartographic history and newspaper history.  He is the author of a large number of books, and has lecture on a wide range of topics all around the world.  Here he wrires about two recently published works on differing subjects of the Second World War.

Germany and the Second World War. VII.  The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia 1943-1945.  By Horst Boog, Gerhard Krebs and Detlef Vogel.  Oxford University Press.  2006. 

The seventh in the impressive ten-volume series published by the German Research Institute for Military History, this volume has three sections, the longest, just over half the book, on ‘The strategic Air War in Europe and Air Defence of the Reich, 1943-1944’, by Boog, the second, on preparations for Overlord, the invasion and the conflict in the West until the end of the Battle of the Bulge, by Vogel, and the third, and shortest, on the war in the Pacific 1943-5, by Krebs.  As a history of World War Two, this is totally unsatisfactory with, for example, far too little on the Burma campaign and a scandalous failure to give due attention to the war in China.  As a treatment of Germany and the Second World War, the relative distribution is more explicable, although one wonders, from that perspective, why it is necessary to devote space to the operational history of the War in the Pacific.  Boog shows how Luftwaffe planning became increasingly grandiose and divorced from reality as the war progressed, with wishful thinking replacing sober calculation.  The urge to retaliate against Britain took precedence over attacks on Soviet armament manufacture.  The ‘Baby Blitz’, however, did not impair Allied preparations for the invasion and, instead, ensured that the Luftwaffe was not capable of significant counterblows when the invasion was launched.
Vogel argues that, despite a decline in the strike power of their navy and air force, the German position in Western Europe prior to Overlord was strong, and that there was no serious threat from the hostile population.  He attributes Allied success in Overlord in part to preparation, particularly in combined warfare and intelligence.  In the operational phase, however, he argues, a lack of command coordination hit the Allies, as did supply problems, and there is criticism of Montgomery.  Although they knew they had lost, the German commanders fought on, at great cost, because they wished to avoid a shameful defeat.  There is a tendency, seen for example in Max Hastings’ latest book, to praise German military effectiveness, but Vogel argues that senior officers tended increasingly to disregard military reality when they took decisions, and that this was very apparent during the Ardennes offensive.  In Vogel’s phrase, ‘Not content with underestimating the fighting qualities of the Allied troops, the Germans also underestimated how quickly the Allied staffs could react’.  The confused command structures of the Germans are criticised.  Nevertheless, German propaganda still managed to suggest to the people that the fate of the war was as yet undecided.
Krebs relates warmaking, strategy and politics, and his succinct account of Japanese strategy is particularly useful.  Repeated Japanese interest in a separate peace between Germany and the Soviet Union is discussed, but by late 1944 the Japanese suspected that Germany was seeking a separate peace with the Western powers, a far less desirable option for Japan.  Despite issues of balance, this is an impressive volume which provides much German material for non-German readers, although it is expensive and bulky and offers more to specialists than to the general reader.
World War Two: Global and Total Dimensions, review by Jeremy Black
A World at Total War.  Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945
Edited by ROGER CHICKERING, STIG FÖRSTER and BERND GREINER.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005

The far greater role of Japan and, to a lesser extent, China in World War Two than in World War One, in causes, course and consequences, helped ensure that the later struggle was more truly global in character.  This is signified by the choice of 1937 rather than 1939 as the starting point for the study.  Nevertheless, as Gerhard Weinberg makes clear in ‘Total War: The Global Dimensions of Conflict’, it was the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 that really started the global character of World War Two.  He points out that the participation of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa guaranteed this, and that the wideranging nature of German commerce raiding underlined this global character.  On the other hand, the beginning of large-scale hostilities in the Pacific was due to the Japanese attack on the USA.  Furthermore, in terms of new entrants into hostilities, Hitler’s unnecessary decision to declare war on the USA was important.  The USA, in response, declared war on Germany on 11 December 1941, as did Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Haiti; Honduras and El Salvador following the next day, and Panama, Mexico and Brazil in 1942.  Other states delayed, Bolivia and Colombia until 1943, and Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela until 1945.  Other late entrants were Liberia in 1944, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey in 1945.
Of these states, Brazil played the biggest combat role, sending 25,000 troops to Italy, but other states still played an important role by providing raw materials, such as oil from Venezuela, as well as air and naval bases, and by allowing use of their air space.  New airbases were developed by, and for, the Americans in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Panama.  These bases were used to oppose the destructive U-boat campaign in the Caribbean, as well as against U-boat operations in the Atlantic.  The war was important to Latin America for economic development.
The subject of the book, however, is total war, not global war, and that is presented in a series of chapters, grouped respectively as The Dimensions of War, Combat, Mobilizing Economies, Mobilizing Societies, The War against Noncombatants and Criminal War, that are essentially studies of the major participants, rather than broad-ranging considerations of aspects of the war.  Thus, John Barber’s chapter on women in the Soviet war effort, while impressive, does not glance at the situation in other states, including, for example, Finland, which only fought the Soviet Union. Even among the major participants, there is an over-concentration on the Soviet Union, the USA, Britain and Germany.  Japan receives relatively little attention, although Louise Young’s ‘Ideologies of Difference and the Turn to Atrocity: Japan’s War on China’ is valuable, while China itself is largely ignored.  This is unfortunate, although recent work by Hans van de Ven helps fill the gap.
As studies in particular aspects of total war, however, the volume is very useful.  It represents the culmination of a series of conference-volumes and offers high-grade discussion both of aspects of World War Two and of the vexed issue of total war.  There are some important qualifications of the latter, not least the determination of wartime populations to return to peacetime ‘normality’: despite the claims of some commentators, there was scant sense among the public that peace and war were simply aspects of conflict or different operational forms of a common strategy.  Dennis Showalter, in a masterful study of the USA, also brings out the extent to which the USA waged a global war but one that was not really total.  As he points out, mobilizing hostility had limited effect at best.  In particular, to most Americans, even those in uniform, the Germans remained throughout the war an abstract enemy.  To Showalter, because the conflict was not a war for the direct survival of the USA, its institutions, and its people, it was not total.  Furthermore, national mobilization did not press hard on domestic living standards.
A far more total account emerges in Jürgen Förster’s discussion of German war aims including the Holocaust.  Hans-Heinrich Nolte provides a discussion of some of the consequences on the ground in considering partisan war in Belorussia.  German policy helped cause partisan resistance, and this included Jewish opposition.  Richard Overy presents a characteristically perceptive analysis of Allied bombing and the destruction of German cities, although he remains overly inclined to underrate the extent to which the German use of terror bombing from the outset – against Warsaw – ensures that there was scant equivalence between the two sides.  Furthermore, the extent to which the V-weapon guidance systems ensured that only widespread and random urban destruction was possible for German weaponry is worth underlining.  Robert Messer brings in the morality of the use of atomic weaponry against Japan.  He argues that Hiroshima was the logical culmination of the Allied strategic bombing campaign and the altered moral context of total war.  This first-rate collection offers much, but there is still room for a study of the global dimension of the war.
JEREMY BLACK
University of Exeter