Expert answer:WW2 Pearl Harbor Wannsee Wartime Strategy
Solved by verified expert:1. Why did the Japanese government decide to attack Pearl Harbor? Why wasn’t the United States better prepared?
2. How did the Nazis at Wannsee rationalize their actions? Why didn’t the rest of the world intervene sooner to stop the holocaust?
3. Analyze the importance of America’s decision to “island hop” across the Pacific. Why was this decision important to American wartime strategy? What affect did this decision have on Japanese wartime strategy?- Minimum 100 words per question, assignment total 300 (but should answer all questions)- Pages 240-309- Book Attached
second_world_war___keegan__john.pdf
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Foreword
Prologue
1 Every man a soldier
2 Fomenting world war
Part I
THE WAR IN THE WEST 1940-1943
3 The Triumph of Blitzkrieg
4 Air Battle: the Battle of Britain
5 War supply and the Battle of the Atlantic
Part II
THE WAR IN THE EAST 1941-1943
6 Hitler’s strategic dilemma
7 Securing the eastern springboard
8 Airborne battle: Crete
9 Barbarossa
10 War production
11 Crimean summer, Stalingrad winter
Part III
THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC 1941-1943
12
13
14
15
16
Tojo’s strategic dilemma
From Pearl Harbor to Midway
Carrier battle: Midway
Occupation and repression
The war for the islands
Part IV
THE WAR IN THE WEST 1940-1945
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Churchill’s strategic dilemma
Three wars in Africa
Italy and the Balkans
Overlord
Tank battle: Falaise
Strategic bombing
The Ardennes and the Rhine
Part V
THE WAR IN THE EAST 1943-1945
24
25
26
27
28
Stalin’s strategic dilemma
Kursk and the recapture of western Russia
Resistance and espionage
The Vistula and the Danube
City battle: the siege of Berlin
Part VI
THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC 1943-1945
29 Roosevelt’s strategic dilemma
30 Japan’s defeat in the south
31 Amphibious battle: Okinawa
32 Super-weapons and the defeat of Japan
Epilogue
33 The legacy of the Second World War
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Copyright Page
About the Author
John Keegan was for many years Senior Lecturer in Military History at the
Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and is now Defence Editor of the Daily
Telegraph. He is the author of many books, including The Face of Battle, The
Mask of Command, Six Armies in Normandy, The Battle for History, Battle at
Sea and A History of Warfare, which was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize.
The Second World War is his sixth book to be published by Pimlico.
John Keegan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received the
OBE in the Gulf War Honours List.
The Second World War
John Keegan
FOREWORD
The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought
across six of the world’s seven continents and all its oceans. It killed fifty
million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or
body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilisation.
No attempt to relate its causes, course and consequences in the space of a
single volume can fully succeed. Rather than narrate it as a continuous
sequence of events, therefore, I decided from the outset to divide the story of
the war into four topics – narrative, strategic analysis, battle piece and ‘theme
of war’ – and to use these four topics to carry forward the history of the six
main sections into which the war falls: the War in the West, 1939-43; the
War in the East, 1941-3; the War in the Pacific, 1941-3; the War in the West,
1943-5; the War in the East, 1943-5; and the War in the Pacific, 1943-5. Each
section is introduced by a piece of strategic analysis, centring on the figure to
whom the initiative most closely belonged at that time – in order, Hitler,
Tojo, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt – and then contains, besides the
appropriate passages of narrative, both a relevant ‘theme of war’ and a battle
piece. Each of the battle pieces has been chosen to illustrate the nature of a
particular form of warfare characteristic of the conflict. They are air warfare
(the Battle of Britain), airborne warfare (the Battle of Crete), carrier warfare
(Midway), armoured warfare (Falaise), city warfare (Berlin) and amphibious
warfare (Okinawa). The ‘themes of war’ include war supply, war production,
occupation and repression, strategic bombing, resistance and espionage, and
secret weapons.
It is my hope that this scheme of treatment imposes a little order for the
reader on the chaos and tragedy of the events I relate.
PROLOGUE
ONE
Every Man a Soldier
The First [World] War explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far as
one event causes another,’ wrote A. J. P. Taylor in his Origins of the Second
World War. ‘The link between the two wars went deeper. Germany fought
specifically in the Second War to reverse the verdict of the first and to
destroy the settlement that followed it.’
Not even those who most vehemently oppose Mr Taylor’s version of interwar history will take great issue with those judgements. The Second World
War, in its origin, nature and course, is inexplicable except by reference to
the First; and Germany – which, whether or not it is to be blamed for the
outbreak, certainly struck the first blow – undoubtedly went to war in 1939 to
recover the place in the world it had lost by its defeat in 1918.
However, to connect the Second World War with the First is not, if the
former is accepted as the cause of the latter, to explain either of them. Their
common roots must be sought in the years preceding 1914, and that search
has harnessed the energies of scholars for much of this century. Whether they
looked for causes in immediate or less proximate events, their conclusions
have had little in common. Historians of the winning side have on the whole
chosen to blame Germany, in particular Germany’s ambition for world
power, for the outbreak of 1914 and hence to blame Germany again –
whatever failing attaches to the appeasing powers – for that of 1939. Until the
appearance of Fritz Fischer’s heretical revision of the national version in
1967, German historians generally sought to rebut the imputation of ‘war
guilt’ by distributing it elsewhere. Marxist historians, of whatever nationality,
have overflown the debate, depicting the First World War as a ‘crisis of
capitalism’ in its imperialist form, by which the European working classes
were sacrificed on the altar of competition between decaying capitalist
systems; they are consistent in ascribing the outbreak of the Second World
War to the Western democracies’ preference for gambling on Hitler’s
reluctance to cross the brink rather than accept Soviet help to ensure that he
did not.
These views are irreconcilable. At best they exemplify the judgement that
‘history is the projection of ideology into the past’. There can indeed be no
common explanation of why the world twice bound itself to the wheel of
mass war-making as long as historians disagree about the logic and morality
of politics and whether the first is the same as the second.
A more fruitful, though less well-trodden, approach to the issue of causes
lies along another route: that which addresses the question of how the two
World Wars were made possible rather than why they came about. For the
instances of outbreak are themselves overridingly important in neither case. It
was the enormity of the events which flowed from the upheavals of August
1914 and September 1939 that has driven historians to search so long for
reasons to explain them. No similar impetus motivates the search for the
causes of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 or the Franco-Prussian War of
1870, critical as those conflicts were in altering the balance of power in
nineteenth-century Europe. Moreover, it is safe to say that had Germany won
the critical opening battle of the First World War, that of the Marne in
September 1914, as she might well have done – thereby sparing Europe not
only the agony of the trenches but all the ensuing social, economic and
diplomatic embitterment – the libraries devoted to the international relations
of Germany, France, Britain, Austria-Hungary and Russia before 1914 would
never have been written.
However, because it was not Germany but France, with British help, who
won the Marne, the First – and so the Second – World War became different
from all wars previously fought, different in scale, intensity, extensiveness
and material and human cost. They also came, by the same measure, closely
to resemble each other. It is those differences and those similarities which
invest the subject of their causation with such apparent importance. But that
is to confuse accident with substance. The causes of the World Wars lay no
deeper and were no more or less complex than the causes of any other pair of
conjoined and closely sequential conflicts. Their nature, on the other hand,
was without precedent. The World Wars killed more people, consumed more
wealth and inflicted more suffering over a wider area of the globe than any
previous war. Mankind had grown no more wicked between 1815, the
terminal date of the last great bout of hostilities between nations, and 1914;
and certainly no sane and adult European alive in the latter year would have
wished, could he have foreseen it, the destruction and misery that the crisis of
that August was to set in train. Had it been foretold that the consequent war
was to last four years, entail the death of 10 million young men, and carry fire
and sword to battlefields as far apart as Belgium, northern Italy, Macedonia,
the Ukraine, Transcaucasia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Africa and China; and
that a subsequent war, fought twenty years later by the same combatants over
exactly the same battlefields and others besides, was to bring the death of 50
million people, every individual and collective impulse to aggression, it
might be thought, would have been stilled in that instant.
That thought speaks well for human nature. It also speaks against the way
the world had gone between 1815 and 1914. A sane and adult European alive
in the latter year might have deplored with every fibre of his civilised being
the prospect foretold to him of the holocausts that were to come. To do so,
however, he would have had to deny the policy, ethos and ultimately the
human and material nature of the state – whichever state that was – to which
he belonged. He would even have had to deny the condition of the world
which surrounded him. For the truth of twentieth-century European
civilisation was that the world it dominated was pregnant with war. The
enormous wealth, energy and population increase released by Europe’s
industrial revolution in the nineteenth century had transformed the world. It
had created productive and exploitative industries – foundries, engineering
works, textile factories, shipyards, mines – larger by far than any at which the
intellectual fathers of the industrial revolution, the economic rationalists of
the eighteenth century, had guessed. It had linked the productive regions of
the world with a network of communications – roads, railways, shipping
lanes, telegraph and telephone cables – denser than even the most prescient
enthusiast of science and technology could have foreseen. It had generated
the riches to increase tenfold the population of historic cities and to plant
farmers and graziers on millions of acres which had never felt the bite of the
plough or the herdsman’s tread. It had built the infrastructure – schools,
universities, libraries, laboratories, churches, missions – of a vibrant, creative
and optimistic world civilisation. Above all, and in dramatic and menacing
counterpoint to the century’s works of hope and promise, it had created
armies, the largest and potentially most destructive instruments of war the
world had ever seen.
The militarisation of Europe
The extent of Europe’s militarisation in the nineteenth century is difficult to
convey by any means that catch its psychological and technological
dimensions as well as its scale. Scale itself is elusive enough. Something of
its magnitude may be transmitted by contrasting the sight Friedrich Engels
had of the military organisation of the independent North German city-states
in which he served his commercial apprenticeship in the 1830s with the force
which the same German military districts supplied to the Kaiser of the unified
German Reich on the eve of the First World War. Engels’s testimony is
significant. A father of Marxist theory, he never diverged from the view that
the revolution would triumph only if the proletariat succeeded in defeating
the armed forces of the state. As a young revolutionary he pinned his hopes
of that victory on the proletariat winning the battle of the barricades; as an old
and increasingly dispirited ideologue, he sought to persuade himself that the
proletariat, by then the captive of Europe’s conscription laws, would liberate
itself by subverting the states’ armies from within. His passage from the
hopes of youth to the doubts of old age can best be charted by following the
transformation of the Hanseatic towns’ troops during his lifetime. In August
1840 he rode for three hours from his office in Bremen to watch the
combined manoeuvres of the armies of Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck free city
and the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. Together they formed a force a regiment
– say, to err on the side of generosity, 3000 – men strong. In the year of his
death in 1895 the same cities provided most of the 17th and part of the 19th
Divisions of the German Army, together with a cavalry and artillery regiment
– at least a fourfold increase. That accounts for only first-line troops,
conscripts enrolled and under arms. Behind the active 17th and 19th
Divisions stood the 17th and 19th Reserve Divisions to which the Hanseatic
cities would contribute an equal number of reservists – trained former
conscripts – on mobilisation. And behind the reserve divisions stood the
Landwehr of older ex-conscripts who in 1914 would provide half of another
division again. Taken together, these units represent a tenfold increase in
strength between 1840 and 1895, far outstripping contemporary population
growth.
This enormous multiplication of force was nevertheless in the first instance
a function of demographic change. The population of most states destined to
fight the First World War doubled and in some cases tripled during the
nineteenth century. Thus the population of Germany, within the boundaries
of 1871, increased from 24 million in 1800 to 57 million in 1900. The British
population increased from 16 million in 1800 to 42 million in 1900; but for
the Irish famine and emigration to the United States and the colonies,
producing a net outflow of about 8 million, it would have tripled. The
population of Austria-Hungary, allowing for frontier changes, increased from
24 million to 46 million; of Italy, within the 1870 frontiers, from 19 million
to 29 million, despite a net outflow of perhaps 6 million emigrants to North
and South America. Belgium’s population grew from 2.5 to 7 million; that of
European Russia between the Urals and the western frontier of 1941 nearly
tripled, from 36 to 100 million. Only two of the combatant states, France and
the Ottoman empire, failed to show similar increases. The French population,
once the largest in Europe, rose only from 30 to 40 million and chiefly
through extended longevity; the birthrate remained almost static – the result,
in Professor William McNeill’s view, of Napoleon’s returning warriors
bringing home techniques of birth control learned on campaign. The
population of Turkey within its present frontiers scarcely increased at all; it
was 24 million in 1800 and 25 million in 1900.
The French and Turkish cases, though falling outside the demographic
pattern, are nevertheless significant in explaining it. The increased longevity
of the French was due to improved standards of living and public health, the
outcome of the application of science to agriculture, medicine and hygiene.
The failure of the Turkish population to increase had an exactly contrary
explanation: the poor yields of traditional farming and incidence of disease in
a society without doctors ensured that population, despite high birth-rates,
remained at a static level. Whenever increased agricultural output (or input)
combined with high birth-rates and improved hygiene, as they did almost
everywhere in Europe in the nineteenth century, the effect on population size
was dramatic. In England, the centre of the nineteenth-century economic
miracle, it was spectacular. Despite a massive emigration of the population
from the countryside to the towns, overcrowded and often jerry-built, the
number of the English increased by 100 per cent in the first half and by 75
per cent in the second half of the century. Sewer-building, which ensured the
elimination of cholera from 1866 and of most other water-borne diseases
soon after, and vaccination, which when it was made compulsory in 1853
eliminated smallpox, sharply reduced infant mortality and lengthened the life
expectancy of the adult population; death from infectious disease declined by
nearly 60 per cent between 1872 and 1900. Improved agricultural yields from
fertilised and fallowed fields, and, in particular, the import of North
American grain and refrigerated Australasian meat, produced larger, stronger
and healthier people. Their intake of calories was increased by the
cheapening of luxuries such as tea, coffee and especially sugar, which made
grain staples more palatable and diet more varied.
The combined effect of these medical and dietary advances on growing
populations was not only to increase the size of the contingents of young men
liable each year for conscription (classes, as the French labelled them) – by
an average of 50 per cent, for example, in France between 1801 and 1900 –
but to make them better suited, decade on decade, for military service. There
is an apparently irreducible military need for a marching soldier to bear on
his body about 50 lb of extraneous weight – pack, rifle and ammunition. The
larger and stronger the soldier, the more readily can he carry such a load the
desirable marching norm of twenty miles a day. In the eighteenth century the
French army had typically found its source of such fit men among the towndwelling artisan class rather than the peasantry. The peasant, physically
undernourished and socially doltish, rarely made a suitable soldier; he was
undisciplined, prone to disease and liable to pine to death when plucked from
his native heath. It was these shortcomings which prompted Marx a hundred
years later to dismiss the peasantry as ‘irredeemable’ for revolutionary
purposes. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the peasant populations of
Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia had so much improved in
physique that they were regularly supplying to their national armies a
proportion of new conscripts or classes large enough to give Marx the lie. His
analysis may have been skewed by his standpoint in England, where largescale emigration to the towns left only the least enterprising under the thumb
of squire and parson. In the continental lands, which were industrialising
more slowly than England – the German rural population in 1900 was still 49
per cent of the total – it was the countryside which yielded the classes of
large, strong young men out of which the great nineteenth-century armies
were built.
If the new population surplus yielded by better diet, drugs and drains
increased the European armies’ recruiting pool, it was the nineteenth-century
states’ enhanced powers of head-counting and tax-gathering which ensured
that recruits could be found, fed, paid, housed, equipped and transported to
war. The institution of regular census-taking – in France in 1801, Belgium in
1829, Germany in 1853, Austria-Hungary in 1857, Italy in 1861 – accorded
recruiting authorities the data they needed to identify and docket potential
recruits; with it died the traditional expedients of haphazard impressment,
cajolery, bribery and press-ganging which had raised the ancien régime
armies from those not fleet enough of thought or foot to escape the recruiting
sergeant. Tax lists, electoral registers and school rolls documented the
conscript’s whereabouts – the grant of the vote and the introduction of free
education for all entailed a limitation as well as an enlargement of the
individual’s liberties. By 1900 every German reservist, for example, was
obliged to possess a discharge pape …
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