Len Deighton - Blood, Tears and Folly - An Objective Look at World War II

4 Airmen killed in the First World War

5 Aircraft production 1939–44

6 Average monthly Farenheit temperatures in four Soviet cities

7 Sources of German oil supplies in 1940

8 Japan’s Pearl Harbor carrier attack force

DOCUMENT Guidelines issued for the behaviour of German troops in England as part of the invasion play of 1940

The maps and drawings are by Denis Bishop. Permission to reproduce the photographs is acknowledged with thanks to the following sources: Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart (20); Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (13); E.C.P. Armées, France (5); Getty Images (1, 14 , 15); Imperial War Museum, London (8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 19); Robert Hunt Library/Mary Evans (18); SZ Photo/Mary Evans (2, 3, 6); Ullsteinbild/TopFoto (4, 7, 12).

I was lucky to be so early in my studies of the Second World War. Finding participants was not difficult: the eyewitnesses and the men who had done the fighting were mostly still young. The men who had commanded the battles and made the decisions that influenced them were no longer young. My great good fortune was in being able to talk to such senior figures as General Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe fighter chief, to Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand, the chief of staff to Field Marshal Montgomery, and to General Walther Nehring, who was chief of staff to General Rommel. (General Nehring was kind enough to write an Introduction for my book Blitzkrieg .) I also met with Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, a remarkable, and usefully frank, source of information about top-level decisions.

When the first edition of this book was ready to go to the printers I sat down with Tony Colwell and Steve Cox, editors who had supported and advised me through the years of writing it. It was the biggest and most demanding work I had ever undertaken and I knew that many of the truths I had uncovered would not bring universal joy. Tony and Steve had been tough critics. It was because they tested and challenged my theories and conclusions that I am now able to look with confidence at this reprinted version which remains as originally written.

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It is a national characteristic beloved of the British to see themselves as a small cultured island race of peaceful intentions, only roused when faced with bullies, and with a God-given mission to disarm cheats. Rather than subjugating and exploiting poorer people overseas, they prefer the image of emancipating them. English school history books invite us to rally with Henry V to defeat the overwhelming French army at Agincourt, or to join Drake in a leisurely game of bowls before he boards his ship to rout the mighty Armada and thwart its malevolent Roman Catholic king. The British also cherish their heroes when they are losers. The charge of the Light Brigade is seen as an honourable sacrifice rather than a crushing defeat for brave soldiers at the hands of their incompetent commanders. Disdaining technology, Captain Scott arrived second at the South Pole and perished miserably. Such legendary exploits were ingrained in the collective British mind when in 1939, indigent and unprepared, the country went to war and soon was hailing the chaotic Dunkirk evacuation as a triumph.

Delusions are usually rooted in history and all the harder to get rid of when they are institutionalized and seldom subjected to review. But delusions from the past do not beset the British mind alone. The Germans, the Russians, the Japanese and the Americans all have their myths and try to live up to them, often with tragic consequences. Yet Japan and Germany, with educational systems superior to most others in the world, and a generally high regard for science and engineering design, lost the war. Defeat always brings a cold shock of reality, and here was defeat with cold and hunger and a well-clothed and well-fed occupying army as a daily reminder that you must do better. The conquerors sat down and wrote their memoirs and bathed in the warm and rosy glow that only self-satisfaction provides.

Half-finished wartime projects, such as the United Nations, fluid and unsatisfactory frontiers and enforced allegiances suddenly froze as the war ended with the explosion of two atomic bombs. The ever-present threat of widespread nuclear destruction sent the great powers into a sort of hibernation that we called the Cold War. The division of the world into two camps was decided more by the building of walls, secret police and prison camps than by ideology. Expensively educated men and women betrayed their countrymen and, in the name of freedom, gave Stalin an atomic bomb and any other secrets they could lay their hands on. Only after the ice cracked half a century later could the world resume its difficult history.

But not everyone was in hibernation. With the former leaders of Germany, Italy and Japan disposed of as criminals, more criminal leaders came to power in countries far and wide. The Cold War that seemed to hold Europe’s violence in suspense actually exported it to places out of Western sight. The existence of Stalin’s prison camps was denied by those who needed Lenin and Marx as heroes. The massacre of Communists in Indonesia raised fewer headlines than Pol Pot’s year zero in Cambodia, but they were out on the periphery. Newspapers and television did little to counteract the artful management of news at which crooks and tyrants have become adept. Orthodontics and the hair-dryer have become vital to the achievement of political power.

The postwar world saw real threats to the democratic Western ideals for which so many had died. Is the European Community – so rigorously opposed to letting newsmen or the public see its working and decision-making – about to become that faceless bureaucratic machine that Hitler started to build? Is the Pacific already Japan’s co-prosperity sphere? Hasn’t the Muslim world already taken control of a major part of the world’s oil resources, and with the untold and unceasing wealth it brings created something we haven’t seen since the Middle Ages – a confident union of State and Religion?

Britain’s long tradition of greatly overestimating its own strength and skills leads it to underestimate foreign powers. Our Victorian heyday still dominates our national imagination and our island geography has often enabled us to avoid the consequences of grave miscalculations by our leaders. Such good fortune cannot continue indefinitely, and perhaps a more realistic look at recent history can point a way to the future that is not just ‘muddling through’.

In Germany in 1923 runaway inflation produced the chaos in which the Nazis flourished. Today the United States is very close to the position where even the total revenue from income tax will not pay the interest on its National Debt. 1While the Japanese enjoy one of the world’s highest saving rates, Americans are notoriously reluctant to put money into the bank. Furthermore Japan, with a population less than half that of the USA, employs 70,000 more scientists and engineers, uses seven times more industrial robots, and spends over 50 per cent more per capita on non-military research and development. 2

Hans Schmitt, who grew up in Nazi Germany, returned to his homeland as an officer of the American army and become professor of history at the University of Virgina, wrote in his memoirs: ‘Germany had taught me that an uncritical view of the national past generated an equally subservient acceptance of the present.’ 3It is difficult to understand what happened in the Second World War without taking into account the assumptions and ambitions of its protagonists, and the background from which they emerge. So in each part of this book I shall take the narrative far enough back in time to deal with some of the misconceptions that cloud both our preferred version of the war, and our present-day view of a world that always seems to misunderstand us.