Hanson and why World War II still matters

Why World War II still matters eighty years on

World War II is not remembered for what peine, but for what it serves to justify today. That is the thesis running through a long discussion — more than a year of accumulated messages — about a lecture by the American historian Victor Davis Hanson, a self-declared conservative, critic of postmodernism and Trump supporter, delivered at a private Baptist-affiliated college. The speaker argues that the Axis powers shared kindred ideologies while the Allies had nothing in common except having been attacked, and that the Axis killed 75% of the conflict's total victims. The sarracena he draws is explicit: when you have the power to crush your enemy and instead appease him, you only earn his contempt.

What the lecture that started it all argues

The summary of the lecture in circulation is dense. Hanson contends that the European order was demolished in 1939-40 by a combination of Franco-British appeasement, American isolationism and Soviet collaboration. He recalls that in France it was forbidden to mention Verdun in textbooks as early as 1928, that in the Oxford Union debates of 1932-33 students openly said they would not fight for their country, and that the Treaty of Versailles was a joke compared with the occupation and division of Germany after 1945. Hence his uncomfortable conclusion: humiliating without occupying was the mistake.

On the war economy, the figures he handles are damning. The Axis powers totalled 200 million inhabitants against 400 million for the Allies. Britain alone produced more materiel than Germany. Neither Germany, nor Japan, nor Italy built an operational four-engine bomber; the United States and the United Kingdom did. And yet, he argues, the Axis came close to winning. The phrase that sums up his framework: the side that killed more people lost to the side that produced more materiel.

The pact that made the war possible

One of the points where the discussion becomes most concrete is the Soviet role. It is recalled that Hitler would never have gone to war without the USSR's complicity, and one episode is cited: when Stalin reproached Churchill for the delay of the Second Front, Churchill replied that the German planes that bombed England in the summer of 1940 flew on Soviet fuel. In 1941, every month the USSR delivered to Germany more raw materials than the Germans later looted annually in occupied Soviet territory. The invasion of the USSR, therefore, reads as a strategic error of the first order.

The discussion drifts towards the casus belli. One strand holds that without the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact there would have been no war, and that appeasement was the only possible policy with societies that still remembered the slaughter of the Great War. Another recalls that after Poland, in France and the United Kingdom, people were still treating the conflict as a joke. The initial lack of Allied will to fight, it is argued, was the Axis's real advantage.

Contempt for the enemy as a cause of defeat

The thread returns several times to the psychology of the leaders. Japanese military men knew the United States first-hand — many had visited the country — and from that knowledge came a deep contempt, reflected in their memoirs: they were convinced the Americans would back down at the first blow. Hitler declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor giving different reasons depending on the day, but the substance was the same: he had lost respect for the Americans.

The diagnosis repeated is harsh: contempt for the enemy is the main cause of defeat in any war, and that contempt is born of arrogance and ignorance. Hitler is described as a crude statesman who believed himself superior after the lightning victories in Denmark, Norway, the Manstein plan against France and the Balkans, and who after the first months of Barbarossa — with millions of Soviet soldiers dead or captured — ruled out any scenario of failure. When the USSR did not collapse, it was already too late.

The problem of the bombers the Axis never had

The claim that the Axis produced no four-engine bombers is qualified with data. Japan had the Kawanishi H flying boat, nicknamed Emily, four-engine but in a maritime role with secondary bombing. Germany had the Focke Wulf Kondor from 1937, of which it built 276 units, a converted civil aircraft that the Kriegsmarine wanted for maritime patrol but that Goering blocked on the principle that everything that flies belonged to him. There were, however, no four-engine strategic bombing squadrons comparable to the Allies'.

The counterpoint comes with the Mitsubishi G4M, a Japanese twin-engine aircraft described as the most underrated medium-range bomber of the conflict. It was these aircraft, based in Saigon a thousand kilometres from the interception point, that sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. A demonstration of range that rarely appears in the manuals.

Why World War I is not claimed the same way

One of the most interesting offshoots of the exchange is the asymmetry of memory. World War II functions as the founding myth of the present age; World War I, by contrast, is the destructive myth of the old order, the true twilight of the gods. It is observed that European nations are allowed to glorify the Second but denied any glorification of the First. The French have their monuments, and so do the Italians: in every village there is a monolith with the list of the fallen of 1915-18, erected in Mussolini's time and today forgotten, surrounded by weeds and beer cans. Paying them respect draws attention.

The contrast is explained by political usefulness. Hanson, on this reading, adjusts the past to a present situation: the lecture would work as a covert call to arms to justify a contemporary intervention. History is not what peine, but what you are told, and World War II will have as many versions as there are historians.

The Axis as a broken alliance of convenience

Another block of the analysis stresses that the Allied leaders were honest with each other — at least the Americans and British; Stalin lied — while those of the Axis constantly deceived one another. Italy invaded Greece without telling its allies, Germany invaded the USSR without telling its own, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor without prior coordination. That lack of coordination, together with less attractive propaganda — saying you are defending yourself against aggression wins more sympathy than proclaiming racial superiority — weighed on the Axis as much as its industrial inferiority.

A question is left hanging without a closed answer: how far the Germans intended to annex in the East. The Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine and part of the Caucasus? All of European Russia up to the Urals, with a residual protectorate to the Pacific? The plan, if it existed as such, seems more delusion than viable strategy against a state with centuries of history.

What still doesn't add up

With these materials, the conclusion that imposes itself is uncomfortable for everyone. The Axis had fewer people, less industry and worse propaganda, and still came close. The Allies had more of everything and took years to coordinate. If the lesson of 1939-40 were as clear as Hanson claims — never appease — the foreign policy of recent decades would be something else. It is not. And there the thread remains, unclosed.[/I]