The Inferno of World War II

by Conroy

“War is prodigiously wasteful, because much of the effort made by rival combatants proves futile, and the price is paid in lives.”

“Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the tribulations that hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension.”

“An average of 27,000 perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict.”

- Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War,   1939-1945

It seems that seventy years after the events of World War II – the greatest calamity in human history – historians have gained a better understanding of the facts and effects of the conflict than anyone, be they leaders, generals, soldiers, civilians, or victims, had during the war or in the immediate post war period. Max Hastings is one of these historians and his many works on World War II stand out among the best histories of the conflict. To this list can be added his latest work, Inferno:The World at War, 1939-1945, an ambitious single-volume overview of the war.

Readers of this blog may remember an earlier post where I praised Hastings’ previous two books, Armageddon and Retribution, which respectively covered the final year of the war in Europe and the Pacific. As with those works, Hastings focus in Inferno is not on the Allied and Axis leadership, notable generals, or even the broad goals and war strategy. Instead, he provides a “bottom-up” approach that conveys the experience of war, what it was like to be a rifleman in battle, a civilian under aerial bombardment, or victim of pillage and rape (a ubiquitous civilian experience in many theaters of the war), to provide a few examples.

As Hastings notes it is impossible to present a blow-by-blow account of World War II, an immensely large and far-reaching subject, in 800-odd pages. In fact, a work ten times as long would be insufficient. Instead, he set out to provide an impression of events as they unfolded starting with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and ending with the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay six years later. He has succeeded. The quotations provided at the top of this post give a sense of the massive horror of the war, and indeed for a modern reader it’s very difficult to understand how such a large proportion of the world’s people could have endured under the stress of war for so long. No book can fully capture this reality, but Inferno does it as well as any. And it does this through largely new or never before used first-hand accounts, diaries, letters, etc. These sources add a gratifying freshness to the book.

Hastings also manages to provide some new insights that have been revealed through decades of studying World War II. There are no sacred cows in Hastings’ telling of the war and he expertly separates fact from myth and legend. This is useful and appropriate. Wars gather their own momentum and this was especially true for World War II. History (with a capital H) has largely identified the correct decisions from the terrible blunders, the necessary sacrifices from the useless wastes, the effective leaders from the incompetent, and the victims and criminals. But Hastings goes one step further, correctly assigning evil to those to which it belonged and separating it from the terrible logic of war, where horrible things happen to many people by all sides. There no moral equivocation with Hastings, only clarity.

I recommend this work highly, it presents the war as well as any single-volume history is likely to. Hastings book is both concise and comprehensive, but to better present Hastings’ mastery of the subject, I’ve provided a series of quotations and passages below that demonstrate two aspects of the book: the actual experience of the war – the bottom-up view, and the many blunders made by the Germany – the broad evolution of the War.

For me, the only real counter-factual worth pondering about World War II is this: Could Germany have won the war? That’s an important question mostly because such an outcome would have been catastrophic for most of Europe’s population and would have set subsequent history in a radically different direction (and thinking from a modern perspective, a very loathsome and bizarre direction). There is much debate about this issue, the forces arrayed against the Axis were enormously powerful, but surely the many and massive mistakes made by Germany (and Japan) contributed substantially to the Axis defeat.

Dwindling Ranks

by Conroy

American ground crew like GMGF Jim

Just this past week America marked the 70^th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; seventy years, a lifetime ago. This weekend my girlfriend’s maternal grandfather, Jim (hereafter referred to as GMGF Jim), will celebrate his 92^nd birthday. These two occasions, the first a date of great historical significance, are separated by only a handful of days, and connected by the passing years.

The attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into World War II. Americans responded by throwing themselves into the war effort, including millions of servicemen destined for all parts of the globe, in what would be the most impressive display of military force in history [1]. One of those men was a young GMGF Jim, in his early 20s, who enlisted in the U.S. Army, and was assigned to the new United States Army Air Force (USAAF), the predecessor of the modern USAF. When I met GMGF Jim in the middle of last year I was curious to hear more about his service, having learned only snippets from my girlfriend. Unfortunately, his advancing age has robbed him of most of his hearing, which means that conversations with him proceed in bursts of short shouted questions, often repeated, and followed by equally short shouted replies. All of this leads to a rather halting dialogue frequently waylaid by misunderstandings, incomplete details, and the basic ineffectiveness that disjointed rhythm has on communication. I would relate it to a phone call where there’s a long delay and you constantly have false starts, long pauses, and overlapping talking. It just doesn’t work well.

Two Experiences
I tell you this as a preface to what I’ve gathered of GMGF Jim’s war service; I think I have the broad elements correct, but the details may be iffy. He set sail from wherever basic training was, maybe his home of Baltimore, destined for Panama City, Florida. But due to some sort of mix-up, the ship instead went 1,500 miles too far south, to Panama…the country…in Central America. I know what you’re thinking: That can’t be right? Which was pretty much my reaction, but I pressed the point with GMGF Jim a couple of times and received that same answer (all I could do was shake my head and say “okay”). So, once in Panama, the local American military commanders had to do something with a ship full of recruits. Fortunately, there was a rather important strategic asset in the area, the Panama Canal. The Canal needed guarding and part of that duty fell to the USAAF. After a short stay on land, GMGF Jim and his fellow shipmates were sent through the Canal and sailed southwest to the Galapagos Islands [2]. There the USAAF established abase at Baltra Island. Planes from this base patrolled for enemy submarines and protected Allied (and neutral) shipping on the western approaches to the Canal. GMGF Jim spent the rest of the war as a member of the ground crew servicing planes.

Given the general danger of being in the military during World War II, I consider getting stationed in Darwin’s quiet balmy islands to have been a pretty plum assignment. Not bad considering it was a mistake. But it was work and it was far from home. Most of war is extended boredom and I’m sure GMGF Jim had moments of the tropical doldrums. Still, it’s an interesting story, and raises a few questions: He really ended up in Panama instead of Florida? The vast American military-logistic system was capable of misplacing an entire ship? There were on-site ad hoc solutions that ended up lasting the entire war? Whatever happened in Panama City when his ship didn’t arrive? What about the men originally slotted for Baltra Island, where they there as well? It all strikes me as a semi-comical combination of Catch-22 and Guard of Honor [3]. It’s also something I was never likely to learn without hearing it from the mouth of the man who lived it.

My maternal grandfather, Jack, also served in World War II as an artilleryman in Europe. He died fifteen years ago at the age of 79. In the last six years of his life his mind was decimated by Alzheimer’s, but even late in his life, long after most of his recent memories were lost, he was still able to tell me of his time in Europe. His service was more typical of what we think of as the American experience, war in Europe, fighting Germans through France, etc., though I gathered from him that he didn’t have any close calls on the battlefield.

Visiting History: The Battleship North Carolina

by Conroy

USS North Carolina

My dad and I, ever the enthusiasts of the historically interesting, were driving from Baltimore to Wilmington, North Carolina, on a quick sojourn to see the USS North Carolina [1], a World War II era battleship. It was early March, and our destination was more than a little motivated by my desire to take a short trip somewhere south (we were only just emerging from an unusually cold Maryland winter). Visiting the ship would allow us to interact with an actual historical artifact, not a battlefield or a monument, but a real object, something that had been "there," something we could see, and touch, and walk through.

In late afternoon, and after nine hours on the road, we arrived in Wilmington, which is located in the far southeast [2] of the state, along the Cape Fear River and just a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean. The city's population has nearly doubled in the last two decades, but even by a generous assessment it remains mid-size. On first view it makes little impression, there's no distinctive skyline -- in fact no skyline -- on the approach to town. There's little sense that you've actually arrived anywhere, just the flat coastal greenery broken up by the standard low-rise, low-density development characteristic of American suburbia. However, we found our way by twists and turns to the center of the city, which included a quaint downtown with an abundance of antebellum architecture situated on the east bank of the river. And from that vantage point we spied the impressive silhouette of the North Carolina, cozily berthed in a narrow cove on the river's west bank. It was getting late, the ship was dark against the fading sun, but at least we knew where we were going the next day.

Central Wilmington

Wilmington is an interesting location for the ship, now a National Historic Landmark. As North Carolina's only real seaport, it makes sense for the ship to be docked there, but Wilmington is a provincial city, out of the way -- you have to want to go to Wilmington to end up there. In a way that's a fitting place for the North Carolina, a fair analogue to the role it played in history.



 ---

USS North Carolina
The next day, Saturday, was exquisite. The sun was what meteorologists like to term, brilliant; the sky a clear cerulean. The air held the first hints of vernal warmth. In late morning, we crossed the river just downstream of the ship, but we didn't get a good view until we pulled into the parking lot. We were among the first there. Looking from up close, it's hard not to be impressed with the North Carolina. Our first perspective was of the ship's profile. The hull sweeps in a majestic arc, parallel to the water at the stern and rising to its exaggerated wave-splitting bow. The busy but balanced superstructure rises from the center of the hull and is guarded closely by three massive gun turrets, two fore and one aft of the superstructure. The ship is painted with a fresh dazzle scheme of alternating gunmetal gray and bluish white, which was meant as a form of camouflage...though I doubt the North Carolina could be missed. The ship is more than two football fields long and its radar tower rises to 200 feet above the waterline. Large enough that you have to turn your head to see it all even from a hundred paces away.

One must pass through a visitor's center [3] (and gift shop) to board the ship. There's a gangway from the visitor's center to the stern-half port-side deck (the ship faces west). The cove where the North Carolina is moored looks like it was made to fit the ship (and it probably was dredged for this purpose). Indeed, the water is so still and likely has received so much sedimentation since the North Carolina was towed into position fifty years ago, that the massive hull probably rests on the bottom. My dad labeled it, "a mud hole," [4] and it does seem incongruously narrow and shallow and confining for the mass of the ship. The deck surface isn't steel, but teak [5], a wood durable enough to stand up to the corrosive effects of seawater and that doesn't get slippery when wet. It's a pleasant sandy brown color, which complements the gray and white of the rest of the ship. Once on board, everything looks even bigger than from the shore. It looks like what it was designed to be, an engine of war.

The End of World War II

by Conroy

As my readers will learn, I am something of an amateur World War II historian. It is my considered opinion, one that I share with more educated and experienced men, that the cataclysmic conflict was not only the overarching event of the last century, but perhaps the most significant calamity in human history. The world that existed before 1939 was irrevocably swept away and a new course established that has directly shaped the global community of the present.

Since the end of the War 65 years ago, it has been the subject of countless histories, biographies, novels, films, etc. Interest today is still keen. And in that vein, I want to praise the complementary works Armageddon and Retribution by British historian and journalist Max Hastings. These histories explore the final phase of the War in 1944-45 to defeat Germany and Japan, respectively. The books cover all aspects of the War's terminal period, which as the author powerfully evokes, was its bloodiest, most brutal phase. Hastings' writing is remarkably vivid and immediate, which is essential to the stories he tells. Hastings covers the war aims, political intricacies, and even broad military strategy clearly and succinctly, but doesn't linger over the grand individuals and larger strategic details that have been explored in so many other works. Instead, he focuses much of the narrative on the experiences of the common soldiers who had to fight the battles and the civilians whose lives were devastated. This approach yields two particularly effective histories, that go as far as any I've read of bringing the heartbreaking reality of the fighting to the modern reader.

The people of the United States, and to a lesser extent Great Britain, were spared the apocalyptic destruction that was faced by the people of Europe and Asia, and especially Germany and Japan. Armageddon and Retribution let Americans and Britons, or any modern reader that has the fortune to live in a (relatively) peaceful world, understand the plight of the civilians as the War tore to its ultimate conclusion.

Max Hastings

I will not burden the reader with a comprehensive list of the superlative passages or analysis contained in these works, but I've listed a few highlights below. I highly recommend these books to anyone interested in World War II, the realities of war, or the grim depths that humanity can sink to when the decency of society is abandoned.

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