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

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СКАЧАТЬ and sometimes a hacksaw, when servicing their vehicles and equipment during the Second World War. In the German section of the Exhibition in London, Alfred Krupp displayed a cannon made from cast steel, instead of the usual iron or bronze. He found no buyers.

      The nineteenth century transformed warfare, with machine-guns used in conjunction with barbed-wire. Mass-produced weapons and citizen armies were moved by railways. Two inventions were yet to bear fruit: nothing would change the nature of war more than the wireless telegraph and the internal combustion engine.

      Britain’s industrial revolution had been made possible by the invention of such devices as George Stephenson’s steam engine, Richard Arkwright’s water-frame, Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, Hargreaves’ spinning jenny and Samuel Crompton’s mule. These inventions were brilliantly simple; the inventors were unsophisticated men. Arkwright was a barber assisted by a watchmaker, Hargreaves a carpenter, Cartwright a clergyman, Crompton a spinner and Stephenson a collier’s son who didn’t learn to read until he was 17 years old. But the next step in modern progress would delve into such mysteries as chemistry, microbiology, physics and precision engineering. It would require educated people working in well equipped workshops and laboratories.

      Inventions were improved at a dazzling speed. A gas engine invented by Dr N. A. Otto in 1876 was developed by Gottlieb Daimler to propel a vehicle. Before the end of the century there was an automobile race covering 744 miles from Paris to Bordeaux and back. By 1903 the Wright brothers were flying their curious contraptions. Six years later Europeans suddenly understood the significance of powered flight when Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel in 31 minutes. The world had been irreversibly transformed and so had the way in which men would fight. War had entered the third dimension.

      Wireless was no less important. By 1901 Guglielmo Marconi’s development of work by Rudolf Hertz enabled a wireless message to be transmitted 3,000 miles. While the industrial revolution had used crude machines and unskilled labour to produce wealth, this new ‘technical revolution’ was far more demanding. Nations with leaders who failed to respond to the complexities of this new world ran the risk of rapid decline. In the words of one British major-general who was also an historian:

      Mind more than matter, thought more than things, and above all imagination, struggled to gain power. New substances appeared, new sources of energy were tapped and new outlooks on life took form. The world was sloughing its skin – mental, moral and physical – a process destined to transform the industrial revolution into a technical civilization. Divorced from civil progress, soldiers could not see this. They could not see that as civilization became more technical, military power must inevitably follow suit: that the next war would be as much a clash between factories and technicians as between armies and generals. With the steady advance of science warfare could not stand still.¹⁰

      In 1890 Germany’s production of iron and steel had been half that of Britain; by 1913 Germany produced twice as much as Britain and half that of the United States. Such advances were matched by progress in manufacturing. German industry – chemical and electric firms in particular – set up research institutes, and worked closely with the universities. By the end of the nineteenth century German technology had left Britain behind. By the time Hitler came to power, Germany had collected one-third of all the Nobel prizes for physics and chemistry.

      Since the early nineteenth century, Prussia had given great emphasis to the technical training of the workforce. It had invented such educational refinements as graduate schools, Ph.D. degrees, seminars, research laboratories and institutes, and scholarly and scientific journals. All of these innovations were quickly adopted by American universities. France recognized the importance of education and technology and pioneered colleges for the advanced study of engineering and science. The achievements of such men as J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish laboratory did not allay the fears of the British educational establishment, which, fortified by State and Church, saw science as a dangerous first step towards Godless social reform and resolutely opposed it. Britain’s ‘public schools’ (actually private, fee-paying and exclusive) prepared upper middle-class boys to study in the choice universities where science and engineering were virtually ignored. Association between university and industry was fiercely resisted. As the First World War began, most of Britain’s population could expect no education beyond their fourteenth birthdays. Teachers were ill paid and difficult to recruit. Decisions about the nation, its industries and commercial life were made by men who had studied the Classics, Law or Philosophy. Few spoke any modern foreign language fluently.

      Britain’s contribution to its wars is celebrated by memorable prose and poetry rather than by military successes. The country’s subsequent industrial and economic history has been blighted by the way its middle classes have continued to hold any sort of technical accomplishment in low esteem, and prefer their children to study liberal arts in outmoded buildings lacking modern facilities.

       Outbreak of the First World War

      The assassination that led to the outbreak of war in 1914 took place in the Balkans. The foreign minister of Austria-Hungary was determined to provoke the Serbians into a war. The Serbians, with strong ties to the Slavic nations, were confident and ready to fight. Obligations, both real and imagined, divided Europe into the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary plus Turkey) on one side and the Allies (France, Russia and Britain) on the other. Britain’s commitment to join in the 1914 war was flimsy.¹¹ So was that of Germany. The war was fought for trade and territory, but men on both sides were moved by romantic ideas rather than practical considerations. The British saw it as a war to resist the German invasion of ‘poor little’ Belgium. Germans saw it as a war for German Kultur against barbaric enemies. In Berlin a Socialist deputy saw the Reichstag vote on war credits and wrote in his diary:

      The memory of the incredible enthusiasm of the other parties, of the government, and of the spectators, as we stood to be counted, will never leave me.¹²

      When war was declared there was satisfaction everywhere. In London, Paris and Berlin the crowds cheered the announcement. German artists and intellectuals were foremost among those succumbing to war fever and thousands of students joined the army immediately. At Kiel University, Schleswig-Holstein – following an appeal by the rector – virtually the whole student body enlisted.

      What did the cheering men – so many of them doomed to death by the announcements – envisage? Certainly they thought the war would be quick and decisive; in every country there was the stated belief that ‘it would be all over by Christmas’.

      The thinking of most of the top soldiers was no less carefree. General Ferdinand Foch, who ended the war as commander of the combined French, British and United States armies on the Western Front, thought: ‘A battle won is a battle in which one will not confess oneself beaten.’¹³ Such folly might have proved less tragic had it not been coupled with Foch’s obsession with attacking, and his rationalization that any improvement in armaments could add strength only to the offensive. Such generalship resulted in French poilus charging into machine-gun fire dressed in bright red pantaloons. It was only in 1915 that the French army went over to less conspicuous attire, and even that was ‘horizon blue’. In an amazing demonstration of the military mind at its most tenacious, Foch ended the war with his views more or less intact.

      Because so many of the ideas, events and even the equipment of 1914 clearly foreshadows that of 1939 it is worth while taking a closer look at this ‘war to end wars’. It was called ‘The Great War’ until 1939 brought another and even greater war. Like that second war, the first began with a ‘blitzkrieg’. Germany’s ‘Schlieffen Plan’ called for a lightning thrust through (neutral) Belgium, then a massive left wheel across northern France to capture Paris. After that all German resources would be turned upon Russia, which would need more time to mobilize its army and prepare for war.

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