Thought I'd do something on the 5th anniversary of Bush's Iraq
invasion -- five years ago I described it as a "day of infamy,"
and there's no reason to reconsider those words. But it's been a
very distracted day, so here's a book review piece I had ready to
go. The title shows not just that war doesn't pay. It hasn't paid
for a long time.
Adam Tooze: The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking
of the Nazi Economy (2007, Viking)
Big book, 802 pages, not much of a priority, but Richard J.
Evans' New York Times Book Review (Dec. 20, 2007) review
sums up some points worth noting:
Between 1924-35 the United States was already the wealthiest
nation in the world. Some GDPs compared to the US: Great Britain
89%, France 72%, Germany 63%, Soviet Union 25% (p. 76):
European contemporaries were very much aware of these facts: and
none more so than Adolf Hitler. Already in his unpublished "Second
Book," written in 1928, he was declaring that "the European, even
without being fully conscious of it, applies the conditions of
American life as the yardstick for his life." For Hitler, who read the
Wild West novels of Karl May during his childhood and adolescence, it
seemed obvious that America had achieved its industrial advantage and
high standard of living through its conquest of the West and its
extermination of the Native American population. If Germany, as
Europe's leading power, did not do something similar, the "threatened
global hegemony of the North American continent" would degrade all the
European powers to the level of "Switzerland and Holland." Far from
being the revival of some medieval dream of conquest sparked by the
example of the Teutonic Knights, Hitler's drive to conquer Eastern
Europe was based on a very modern model, a model of colonization,
enslavement, and extermination that had its parallels in the creation
of European empires in Africa an Australia, or the nineteenth-century
Russian conquest of Central Asia and Siberia.
(p. 76):
Hitler's drive to rearm was so obsessive, so megalomaniacal, that
he was prepared to sacrifice almost anything to it. In particular,
consumers suffered as resources and foreign exchange were diverted
into arms expenditures. Cotton imports, for example, were hard hit,
and people started to complain about the poor quality of the
synthetic-fiber clothing they were forced to wear. Tooze here
completely explodes the German historian Götz Aly's recent claim that
the Nazi regime deliberately cushioned the civilian population for
fear of alienating it. Contrary to what Aly suggests, Tooze points out
that Germany's population was the most heavily taxed in Europe.
(p. 77):
Looked at from an economic perspective, indeed, the cards were
stacked against the Germans from the outset. Tooze perhaps
overstresses the point when he describes Germany, as he frequently
does, as a "medium-sized European power"; even according to his own
figures it far outclassed all other European states with the exception
of Britain and the Soviet Union. The point was, however, that by the
end of 1941 it had arrayed against it the combined might not only of
these two countries, together with the British Empire, still at this
time the largest the world had ever seen, but also of the United
States.
To try to counter this, Hitler more or less abandoned the
construction of costly and generally ineffective battleships and
poured resources into the U-boat campaign with which he hoped to cut
off British supplies from across the Atlantic and force a separate
peace. Yet there were too few submarines to make an impact, especially
against an enemy that organized an effective convoy system and had the
advantage, thanks to the Ultra decoder, of being able to decipher
German signals in advance of the operations they unleashed. Once more,
the raw materials needed to build and fuel a submarine fleet large
enough to overcome these obstacles were simply lacking.
Tooze points to a similar problem with the projected invasion of
Britain in the summer and fall of 1940. Irrespective of whether Hitler
was really set on this course, he simply lacked the resources to
establish the air superiority that was the sine qua non of a
successful crossing of the English Channel. A third of the initial
strength of the German air force, the Luftwaffe, had been lost in the
western campaign in the spring. The Germans lacked the trained pilots,
the effective fighter planes, and the heavy bombers that would have
been needed. Moreover, before long, the German attempt to gain control
over the oil-rich Middle East and also threaten British control over
the vital artery of the Suez Canal had suffered a fatal blow when
Britain defeated a German-sponsored uprising in Iraq and seized Syria
from the Vichy French.
Germany, of course, had at its disposal the resources of conquered
countries in Europe, from France in the West to Belarus in the
East. The Nazis had no compunction in ruthlessly exploiting the
defeated nations to their own advantage. Tooze notes that by 1944 the
Germans had taken nearly four million shells, over five thousand
artillery pieces, and more than two thousand tanks from the
French. Nearly half of all German artillery guns in March 1944 were
non-German. Enough tin and nickel was seized after the victories in
the West to cover German needs for a year, enough copper for eight
months. France was drained of almost all its gasoline supplies. Yet
such exploitation contributed to a collapse of the French economy in
1940, and the confiscated resources did not last for very long. This
was another reason for Hitler's avoiding any further delay in pushing
on with the invasion of the Soviet Union.
(p. 77):
When German armies marched into the Soviet-controlled part of
Poland in June 1941, they soon scored a series of stunning victories,
surrounding and killing or capturing millions of Red Army troops. Here
too, shortages of fuel and ammunition quickly affected the German
armies as their rapid advance stretched their supply lines to the
breaking point. More serious still was the food situation. It was no
use commandeering the Ukrainian collective farms if there was no
gasoline to run the tractors and combine harvesters. Millions of
German troops had to be fed, and more resources still were needed to
sustain the civilian population back home, not to mention the foreign
workers who were being forced into the country by the millions to
boost the labor supply.
The Nazis and the German military decided to deal with this problem
through the planned starvation of the native population of the
occupied areas of Eastern Europe. At least three and a third million
Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately killed in German captivity,
allowed to die of starvation, disease, and neglect, or simply
shot. Nearly three quarters of a million people perished during the
German siege of Leningrad as a deliberate result of the
blockade. German plans for the region envisaged the deaths of up to 30
million of its civilian inhabitants over the following years as German
settlers were moved in to populate its towns, cities, and manor
houses. This was mass murder on a historically unprecedented
scale.
One thing that seems clear is that World War II was decided primarily
by economic depth and reach. Germany tried to compensate with its blitz
tactics, but the largest foe they were able to defeat that way was France.
Britain was sufficiently protected by its moat. Germany pushed deep into
Russia, but couldn't push deep enough. Russia was able to move much of
its production back to the Urals and Siberia, wear down the onslaught,
and turn it back. Japan fared little better against China, even though
they had little trouble with colonial regimes in southeast Asia. Neither
Germany nor Japan had any chance against the US.
The economic resilience which allowed the US to defend against the
Axis powers has only increased since 1945. Aside from the vulnerabilty
that all nations fear from nuclear attack -- which the US is uniquely
able to deter, assuming that makes a difference -- it is inconceivable
that any nation or realistic alliance of nations might threaten the US.
It's also increasingly unlikely that anyone would try: WWII took place
in an era still drunken with imperialism, but everything since then
has shown that empires are unsustainable and not very desirable. As
such, the US for its own defense needs no more and probably a good
deal less funding than in 1939. Yet we see the opposite: the US spends
over 50% of the entire world's military budget. The very fact that no
other country considers an arms race with the US shows that what the
US spends is almost totally wasted.
