Tom Hull: Adam Tooze: The Wages of Destruction

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 Already in his unpublished "Second Book," written in 1928, he was declaring that "the European, even without being fully conscious of it, applies the conditions of American life as the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.

posted 2008-03-21