The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939
Rahe, Paul A.
BOOK R E V I E W S Back in April, when the Democrats af New York had the opportunity to register their preference for Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, or Jesse Jackson, Mondale and Hart pretty much...
...Only after extensive conquests would Germany be in command of the resources and the industrial base necessary for the rearmament effort to reach completion --and such conquests would only be possible if the British and the French resolutely sat on their hands and allowed Hitler to create that window of opportunity...
...appoints diplomatic mediator on basis of complete unfamiliarity with issues...
...The mistakes made by the Flottenabteilung and the failure of the Nazi leadership tb alter the admirals' allocation of resources suggest what Murray subsequently asserts: Though the Germans were adept at devising tactics and at training soldiers, airmen, and sailors, they were deficient in grand strategy...
...Under "military mind," the British statesman listed "narrowness of...
...He alone was able to tell the "loyal, brave people" of Britain that they had "sustained a defeat without a war" and that "the whole equilibrium of Europe [had] been deranged...
...there is a department in which military history flourishes...
...Eventually, of course, Mussolini rallied to the cause, but the Italy he carried into the alliance was, if anything, even more dependent upon the import of raw materials from abroad than Hitler's Germany...
...They were, in fact, considerable...
...His question is a simple one: How did the events which transpired at Munich in _September 1938 affect the V war-making capacity of the powers that came into conflict a year later...
...The next President should hire two historians and fire his pollsters," he contended...
...she was confined within narrower boundaries than in 1914...
...Like the American leaders who forfeited the struggle in Vietnam, the Germans never properly determined what it would mean to win the war and were therefore unable to outline a strategy aimed at achieving that end...
...As a result, in September 1939 Germany possessed no aircraft, carriers and only 26 submarines...
...Fortunately for us, there was one important exception to this pattern...
...On the face of it, this might appear to be sage advice...
...Since rearmament in depth was out of the question, to accomplish his ends Hitler followed a strategy aimed at achieving temporary military superiority and taking advantage of the window of opportunity this would afford him...
...BOOK R E V I E W S Back in April, when the Democrats af New York had the opportunity to register their preference for Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, or Jesse Jackson, Mondale and Hart pretty much igfiored Jackson's antics and, instead, spent the better part of their time trying to outdo each other in demonstrating their zeal for the nuclear freez6 and their antipathy to the faltering and sometimes clumsy attempts of the Reagan Administration to support American interests and the cause of liberal democracy in Central America...
...Murray's response to these questions in The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939 is informed by an unsurpassed familiarity THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 31 with the surviving evidence for German and Allied efforts in the course of the war itself...
...what the author of this careful study has in mind when he speaks of the "civilian mind...
...Nicaragua and El Salvador can no more properly be equated with Czechoslovakia than with South Vietnam...
...The general outlines have long been known, but the most important pieces in the puzzle were missing or in large part ignored...
...In the last two decades, you would have been hard put to find a course at any of our most respected universities that ~focused on the planning, the preparation, and the actual fighting of any war more recent than the one which Thucydides described in such wonderful, seductive detail...
...The last of these qualities is the hardest to find...
...The histories of the Cold War assigned to university students in this country are generally written by men who know nothing of Russian--much less Czech, Polish, German, Serbo-Croation, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Greek, Turkish, Persian, or Arabic...
...The I n the final chapter of his book, Murray draws attention to an entry in the index that Lloyd George added to his memoirs...
...No one combining good sense with an intimate knowledge of the American academy would be sanguine that Jimmy Carter would have received better counsel concerning the hostage crisis from a historian than he secured from Pat Caddell...
...When Neville Chamberlain and his Cabinet posed the proper ques32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 tions, the soldiers usually produced solid and sensible studies--but when the British Prime Minister and his associates asked the wrong questions (as they almost always did), the Chiefs of Staff rarely intervened to set them right...
...From this, Hitler's admirals learned little...
...stubbornness of, not peculiar to America...
...The study of armed conflict has not in the recent past recommended itself to our intellectual elite...
...infinite capacity for self-delusion...
...they were men with a mission--and in their quest for peace, they left nary a stone unturned...
...impossibility of trusting...
...But they remained ineffectual in large part because they were generally less assertive than their German counterparts...
...Anyone familiar with the book trade knows that military history is a perennial favorite with the book-reading public...
...The problem is that historians possessed of such expertise and knowledge are few and far between--particularly if one is interested in assessing the consequences of going or of not going to war under particular circumstances...
...It may take four years...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 33...
...Hollings's advice is nonetheless in principle sound...
...The technology of war made far greater demands on her resources than in the past...
...No friend of representative democracy and no one concerned with the long-term wellbeing of this country can welcome the increasing trend toward government by public opinion polls...
...Millions of men, women, and children lost their lives in the 1940s precisely because there was no arms race in the decade before...
...and the development of air power promised to change the nature of conflict at sea...
...Germany may well have lost the First World War because she lacked the resources necessary for modern warfare...
...In time of war, the Italian presence would only add to Germany's already grievous economic burdens...
...Accordingly, Fritz Hollings's President might well get better advice from his pollsters...
...But it is not similarly favored among academic historians: After all, nice people are far too refined to pay attention to such things...
...Government Printing Office published Murray's Strategy f o r Defeat: The Luftwaffe 1933-1945 for the Air University...
...and other like references...
...To find a modern historian better able to counsel a President on foreign affairs th~n his pollsters, one would be well advised to go to the same placemat least if Ohio State professor Williamson Murray's splendid book on Munich and its consequences is any indication...
...But when American leaders cease to ponder in Munich's light the consequences of our abandoning to the enemies of freedom small countries, far away, of which we know little or nothing, the world will have become a much more dangerous place...
...Was he, in fact, largely responsible for Germany's loss in the Battle of Britain...
...But the men in Berlin were ultimately, if grudgingly, willing to learn from the experience of Wolfram yon Richthofen with the Condor Legion in Spain...
...This fact, more than any other, explains why the effort to rearm in depth was stymied from the start, and it virtually dictated the timing of the outbreak of war...
...To those horrified at the size of our current military budget, devoutly opposed to our building the B-1 bomber and the MX missile, and distressed above all else by our inability to put a stop to the arms race, Murray's book should give pause...
...Now, that has all changed--and Murray has collected and analyzed the most important of the relevant material...
...To rearm, the Nazis would have to import most of what was required, and they were always short of the necessary foreign exchange...
...Williamson Murray has written an important and timely book--important because it reveals more clearly than any other recent work what true statesmanship requires, and timely because it treats of an era, decisive in shaping our own age, that is nonetheless rapidly passing from memory...
...Murray nowhere suggests that Munich was in and of itself decisive...
...Senator Fritz Hollings, who had endorsed Hart after the collapse of his own abortive bid for the nomination, was reportedly appalled...
...As a consequence, Churchill was virtually alone in grasping the importance of what had occurred at Munich...
...But Hollings's alternative may be worse: The distinguished senator from South Carolina would, in fact, have a hard time finding historians in this country as saddened by the mad scramble toward isolationism as he seems to be...
...In fact, the ordinary voter--on those rare occasions when dramatic events like the revolution in Iran or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan focus his attention on foreign affairsmhas a keener appreciation that there are malevolent forces out there than many of the most distinguished of our diplomatic historians...
...In the First World War, the German submarine campaign against Allied shipping had come perilously close to bringing Britain to her knees...
...But most of their blunders had little effect because the various armed services proved flexible in doctrine, willing to experiment, and quick to take note of their own deficiencies...
...Only then did Britain begin actively to pursue a concerted policy aimed at a specific, attainable end: the destruction of the Nazi regime...
...cannot find fortifications on a map...
...Only when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister did Britain possess what Murray calls "a driving, strategic force at the center...
...In the first year of the war, 35 more U-Boats entered service, but 28 were lost at sea...
...Murray does not say anything in this context about his own index...
...As a consequence, the Luftwaffe of the early war years was surprisingly ready and able to provide ground troops with close air support...
...Did Chamberlain win crucial time for his country...
...On the whole, American historians (and students of American history in particular) are like the rest of their compatriots~a parochial lot...
...The entry is amusing, but--sad to say--justified, and it causes one to wonder whether the young leaders turned out by elite universities that shun the study of military history will not exemplify theme adopted by Gary Hart in the primaries last spring deserves notice...
...and when these experiments proved successful, they altered their doctrine accordingly...
...Much the same was true of the Luftwaffe...
...In the 1930s, Germany faced even greater difficulties than she had twenty years before...
...For there the author abandons his customary restraint-and, under the entry "civilian mind," one finds "narrowness of, not confined to universities...
...It is no wonder that the authors of these books seem Paul A. Rahe will spend the next two years in Istanbul as a fellow of the Institute o f Current World Affairs...
...Yet, in the great convoy battles of 1942-43, German submarines came remarkably close to winning the Battle of the Atlantic and thereby the war...
...thinks that horses and violins have similarities...
...regards thinking as a form of mutiny...
...Furthermore, while the multiplication of competing and hostile bureaucracies which the Nazi regime fostered no doubt contributed much to corruption, waste, and mismanagement, that corruption, waste, and mismanagement proved remarkably fruitful in the end--for the very diversity of the weapons systems devised by the various departments left Hitler, his civilian advisers, and his generals free to order mass production of those that actually did the job...
...The consequences are obvious: Those who do not limit themselves to writing dispatch history (summarizing the latest batch of internal documents released to the public by the State Department) tend to treat our floundering attempts to deal with the world outside our borders as an extension of domestic politics and American intellectual history or as a reflection of corporate plotting and right-wing machinations...
...bases diplomatic estimate on comments of German butler...
...But the subject repays investigation...
...British policy--from 1933 down to the collapse of the Chamberlain government in May 1940--was cut from one cloth...
...And did he and Germany gain or lose by the decisions made in the late thirties...
...no one before this has managed to put the entire story together...
...Murray would clearly bring to the task the three qualities required: an inquisitive mind, an unbelievable Capacity for research, and the sense to know what matters and what does not...
...it simply set the seal on all that had come before...
...Very few of them know much about the larger world, and those who study the history of American foreign relations rarely have a command of any language but English...
...Neville Chamberlain and those near him were no more adept in the actual conduct of war than they had been in the conduct of diplomacy in the months preceding September 1939...
...it will, I hope, take longer...
...And did Hitler know what he was doing...
...and, anyway, if we ignore war and banish from polite company those with the bad taste to remind us of its presence, it might just go away...
...To be sure, Hitler and his advisers made a number of serious errors in their planning...
...Even if they knew better, they would be unable to do the research required for serious work in their chosen field...
...does not seem to understand arithmetic...
...As it pertained to the Wehrmacht, rearmament was a conservative effort aimed at reproducing the army that had lost in the First World War...
...Expertise and a knowledge of past history are obviously an advantage...
...Accordingly, Murray then devotes the remaining paragraphs of the chapter to an assessment of the obstacles that stood in Hitler's way...
...But because the cautious men at the top were anything but hidebound, they were willing to tolerate experiments with panzer divisions...
...and her ally Austria-Hungary had been replaced by a collection of states--generally divided, but united in their suspicion of German aims...
...One may shudder to think (but one must ponder nonetheless) what would have happened if even a moderate proportion of the resources devoted in the 1930s to building battleships and cruisers had been allocated to the U-Boat program instead...
...In this respect, the British Chiefs of Staff come off rather well...
...While Chamberlain piously sought the moral high ground, Hitler variously promised peace and threatened war as the occasion demanded-while all the time preparing for the conflict to come...
...the allied blockade had been critical, if not decisive...
...T :. o f'md sucha course, one would ordinarily have had to journey away from the East coast--to, say, Columbus, Ohio where not only do they know how to play football, but (miracle of miracles...
...But it will happen--and it will happen relatively soon: Before long, we will be subject to the guidance of a President representative of "a new generation" shaped by the war in Vietnam and almost entirely ignorant of the manner in which the liberal democracies were weighed in the balance and found wanting in the 1930s...
...Was he well informed regarding the state of the German economy, the condition of his own military forces, and the situation in Britain and France...
...Many scholars have written about Munich...
...Barely eighteen months prior to the appearance of this book, the U.S...
...What were his intentions...
...Or did the British and the French exchange a position of considerable strength for one of comparative weakness...
...and the like...
...In the very first paragraph of the initial chapter, he makes it clear that he takes Hitler at his word--tliat the Nazi leader seriously intended from the moment he became Chancellor to devote his considerable energy to one goal: the destruction of the Versailles treaty and the achievement of German dominance within Europe...
...From its inception, strategic bombing was to be its principal purpose...
...Convinced that antisubmarine tactics had rendered the U-Boat virtually obsolete, they repeated the blunders of Tirpitz and the other planners responsible for the development of the German navy prior to World War I and concentrated on surface raiders during the period of rearmament...
...9.50 paper Paul A. Rahe to think that the United States is somehow responsible for everything that happens in the world for good or for ill--and particularly for ill...
...In truth, coal was the only strategic resource the Germans possessed in great abundance, and their coal fields lay within easy reach of forces attacking from France, Poland, or Czechoslovakia...
...This, his f'n-st book, was a lengthy and extraordinarily detailed account of the creation of the Luftwaffe and of the long and bloody war of attrition that subsequently took place in the skies over Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa...
...Murray wrote that earlier work from the perspective of grand strategy, and he has rightly adopted the same approach here...
...The government documents indicate that Chamberlain and his closest advisers paid almost no attention to the military consequences of their endeavor...
...THE CHANGE IN THE EUROPEAN BALANCE OF POWER, 1938-1939: THE PATH TO RUIN Williamson Murray/Princeton University Press $50.00...
Vol. 17 • October 1984 • No. 10
