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Understanding how miscalculations by Germany and Japan led to their defeat offers lessons for world leaders today on how to avoid another major conflict, a Stanford scholar said.
“The once ascendant Axis powers were completely ill-prepared – politically, economically and militarily – to win the global war they had blundered into during 1941,” writes Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and a Hoover Institution senior fellow, in a new book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.
At the start of the war, the misperception was “that the Axis powers, particularly Germany and Japan, were ferocious war makers in the global sense and that they were strategically adept and almost unstoppable,” Hanson said in a recent interview.
Germany had a head start rearming militarily in the 1930s after the global depression, and then it enjoyed quick success in 10 border wars against much weaker European states. As for Japan, it invaded China and other parts of Asia and faced very little resistance. (Italy, which entered WWII on the Axis side in 1940 as the defeat of France became apparent, encountered more opposition in North Africa.)
“The Axis powers, Japan and Germany primarily, had convinced the world, and themselves, that they were capable, militarily and economically, of waging a global war,” Hanson said. Fascism was pronounced superior and modern – the future of humankind – by the Axis nations.
“But there was nothing in their prior histories, and nothing in their rearmament strategies, to suggest that was true. So, they had to win the war very quickly,” he said.
“The other misunderstanding is that we have this idea of Britain as a weak link in the Allied triad for population and land size issues,” Hanson said. “But they really punched above their weight. They were the only country to face Hitler alone for a year between June 1940 and June 1941.”
British technology, cryptology, aircraft and vehicle production were superior to Germany’s efforts, he said.
Britain, Hanson said, was the only country to go to war on virtually the first day of the conflict (Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and Britain declared war on Germany two days later) and fight until the last day of the war (the surrender of Japan on Sept. 2, 1945). In fact, the British were exclusive in going to war on the principle of protecting an ally (Poland) rather than being first attacked themselves – or surprise-attacking another country.
And, British prime minister Winston Churchill was the strongest and most eloquent voice in making the case that WWII was an existential war for the West, he noted.