The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World
War
By Andrew
Roberts
(Harper, 712 pages,
$29.99)
LIKE THE ANNUAL inundation of the Nile, each year brings its
fresh flood of increasingly trivial books about World War II, many
of them slanted, pedantic, or downright silly. Like so many other
contemporary historians, most of today’s chroniclers of the Second
World War have a perverse inclination to write more and more about
less and less. The high-or low-water mark for WWII trivia may have
been reached in 2004 with the publication of Peter Conradi’s
earnest but error-sprinkled Hitler’s Piano
Player, an excruciatingly detailed biography of Ernst
“Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a third rate Third Reich propagandist and
court buffoon who occasionally served as der Führer’s lounge pianist.
All the more reason, then, to welcome a healthy corrective to
this flood of fluff—a concise but comprehensive history that gets
to the heart of one of mankind’s greatest struggles with keen
intelligence and a minimum of cant. This is exactly what
The Storm of War by British
historian Andrew Roberts does. The broad sweep of Mr. Roberts’s
narrative, which never flags, marches the reader from battle to
battle, theater to theater of this colossal contest, but it does
much more than merely chronicle events.
Besides vividly evoking the storm of war, Mr. Roberts offers his
readers that rarest of the historian’s gifts, the ability to
synthesize. For history, like science, is much more than an
inventory of ingredients or occurrences; it is, to quote a
dictionary definition of synthesis, “the composition or combination
of parts or elements so as to form a whole.”
Again and again, Mr. Roberts achieves historical synthesis,
taking us behind the scenes and into the minds of antagonists and
protagonists to help us understand why people acted the way they
did, and why things turned out the way they did. His ultimate act
of synthesis is to be found in the last paragraph of the last page
of his narrative: “Analyses of Hitler’s defeat have tended to
portray him as a strategic imbecile—‘Corporal Hitler’—or
otherwise as a madman, but these explanations are clearly not
enough. The real reason Hitler lost the Second World War was
exactly the same one that caused him to unleash it in the first
place: he was a Nazi.”
By which Mr. Roberts means—and amply demonstrates in his
text—that Hitler’s various political and racial obsessions, which
formed the basis of Nazism, undercut all of his initial military
and diplomatic triumphs and made the eventual Allied victory not
only possible but well nigh inevitable. A few examples:
• It was Hitler’s paranoid anti-Semitism that stripped
Germany of thousands of its most brilliant minds, including many of
the key scientists and mathematicians who, as political refugees,
would create the atomic bomb in America.
• It was his racist xenophobia, his obsession
with Lebensraum for his Aryan
supermen, that led Hitler to alienate millions of victims of Soviet
oppression who welcomed the Germans as liberators only to turn
against them after being treated as subhuman slave labor.
• The flip side of Hitler’s Nazi racism—his
admiration for and identification with the Anglo-Saxon–dominated
British Empire—meant that the man whose conquering legions had
blitzed their way through Western Europe would show little interest
in the German General Staff’s plans for invading the British Isles
at their weakest moment, still dreaming of an Aryan consortium in
which the Thousand Year Reich would rule the European continent
while overseas Untermenschen
would remain under the heel of a British Empire upon which, with
Hitler’s help, the sun would never set.
• Even the Nazi cult of death and violence,
initially directed against political opponents, minorities, and
foreign foes, would eventually be turned on the German people as
Hitler ordered whole armies to die where they stood and, when he
finally recognized that defeat was inevitable, led him to the
egomaniacal conclusion that Germany had been unworthy of him and
therefore deserved to die when he did.
Mr. Roberts also brings his considerable analytic skills to bear
on the Allied effort and its leaders. His pen portraits of Stalin,
Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Marshall, and the rest
are vivid, insightful, and often highly entertaining, as is his
choice of source material. Witness this telling glimpse of two
battling egos: “Patton and Montgomery had long mutually loathed one
another—Patton called Monty ‘that cocky little limey fart,’ Monty
thought Patton a ‘foul-mouthed lover of war’…”
In this particular case, they were both right—and Mr. Roberts’s
lapidary choice of quote tells us a lot about the character of the
men themselves, as well as what they thought of each other. His
appreciation for Eisenhower—whose reputation as both soldier and
statesman has enjoyed a well-deserved resurgence in recent
years—is equally pithy and on the mark. When, on September 1,
1944, Ike took over day-to-day control of all ground forces from
Montgomery, he had almost as much to fear from the bitter
animosities dividing Monty, Patton, and Omar Bradley, each with an
egocentric war plan of his own, as he did from the enemy.
“It is sadly impossible to believe that the best demands of
grand strategy, rather than their own egos, actuated these
soldiers,” Mr. Roberts writes, “and Eisenhower had the difficult
task of holding the ring between them and imposing his own view.
His greatness—doubted by some like [Field Marshall Sir Alan]
Brooke and Montgomery—stems in part from his success in achieving
that.”
Mr. Roberts is also a model of intelligent objectivity when it
comes to weighing the various national contributions to Allied
victory. He recognizes the key role of American industrial and
military might in tipping the balance and underscores the pivotal
importance of his native England’s determination to go it alone
after the fall of France without overstating the case. And he also
gives the Devil his due where many Western historians have not:
It was the Russians who provided the oceans of blood necessary
to defeat Germany, and it cannot be reiterated enough that out of
every five Germans killed in combat—that is, on the battle field
rather than in aerial bombing or through other means—four died on
the Eastern Front. It is the central statistic of the Second World
War.
Thanks to Mr. Roberts’s mastery of substance, style, and, yes,
statistics, readers can now enjoy a comprehensive, one-volume
history of that war that is far superior to most of the works
preceding it.
