The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Vintage) by Paul Kennedy

Author:Paul Kennedy [Kennedy, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

*That is to say, its output in 1929 totaled what it probably would have reached in 1921, had there been no war and had the pre-1913 growth rates continued.

*That is, the post-1919 directive that the armed services should frame their estimates on the assumption that they would not be engaged in a major war within the next ten years.

STRATEGY &

ECONOMICS

TODAY &

TOMORROW

7

Stability and Change in a Bipolar World, 1943–1980

At the news of the U.S. entry into the war, Winston Churchill openly rejoiced—and with good reason. As he later explained it, “Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.”1 Yet such confidence must have seemed wildly misplaced to more cautious minds on the Allied side during 1942 and until the first half of 1943. For six months after Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces had run rampant in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, overwhelming the European colonial empires, encircling China from the south, and threatening India, Australia, and Hawaii. In the Russo-German war, the Wehrmacht resumed its brutal offensives once the winter of 1941–1942 had passed and battled its way toward the Caucasus; at almost the same time, the far smaller German force under Rommel in North Africa had pushed to within fifty-five miles of Alexandria. The U-boat assault upon Allied convoys was proving deadlier than ever, with the highest losses of merchantmen occurring in the spring of 1943; yet the Anglo-American “counterblockade” of the German economy by means of strategic bombing was failing to achieve its purpose and was leading to severe casualties among the aircrews. If the fate of the Axis Powers was sealed after December 1941, there was little indication that they knew it.

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