War: What is it good for? by Ian Morris

Author:Ian Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

Figure 5.11. Overwhelmed: a German artilleryman despairs as the biggest tank battle in history, at Kursk in July 1943, ends Hitler’s hopes of defeating the Soviet Union.

Learning to Love the Bomb

The Second World War was the most destructive ever fought. When we include those who starved, succumbed to disease, and were murdered in German, Soviet, and Japanese camps, it claimed fifty million to a hundred million lives, as compared with fifteen million dead in World War I and another twenty million in the civil wars that followed it. World War II turned much of Europe and East Asia into wastelands and cost something like $1 trillion (as I write, in 2013, the equivalent of perhaps $15 trillion, the entire annual output of the United States or the European Union). And yet, in a paradox as striking as any in the history of conflict, World War II also managed to be among the most productive ever fought.

That was because the war began the process of clearing away the chaos left by the demise of the British globocop. This, needless to say, was not the end Churchill had had in mind when he asked for the British people’s blood, toil, tears, and sweat. In August 1941, before the United States had even entered the war, he had rushed back from a secret meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to boast to the cabinet that he had “a plain and bold intimation that after the war, the US will join with us in policing the world until the establishment of a better order.” But this was not to be. There was a popular saying during the war that Britain provided the time, Russia provided the men, and America provided the money to defeat Hitler, but by November 1943, when Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt held their first group meeting, time was already on the Allies’ side. Only men and money now mattered, and Churchill found himself sidelined.

Far from sharing global condominium with the United States, Britain woke up from celebrating victory over Germany and Japan to the worst economic hangover in its history. Its debts were much worse than in 1918, its economy completely distorted by war production, and its very food supply dependent on American loans. “It was extraordinarily unreal, even absurd, and shabby,” a left-wing journalist wrote in his diary in December 1945 after spending two days watching Parliament debate the terms of a new American bailout. “Speakers took up their position, but the only reality was the fear which none of them dared to express—the fear of the consequences if cigarettes and films and spam were not available from America.”

Absurd and shabby it might have been, but unreal it was not. Britain had gone broke fighting Germany. To pay its debts, it had to put exports ahead of consumption, and food rationing actually got stricter after 1945. When eggs became freely available in 1950, there was euphoria. “What this means to us only an English housewife can understand,” one diary records;

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