European Warfare Research Paper

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Early Europe’s military arsenal was largely connected to developments in neighboring Asia and North Africa, but changes in the structure of armed forces (e.g., the use of land-owning cavalry and knights in the eighth century) allowed Europeans to better protect themselves from marauders. Technology and training advanced weaponry, created arms races, and eventually allowed European countries to conduct warfare worldwide.

The ancient Greeks invented the idea that Europe was separate and equivalent to Asia. But a glance at the map shows that Europe is in fact a peninsula stretching westward from Asia and, as such, remains closely connected with that larger continent, while on the south the Mediterranean Sea connects it no less intimately with North Africa. Throughout the Ice Age, when glaciers covered much of northwestern Europe, and long after the glaciers began to melt away, Europe remained no more than a thinly inhabited outpost of the Asian-African heartlands. Its military history continued to depend in large part on developments in Asia until after the time of the Mongol Empire (1226–1368) and the arrival of gunpowder from China.

Innovations in Weaponry

Europe’s earliest inhabitants came on foot from Africa and Asia, ferrying across the Straits of Gibraltar and the Bosporus and Dardanelles. They were hunters and gatherers, and we know next to nothing about their warfare. Archaeologists have found a few skeletons showing wounds, inflicted either by warfare or by hunting accidents. That is all. Agriculture arrived from Asia via the Danube Valley, and early farmers spread throughout Europe between about 8,000 and 6,700 years ago. They also possessed bows; a few rock carvings in Spain show naked archers running around and shooting at one another. Some skeletons, too, have arrows embedded in them. Early European farmers did fight one another at least occasionally, very probably in much the same disorganized fashion that Stone Age farmers in the highlands of New Guinea did when they were first discovered by the rest of the world in the 1930s.

A notable shift in military affairs came when bronze armor and weapons became available in Sumerian cities about 3000 BCE. Since the copper and tin to make bronze came from afar, only a handful of specialized warriors at first could possess these tools. Little by little bronze became more widely available, and wherever the necessary metal and specialized artisans showed up on the scene, the advantages of bronze armor and weapons were so great that warfare became the business of a small elite of professional warriors supported by rents or taxes exacted from ordinary farmers.

Bronze weapons and armor spread throughout Europe between 2800 and 1300 BCE, creating vigorous warrior elites and skilled metalworkers, sustained by far-reaching trade in metals and other objects of prestige. As early as 2800 BCE, two-wheeled chariots drawn by horses appeared on the steppe between the Ural Mountains and the Volga River; at first these clumsy vehicles were fit more for ceremony than for war. But after 1700 BCE, when strong, spoked wheels turning on a fixed axle reduced friction, and when powerful compound bows gave charioteers striking power at a distance and something close to invulnerability against foot soldiers, warfare was swiftly transformed throughout western Asia and Europe. Chariots were expensive and so were horses (except on the steppes), but throughout most of Europe local rulers and chieftains soon acquired the new instruments of power, even as far away as Sweden and England.

This reinforced the military and political power of narrow elites, but after about 1200 BCE the spread of cheap and abundant iron weapons made it possible for ordinary farmers to equip themselves with spears, shields, and helmets, so that tightly packed infantry, arrayed in ranks, became able to withstand chariot attacks far more successfully than before. Significant democratization of European society ensued.

Soon after 700 BCE the balance shifted once again when steppe nomads learned how to shoot their bows from horseback by letting go the reins and clinging to a galloping horse with legs alone. These tactics enhanced the mobility of steppe raiders, and their advantages over farming populations improved in subsequent centuries, most notably when someone, somewhere invented stirrups (about 200 CE) to give them a firmer seat. Finally, steppe warfare reached its apex when bureaucratic promotion on merit to command over standardized units of tens, hundreds, and thousands of men gave Mongol armies their remarkable efficiency in the thirteenth century.

Armies and Cavalry

Keeping horses where grass did not grow naturally was always expensive and, as ancient Greeks and Romans discovered, a disciplined and armored infantry could withstand cavalry attacks as long as a sufficient number of cavalrymen guarded their flanks and rear. Since Mediterranean landscapes were conspicuously short of grass and far enough from the open steppes to be safe from steppe cavalry most of the time, Greeks and Romans therefore relied mainly on armored infantry, protected by iron corselets, greaves (shin protectors), helmets, and shields. Greek hoplites, as the infantry soldiers were called, relied on spears to stab their foes face to face; Romans used swords and fought in more-open formations. At first, ordinary farmers, responsible for supplying their own equipment, filled the ranks. As long as citizen farmers dominated Greek and Roman battlefields, they had a decisive voice in war and peace and other public issues.

Democratic and republican ideals were thus implanted in the classical tradition. The idea that free men fight more bravely than subjects of royal or imperial monarchs still lingers among us. This was how the fifth century BCE historian Herodotus explained the success of a ragged coalition of Greek city-states against the invading army of the Persian king Xerxes. But Xerxes could not feed his army through the winter and so withdrew, leaving a small garrison behind for the Greeks to defeat the next summer (the siege lasted from 480 to 479 BCE). After this triumph, citizen armies persisted in Greece until the semibarbarian king Philip of Macedon subdued the whole country, and his son, Alexander III (Alexander of Macedon, reigned 336–323 BCE) conquered the vast Persian Empire, spreading Greek influence all the way to India and initiating what historians call the Hellenistic era.

The Macedonian army relied on infantrymen equipped with far longer spears than the Greeks had used, supplemented by far larger bodies of cavalry than the Greeks had been able to afford. The combination of a hedgehog of moving spears driving back the foe supplemented by headlong cavalry attack on vulnerable places in the enemy front proved irresistible on the open ground. Alexander’s soldiers also overcame even elaborate fortifications by a combination of massive earthworks and scaling ladders. For the first time, a European army clearly excelled its Asian rivals, but the advantage was transitory.

To be sure, the Romans conquered the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, overthrowing the Hellenistic kingdoms with ease, and penetrated Europe as far north as England and the Rhine and Danube rivers. But Persian rulers retained control of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley most of the time despite Roman invasions. Persian success against Roman armies rested principally on the fact that they had developed a large and powerful breed of horses that were capable of carrying fully armored men on their backs. Such beasts needed abundant fodder, but by planting alfalfa on fallowed fields, the Persians assured themselves of sufficient fodder with no diminution of grain harvests, since alfalfa crowded out weeds as effectively as summer plowing could, and also formed nitrogenous nodules on its roots to fertilize next year’s grain.

The Persians’ heavy-armored cavalry, equipped with powerful bows, resembled old-time chariots in being able to harass and defeat infantry almost with impunity, hence Roman failures. But the big horses also could meet steppe cavalry raiders on more or less even terms, protecting local farmers even if they could not pursue steppe ponies very far across the steppes since natural grass was too scant to feed them adequately.

Not surprisingly, the Romans and even a distant Chinese emperor set out to import big horses from Persia in hope of acquiring such a formidable cavalry force for themselves. Yet the big horses were so costly to feed that they never became numerous in China and eventually disappeared. In Europe, however, the Persian style of armored cavalry, introduced under Emperor Hadrian (reigned 117–138 CE), became the backbone of the East Roman or Byzantine army by the time of Justinian (reigned 527–565 CE). But unlike the Persians, the Romans paid these fighting men in money, realizing that central control would falter if they scattered out across the landscape and began to live on private estates.

Knights

Soldiers in western Europe began living on private estates after the Frankish ruler Charles Martel introduced the new style of cavalry in 732 CE by granting land to men, later called knights, in return for promises of military service. For a long time, Western knights remained very few and, unlike their counterparts further east, relied on spears to bring decisive force against their enemies. By the time they became common, the Western Roman Empire was long gone, and German invaders had set up rival kingdoms. Although Charlemagne crowned himself Roman Emperor in 800 after subduing mainland Europe from the Pyrenees to the Hungarian plain, his successors split his empire into rival kingdoms once more. They miserably failed to safeguard their subjects from fresh waves of attackers—Vikings from the north, Arabs from the south, and Magyars from the east.

Local self-defense was urgent, and the means to support it came on stream when the use of heavy moldboard plows drained waterlogged landscapes, converting them to fertile fields. Knights adequately supported by this new sort of agriculture multiplied accordingly, and eventually became thick enough on the ground to repel foreign raiders. Thereupon, effective local protection assured population growth. From about 1000 to 1300 CE, Western Europe became a prosperous frontier land as forests became fields on a massive scale, and all the skills of civilization began to flourish across the north European plain for the first time.

Knightly warfare proved so effective that it expanded in every direction from northwestern France and Germany where it first arose. Knighthood reached England in 1066 with the Norman Conquest; knights had earlier begun to reconquer Spain from Muslim rulers—a process completed only in 1492. The main area of expansion lay eastward where a moving frontier of settlement carried German knights across the Elbe River and eastward to the climatic limits within which moldboard farming was feasible. A new medieval civilization took shape during these same centuries, and western Europe swiftly caught up with its neighbors in military matters—a fact registered by the initial success of crusaders who carried European arms all the way to Jerusalem in 1099 and remained there until 1187.

Arms Races

The Mongol armies that brought steppe warfare to its apex and overran most of Asia before conquering Russia in 1240 never penetrated the rest of Europe. But under the Mongol Empire (1226–1368), trade and travel across Asia intensified, and familiarity with gunpowder (as well as with printing and the compass) reached Europe from China, transmitted by anonymous artisans. The Chinese began to experiment with guns about 1290, but the earliest certain evidence of gun making dates from 1326 in Europe and 1332 in China, taking the form of two drawings of very similar vase-shaped vessels with an oversized arrow projecting from their mouths.

Long before gunpowder upset older ways of warfare, however, European knights suffered unexpected defeat at the hands of pike-carrying Italian foot soldiers in 1176; and when cities like Genoa began to manufacture powerful steel crossbows (initially used to defend ships at sea), knights lost their easy supremacy on land. Rival cities in northern Italy responded by pioneering the management of mercenary armies composed of crossbowmen, pikemen, and cavalry, while innumerable Italian artisans launched an arms race between ever stronger and nimbler crossbows and more perfect armor.

When gunpowder reached Europe, it had immediate and very drastic effects on warfare, whereas in China and other parts of Asia its effects were much less. That is not really surprising, since where cavalry warfare prevailed, early guns were useless for men on horseback; in China the government relied on walls to resist raiders from the steppes, and crossbows defended such walls more cheaply and far better than early guns could do.

But in Europe kings were interested in anything that could breach town and castle walls and allow them to assert their authority more firmly. Moreover, European artisans already knew how to cast church bells and speedily used the same skills for casting bigger and bigger guns. Not surprisingly, European guns quickly outstripped what Chinese and other Asian artisans produced—a lead that Europeans retained for centuries, at the cost of suffering increasingly destructive wars among a shifting array of growingly powerful states.

The Italians dropped out of the new arms race, which centered in the borderlands between France and Germany where French kings and German emperors competed for the best and newest guns. The speed was astonishing with which the toy-like vase gun of 1326 was transmuted into clumsy bombards, about 3.5–4.5 meters (12–15 feet) long, like those that breached the walls of Constantinople in 1453. By 1477, they were replaced by mobile guns, about 2- to 2.5-meters (6–8 feet) long, permanently mounted on wheels yet capable of destroying city and castle walls in a few hours by shooting iron cannonballs.

Monarchs throughout Europe hastened to buy these weapons and used them to overawe rivals at home and expand their power to neighboring lands. Though dwarfed by the new style of armament, Italian city-states were not baffled for long by the power of the new siege guns. Instead, in 1500 the Florentines discovered almost by accident that loosely compacted earth could absorb cannon shot harmlessly, and by digging a vertical hole in front of earthen ramparts, attackers had to cross what amounted to an inverted wall in the face of defending guns. This so-called trace italienne put an effective obstacle in the path of Europe’s imperial unification of the kind that came to Russia, Turkey, India, and Japan when mobile siege guns like those of Europe reached those lands. But the new fortifications were expensive to construct, and thousands of guns defending (and attacking) them remained essential for enhancing royal power.

Worldwide Warfare

Another significant military change resulted after 1514 when King Henry VIII of England put cannon on board a specially designed warship that had gun ports near the waterline to assure stability. Such ships could deliver a devastating broadside to more lightly armed vessels. Within a single generation (1492– 1522), when advances in navigation and knowledge of ocean winds and currents allowed Europeans to sail across the oceans, cannon-carrying ships were available to support their presence on all the coastlines of the Earth. Subsequent conquest and settlement of the Americas depended both on gunpowder weapons and on the infectious diseases Europeans brought with them that proved deadly among previously isolated populations.

In the short run, Spain was the state that profited most conspicuously from the discovery of the Americas. A handful of Spaniards conquered first Mexico and then Peru between 1521 and 1533, and rich silver mines soon supplied King Philip I of Spain (reigned 1556–1598) with a flow of silver that allowed him to more than double the size of his army. Despite American silver, paying so many soldiers and sailors drained the treasury, and three successive bankruptcies paralyzed King Philip’s hopes and plans. Mercenary soldiers had dominated the scene in Italy for two centuries by King Philip’s time (where he ruled Milan, Naples, and Sicily), when money and credit had become essential for paying and equipping armies throughout Europe. Even the greatest of kings found themselves entangled in debts owed to merchants and bankers.

Under the circumstances, states that managed to increase taxes and repay loans on time fared better than those where royal and aristocratic disdain of money prevailed, as in Spain. The Dutch led the way. They also developed new forms of drill, discipline, and command that made their armies efficient as never before. Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and captain general of Holland and Zeeland between 1585 and 1625, set out to match ancient Roman armies by drilling his soldiers for long hours whenever they were not fighting, marching, or digging trenches for a siege. Endless practice of marching and going through the motions needed to load and fire muskets in unison and in obedience to shouted commands made firing quicker and more reliable in battle.

Moreover, prolonged rhythmic movements—a sort of dance—aroused feelings of solidarity and togetherness that made well-drilled soldiers willing and able to stand fast even when enemy bullets were flying among them. Maurice’s drill spread very fast to other European armies; for the next two hundred years European soldiers, recruited among poor peasants and drifters on city streets, nevertheless obeyed their officers with superior precision and effectiveness wherever they found themselves. These mercenary armies employed young men who might otherwise have been poor and riotous subjects, yet in uniform and under military discipline upheld peace and order even against their like at home. It was they who established Dutch, French, and English empires overseas and extended the Russian Empire southward and eastward overland.

Within Western Europe, each army was so nearly matched with its neighbors that an unstable balance of power was maintained. But on the margins, whether in Ireland, America, Siberia, or India, systematic expansion set in. Europe, in short, launched itself on a self-reinforcing cycle whereby military organization sustained and was sustained by economic and political expansion at the expense of other peoples of the Earth.

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) came close to being a world war, fought, as it was, in Europe, America, and India. Great Britain decisively defeated the French in America and India, while in Europe, Prussia survived against overwhelming odds, thanks to Prussian armies, British subsidies, and potatoes, a crop recently introduced by Frederick the Great (reigned 1740–1786). Potatoes kept his soldiers and subjects alive year after year as Russian, French, and Austrian armies marched to and fro across the Prussian landscape, confiscating grain to feed themselves everywhere they went.

Prussia’s survival provoked other Europeans to propagate potatoes in fallow fields wherever they would flourish; British successes overseas provoked the French to improve their field artillery by careful scientific experiment and to build a larger navy with which to challenge Britain anew. When British efforts to tax their American colonies to help pay for the Seven Years’ War aroused armed rebellion, the French seized the chance to revenge themselves in 1778 by supporting the Americans’ Revolutionary War. Subsequent French victories at sea, together with French and American troops on the ground, finally compelled the British army to surrender at Yorkown, Virginia, in 1781.

But the French government had difficulty paying for their victory, and when it summoned the Estates General in 1789 to raise new taxes, simmering discontent and admiration for the republican government inaugurated in the United States of America two years before suddenly boiled over into a revolution that soon convulsed all of Europe until 1815. Population pressure had been mounting within most of Europe for a generation or longer, and this contributed to popular discontent, while appeals to reason, centered especially in France, had challenged exemptions from taxation and other privileges that nobles and priests enjoyed. When elected representatives deposed and executed the French king and queen in 1793, other Europeans were shocked. Warfare, commenced in 1792, swiftly intensified when the revolutionary government declared a levee en masse whereby all males capable of bearing arms were summoned to fight the invading armies.

The levee en masse supplied French armies with an unprecedented number of recruits, and revolutionary enthusiasm, expressed in the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” together with enormous efforts to train and equip them with weapons, began to pay off in 1794 with victories against Prussian, Austrian, and British invaders. The advancing French were soon overrunning Belgium, Germany, and Italy, where local populations sometimes welcomed them as liberators.

For the next twenty years, most of Europe was at war save for brief interludes. Varying coalitions of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia together with lesser states struggled against the French and their allies and/or subjects in newly annexed parts of the continent. Political infighting in Paris brought a successful general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to power in 1799; he crowned himself emperor of the French five years later. Armies became far larger than before, and artillery, now light enough to keep up with marching infantry, played a bigger role in battle than before. Yet thanks largely to potatoes, peasants did not starve as they had in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Peace, when it came after Napoleon’s final overthrow and exile in 1815, left Europeans no poorer and militarily far more powerful than they had been in 1789.

Industrialization

The relative peace and prosperity in Europe was due to fact that war had accelerated the manufacture both of armaments and of other branches of industry. More and cheaper goods that were produced by new machinery using both waterpower and steam engines generated new wealth, new markets overseas, and new jobs for growing populations. Britain, Belgium, and Germany, where coal abounded, soon outstripped France, where coal was scarce.

As for military affairs, for a generation after 1815 European governments tried to maintain peace, and armies and navies remained content with the way things were. That began to alter in the 1830s when the French adopted guns designed to fire shells that exploded on impact and could destroy wooden warships with ease. Change accelerated after 1840 when the French and British navies and the Prussian army all abandoned the weapons that had served their predecessors so well, and a general arms race got under way. The two navies shifted first to iron and then to steel ships powered by steam and armed with larger and larger breech-loading guns, while the Prussian army invested in breech-loading rifles, making older infantry tactics obsolete. Then, when Britain and France joined forces against the Russians in the Crimean War (1854–1856), traditional artisan methods of shaping metal by hand proved utterly inadequate to turn out new rifled handguns. The British responded by borrowing American methods of using semiautomatic machine tools to turn out standardized parts in hitherto unimagined quantity. Mass production quickly spread to the arms makers of all Europe.

Simultaneously, mechanized transport—railroads and steamships—enlarged transport capabilities, and the American Civil War (1861–1865) showed Europeans how armies of enormous size could be supplied from far in the rear for months on end. Mechanized transport also allowed the British navy to compel China to open its ports to the opium trade (1839–1842) and soon afterward Americans induced Japan to open itself to the rest of world (1854). And all the while the British and the French led the way in expanding European empires in Africa and Asia.

Within Europe itself, however, the state that most profited from the mechanization of warfare was Prussia. The General Staff had a decisive voice in determining exactly how Prussian railways were laid out, and then it made detailed plans for using the railways to deliver the maximum number of men and equipment to the frontiers in minimal time. Their careful planning paid off when war broke out, first with Austria (1866), then with France (1870–1871), leading in both cases to quick Prussian victories. Thereupon, nationalists who had long yearned to unite the separate German states formed the new German Empire under Prussia’s lead.

In the next half century, the arms race intensified. Battleships became larger and faster, armed with enormous steel guns capable of projecting heavy shells as much as 32 kilometers (about 20 miles). Design of field artillery for land warfare improved almost as much, with faster fi re, better sights, and greater mobility. New weapons also threatened existing ways of war as airplanes, submarines, and torpedoes extended their reach above the Earth and beneath the sea.

Twentieth-Century Warfare

The long-standing French–British rivalry subsided after Emperor Wilhelm II (reigned 1888–1918) came to the German throne and decided to seek world power by building a navy to rival that of the British. Simultaneously, German army planners began to fear that new Russian railroads might allow Russia’s superiority in numbers to endanger their eastern frontier. The result was that after 1907 a triple alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy confronted the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and Russia.

World War I and Its Aftermath

This was the situation that precipitated World War I (1914–1918). Assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne by Serbian revolutionaries was the spark that set it off, and Austrian plans to retaliate by invading Serbia provoked Russian mobilization, whereupon German and French armies also mobilized. Once mobilization got under way, no one dared to back down and risk unreadiness in the face of the enemy. Britain hesitated, but German invasion of the neutral Belgium on 4 August 1914 persuaded the British to join its allies and hurriedly dispatch a small army to France. Unlike the continental powers, however, the British army had few reserves‚ so its full military effort was delayed until 1916 when civilian volunteers (later conscripts) had been equipped, trained, and sent abroad to join the struggle.

The German mobilization plan proved initially to be the most successful. As in 1870, it aimed at defeating the French quickly by marching seven armies across Belgium. But after weeks of strenuous marching, a gap opened between their armies, and a desperate French effort halted the German advance at the River Marne. Very quickly improvised trenches sheltered soldiers on both sides from enemy fire, and within a few months trenches stretched all the way from the Swiss border to the North Sea. For the next four years repeated efforts to break through evermore- complicated defenses failed to do more than shift the front by a few kilometers.

In the next four years, other states, as near as the Ottoman Empire and as far away as Japan, joined one side or the other, turning the conflict into World War I. In addition, mobilizing the home front to assure adequate war supplies transformed civil society, especially in Europe, as government officials, big business, and big unions collaborated to enlarge the output of munitions while rationing food and other civilian consumption. Welfare and warfare intermingled, since a healthy and contented workforce was essential to the war effort. When welfare wavered as food shortages set in, first Russia and then Germany would eventually have to stop fighting.

Shortages of coal and iron ore in France required purchases abroad from the start; both Britain and France imported grain, cotton, and manufactured goods from the United States in growing quantities. American bankers were soon making loans to finance such imports. Other purchases of food and raw materials from Asia, Africa, South America, and the islands of the sea also swept those lands into a transgovernmental, flow-through, managed economy designed to maximize the power of Allied armies. Germany and its allies did the same but on a lesser scale, since the British navy blockaded Germany in the North Sea and intercepted imports whenever it could.

The eastern front was always too lengthy to settle down to trench warfare, but there, too, neither side could win until shortages of food and ammunition began to cripple the Russians. Communist revolutionaries in Russia took power in November 1917 and made peace by ceding the Ukraine and other territories to Germany in March 1918. The fact that the United States declared war against Germany in April 1917 more than compensated for this temporary German victory. More than a million American soldiers arrived in France by the time reinforcements from the east allowed the Germans to mount a final offensive. It met initial successes, but the French and British held and, with the help of American troops, reversed the tide of battle as growing shortages of food and ammunition weakened the Germans. On 10 November l918 an armistice signified the Allied victory a few days after socialists had seized power in Berlin. By then, about 10 million men had been killed in battle, and drastic economic disruption and enormous war debts threatened to paralyze Europe’s future.

Across the next four years, peace was defined by a series of treaties. The victors sought to ensure themselves against German revenge by transferring marginal territories to neighboring states, demilitarizing the Rhineland, limiting the German army to 100,000 men, and more generally by organizing the League of Nations to keep the peace. Still more American loans were necessary before economic recovery came to Germany, soon followed by a New York stock market crash in October 1929 and years of deep, worldwide depression.

Widespread unemployment provoked a radical response in Germany, where Adolf Hitler brought his Nazi Party to power in January 1933, and in the United States, where Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the New Deal three months afterward. In both countries, expanded government expenditures on roads and other public works did something to diminish unemployment, but the Depression ended only when wholesale rearmament, first in Germany, then more reluctantly in Britain, France, and the United States, prepared the way for World War II. Japan also militarized its economy beginning as early as 1931, when they invaded Manchuria and then attacked China in 1936.

World War II

In Europe, Hitler proclaimed the superiority of the Aryan race, blamed Jews and Marxists for Germany’s defeat in 1918, and set out to undo that defeat by propaganda, diplomacy, and, if need be, by war. At first, France and Britain caved in, abandoning Austria and then Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938; when Hitler made a surprising agreement with the Soviet Union (formerly Russia) and invaded Poland in September 1939, the French and British reluctantly went to war once more. This time, German war plans proved more successful, defeating Poland in 1939, France in 1940, and occupying Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) as well as the Balkans. But bombing London failed to persuade the British to surrender, and the British navy frustrated plans for a cross-channel assault, so in 1941 Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union instead, expecting another swift and easy victory.

The initial attack carried German tanks and mechanized infantry deep into the Soviet Union, besieging Leningrad and reaching the outskirts of Moscow by December 1941. Winter cold and supply shortages then forced German armies to a halt exactly when a Japanese naval attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor brought Americans into the war. Roosevelt had already aided Britain short of joining the war, and Hitler reacted to the news of Pearl Harbor by gratuitously declaring war on the United States. He thus relieved President Roosevelt of what might have been an insurmountable obstacle to following his preferred strategy of defeating Germany first, on the ground that Hitler’s power was more threatening than anything the Japanese could offer.

From then on the course of the war depended very largely on the flow of supplies of every kind from farms and factories to battlefields scattered all the way from the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific to Stalingrad on the Volga River, and from Alaska to Burma. The Germans never really integrated their war plans with the Japanese. Transport was too difficult, and trust was scant. The Anglo-Americans did far better, establishing joint commands and concerting economic and strategic plans more efficiently than had been done in World War I. Soviet armies benefited from food and trucks that reached them from America, although trust between the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Anglo- Americans was never fi rm. And the Soviet Union, like France in World War I, manufactured nearly all the tanks, artillery, and airplanes the Red Army needed to drive the Germans back, beginning with a successful counterattack at Stalingrad in September 1942 and breaking the Leningrad siege in January 1943. A little earlier, the Battle of Midway (June 1942) turned the tide in the Pacific.

Hard fighting continued until 1945, involving massive air attacks on Germany, a successful Anglo- American cross-channel invasion in 1944, and continued Soviet advances all the way to Berlin. With defeat certain, Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, leaving others to surrender in the early days of May. The Japanese fought on, as American forces advanced across the Pacific, but finally surrendered after American airplanes dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. Formal surrender on 2 September 1945 ended a struggle that resulted in about 22–25 million military casualties and the deaths of approximately 40–52 million civilians, including nearly 6 million Jews, the victims of the Holocaust. (Such unprecedented numbers, although they are still subject to historical research in the twenty-first century, reflect a dramatic and disturbing shift in the tactics of world powers that continues to resonate among us: the blatant targeting of civilian populations, whether by strategic bombing, population transfers, or persecution.)

Outlook in the Atomic Age

The atomic bomb was the most spectacular and frightening technology to emerge from World War II. Fear of seeing atomic clouds like those that towered over Hiroshima and Nagasaki have haunted international politics ever since. Innumerable other new devices—radar, proximity fuses, guided missiles, rockets, jet engines, and computers, to name only the most significant—also affected military, political, and civilian life during the war itself and thereafter.

When surviving Jews established the State of Israel in 1948 and forcibly expelled many thousands of Palestinians, they aroused intense resentment among Muslims in general and Arabs in particular. Subsequent brief local wars favored Israel, with the help of arms and money coming mainly from the United States. And when Muslims resorted to acts of terrorism not only against Israel, but also against the United States (September 11, 2001), President George W. Bush (in office 2001–2009) declared the War on Terrorism, which reached the nine-year mark in 2010 with no end in sight. American forces invaded Afghanistan without eradicating all the terrorists who had found shelter there, then attacked Iraq and easily overthrew Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) only to provoke years of violence. Many people believe that as long as the United States supplies the Israeli armed forces with modern weapons and tolerates Israeli attacks on Palestinians and the sporadic establishment of new settlements on Palestinian land, then it seems certain that thousands of angry Muslims will continue to plan terroristic acts, often sacrificing their own lives in order to kill Israelis, Americans, and also Europeans.

Such terrorism may become a running sore, but fears of atomic disaster have so far remained no more than a bad dream. Even after the aptly nicknamed Cold War broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Soviets tested their first atomic warhead (1949), actual atomic attack failed to materialize. In the course of the next half century or so, other states—Britain, France, Israel, China, India, and Pakistan—also acquired atomic capabilities, yet none of them has yet employed an atomic warhead against an enemy. Nor have any of these governments ever approached the number of U.S. and Russian warheads and rockets poised and ready to deliver them anywhere on Earth.

Eventually, in 1991, Communist mismanagement of production, both for war and peace, provoked the swift and surprising dismantlement of the Soviet Union. Satellite Communist regimes in Eastern Europe also foundered, and a shaky balance of power between the new Russia and the rest of the world emerged. That tended to destabilize the atomic standoff since the Russians became unable to guard all their atomic installations as before. A similar meltdown in Pakistan, should it ever occur, would be far more dangerous since Muslim terrorists already abound within Pakistan’s borders. As of 2010, terrorists had not acquired the fearful capability of atomic weaponry, though the threat remains for the foreseeable future.

Although an isolated explosion could be horrific, the fact remains that it is the great powers with large arsenals of warheads that may destroy human life on Earth if they ever launch an all-out assault on one another. The Russians, Americans, Chinese, and Indians have so far refrained. If that continues, humankind may yet survive despite our long-standing propensity and mounting capability for killing as many enemies as possible in times of war.

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