Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II. Len Deighton

arts of camouflage and sniping. The role of the machine-gun went unremarked in the war, and after it the British army preferred to admire the horsemanship of the foe and concentrated its reforms upon its own horsemen. By 1914 British cavalry were the finest in the world, but there were to be no battles for them to fight.

      The decisive components of future warfare were more easily seen in the savage civil war which had torn nineteenth-century America in two. Here was a country where public opinion counted for a great deal. Even in the most desperate days of the war its leaders had stopped short of universal conscription. (The Confederate army was 20 per cent conscript, the Union army 6 per cent.) A cunning combination of cash bounties for volunteers, plus the threat of conscription, had bulldozed enough men into uniform. The inescapable lesson of the civil war was that the industrial might of the North inevitably prevailed. Frequent demonstrations of military prowess by Confederate generals came to nothing because the Union had more soldiers, more miles of railroad, and more factories to produce armaments and all the other resources of war.

      Neither the British nor the French seemed to learn much from the American battlefields and the terribly high casualties that were suffered there. After the stunning German victory in 1870, the defeated French generals concluded that it was the nature of the offensive that had been the true secret of Germany’s lightning campaign. Assault became the new theory of warfare. France soon paid off the punitive reparations demanded by its conquerors and, inexplicably, regained its reputation as the world’s most formidable land power. With Britain’s navy considered indomitable, the Anglo-French alliance was not actively challenged.

      As the dust of war blew away, it was starkly evident that France would not be content with the European borders that the Germans had imposed upon her. Frenchmen were determined to regain the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and redress their humiliating defeat. The thought of Wilhelm posturing in the great Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, amid the German princes and the battle-torn standards, while the grand duke of Baden hailed him as emperor had ignited a lasting desire for revenge in every French heart.

      A different sort of German ruler might have guided his country through this prevailing French resentment but Wilhelm was a neurotic and enigmatic personality. Despite his seven children, his closest friends were homosexuals. From them he seemed to get the warmth and affection that he needed in order to play the role of a tough and pitiless warlord. When he became ruler of a united and powerful Germany, a war to decide the hegemony of Europe was almost inevitable. Furthermore the unified Germany that came after the victory of 1870 was being transformed. In the following 25 years the national income doubled. Railroads spread across the land. Giant electrical, chemical and industrial enterprises flourished and booming cities absorbed a population which increased 50 per cent. ‘German universities and technical schools were the most admired, German methods the most thorough, German philosophers dominant,’ said Barbara Tuchman.⁹

       Technical advances

      Displayed by the Americans at Britain’s Great Exhibition of 1851 there were half a dozen mass-produced rifles, every part of them easily and quickly interchangeable. The advantage such precision production brought to an army will be readily understood by those British soldiers who used a hammer and file, and sometimes a hacksaw, when servicing their vehicles and equipment during the Second World War. In the German section of the Exhibition in London, Alfred Krupp displayed a cannon made from cast steel, instead of the usual iron or bronze. He found no buyers.

      The nineteenth century transformed warfare, with machine-guns used in conjunction with barbed-wire. Mass-produced weapons and citizen armies were moved by railways. Two inventions were yet to bear fruit: nothing would change the nature of war more than the wireless telegraph and the internal combustion engine.

      Britain’s industrial revolution had been made possible by the invention of such devices as George Stephenson’s steam engine, Richard Arkwright’s water-frame, Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, Hargreaves’ spinning jenny and Samuel Crompton’s mule. These inventions were brilliantly simple; the inventors were unsophisticated men. Arkwright was a barber assisted by a watchmaker, Hargreaves a carpenter, Cartwright a clergyman, Crompton a spinner and Stephenson a collier’s son who didn’t learn to read until he was 17 years old. But the next step in modern progress would delve into such mysteries as chemistry, microbiology, physics and precision engineering. It would require educated people working in well equipped workshops and laboratories.

      Inventions were improved at a dazzling speed. A gas engine invented by Dr N. A. Otto in 1876 was developed by Gottlieb Daimler to propel a vehicle. Before the end of the century there was an automobile race covering 744 miles from Paris to Bordeaux and back. By 1903 the Wright brothers were flying their curious contraptions. Six years later Europeans suddenly understood the significance of powered flight when Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel in 31 minutes. The world had been irreversibly transformed and so had the way in which men would fight. War had entered the third dimension.

      Wireless was no less important. By 1901 Guglielmo Marconi’s development of work by Rudolf Hertz enabled a wireless message to be transmitted 3,000 miles. While the industrial revolution had used crude machines and unskilled labour to produce wealth, this new ‘technical revolution’ was far more demanding. Nations with leaders who failed to respond to the complexities of this new world ran the risk of rapid decline. In the words of one British major-general who was also an historian:

      Mind more than matter, thought more than things, and above all imagination, struggled to gain power. New substances appeared, new sources of energy were tapped and new outlooks on life took form. The world was sloughing its skin – mental, moral and physical – a process destined to transform the industrial revolution into a technical civilization. Divorced from civil progress, soldiers could not see this. They could not see that as civilization became more technical, military power must inevitably follow suit: that the next war would be as much a clash between factories and technicians as between armies and generals. With the steady advance of science warfare could not stand still.¹⁰

      In 1890 Germany’s production of iron and steel had been half that of Britain; by 1913 Germany produced twice as much as Britain and half that of the United States. Such advances were matched by progress in manufacturing. German industry – chemical and electric firms in particular – set up research institutes, and worked closely with the universities. By the end of the nineteenth century German technology had left Britain behind. By the time Hitler came to power, Germany had collected one-third of all the Nobel prizes for physics and chemistry.

      Since the early nineteenth century, Prussia had given great emphasis to the technical training of the workforce. It had invented such educational refinements as graduate schools, Ph.D. degrees, seminars, research laboratories and institutes, and scholarly and scientific journals. All of these innovations were quickly adopted by American universities. France recognized the importance of education and technology and pioneered colleges for the advanced study of engineering and science. The achievements of such men as J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish laboratory did not allay the fears of the British educational establishment, which, fortified by State and Church, saw science as a dangerous first step towards Godless social reform and resolutely opposed it. Britain’s ‘public schools’ (actually private, fee-paying and exclusive) prepared upper middle-class boys to study in the choice universities where science and engineering were virtually ignored. Association between university and industry was fiercely resisted. As the First World War began, most of Britain’s population could expect no education beyond their fourteenth birthdays. Teachers were ill paid and difficult to recruit. Decisions about the nation, its industries and commercial life were made by men who had studied the Classics, Law or Philosophy. Few spoke any modern foreign language fluently.

      Britain’s contribution to its wars is celebrated by memorable prose and poetry rather than by military successes. The country’s subsequent industrial and economic history has been blighted by the way its middle classes have continued to hold any sort of technical accomplishment in low esteem, and prefer their children to study liberal arts in outmoded buildings lacking modern facilities.

       Outbreak