"The Storm of War"

It took me as almost long as the event itself - OK, not quite, but I started it well over a year ago and yesterday, I finally finished it! As is obvious from the photo above, The Storm of War is a single-volume history of the Second World War.  It was published in England in 2009 (where the author, Andrew Roberts, is from) and in the US in 2011. The paperback edition came out last year.

At over 600 pages (of the tall variety, at that), it is not a quick read, but it sure is a fascinating one.  The Second World War doesn't get a lot of coverage in Indian history books (although Indian soldiers participated in significant numbers as part of the British forces, the war itself never entered India) and before reading this book, I only had the most rudimentary awareness of this cataclysmic event. I have considered others books in the past (& even own a couple of them), but I am certainly glad that this is the one I chose to actually read.

Andrew Roberts has the rare ability to synthesize such a vast and complex story into a readable narrative that does not feel superficial or mired in inane detail. He has marshaled an impressive array of sources (the Bibliography alone runs to over 25 pages) and quotes them at just the right moment.  His approach is to break up the war into its various theatres and cover each one for time periods that span a few years at a time.  This implies that he jumps back in time between chapters, but it allows him to keep the focus on one specific aspect of the war in a particular chapter.  In general, this approach works quite well, although it could be a mite confusing if you take too many long breaks.

I obviously learnt a lot from this book, but probably the most astonishing fact for me was amount of lives lost by the Russians.  If America paid for the war (literally) in arms, equipment, and food, then it was Russia that paid the price in blood.  Some of the statistics that surround this are truly startling: 50 million lives were lost in this war. Of this more than 27 million were from Russia.  The Germans were engaged simultaneously on Eastern (Russia) and Western (Britain and USA) fronts. The Western front with the War of Britain and the D-Day landings gets most of the press, but the real bitter, bloody, and often hand-to-hand, battle was fought on the Eastern front. Of every 5 Germans killed on the battlefield, 4 were killed on the Eastern front.

Roberts doesn't just report history - he also provides analysis and insight.  He does this throughout the book, but particularly so in the last chapter ("Conclusion") where he provides his answer to the question, Why did the Allied forces win the war? It is clear that there was nothing inevitable about this victory and the author points out the long series of strategic and tactical blunders on the part of Hitler that likely cost Germany the war.  Germany held the advantage for much of the early going - indeed, the author makes a strong claim for the German soldier to be the "best" soldier in all of the Word War.  Ultimately, the seeds for the downfall of the Nazis were within the same philosophy that brought them to power and triggered the war in the first place.

A book of this scope must necessarily drop some aspects that others might consider very important. There is barely any mention of Mussolini and while the Japanese side of the story gets considerably more play (especially the attack on Pearl Harbor and of course the dropping of the nuclear bombs), the presentation is almost entirely from Hitler's perspective.  As the author readily admits, this is by design and due to the somewhat obvious fact that Hitler was the primary reason for starting the war, the early successes for the Axis, and their eventual defeat.

The combined leadership of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin won the war for the Allies, but while Stalin essentially ruled as a dictator, Roosevelt and Churchill presided over a more fractious set of generals with out-sized egos that constantly squabbled over matters of strategy and tactics. It is interesting that their "committee style" approach eventually triumphed over the "single vision" approach of Germany.

Almost 70 years after the end of the war, it is hard to imagine what it must have been like to live through that tumultuous time, but the accretion of the descriptions of one bloody battle after other, the cruelty of one people against another (& indeed, sometimes on their own - especially in the case of the Russians), and just the massive loss of life and survival in horrendous conditions cannot fail to weigh down the reader and indeed, the lingering sense I had as I finished the book was one of sadness.

Is there justification for the enormous cost (in lives and treasure) of this war? The author posits the theory that Germany needed to lose the war as comprehensively as it did to usher in the peaceful country it has since become and avoid the rise of revanchist forces. This debate was of course the central question of the Bhagvad Gita and it is generally accepted that Krishna's view of "duty first" is the preeminent one - implicitly in the way events transpire in the Mahabharata and more explicitly by a long line of more modern philosophers.  However, as Amartya Sen discusses in The Argumentative Indian, Arjun's questioning of the morality of the cost that such duty entails still deserves consideration - but that is a subject for another day.

One last statistic about the war that reflects on the relative costs borne by the Allies: The US spent $350 billion - more than Britain and the USSR combined, but for every American life lost in the war, Russia lost 92.