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But wait – there’s more!!

I’ve compiled my Top 10 Second World Wars – one of my top ten lists where I look at a subject which has a fundamental continuity but which also can be demarcated into distinct parts in their own right. If you prefer, you can think of it as my Second World War iceberg meme – in this case an iceberg of Second World War continuity.

My usual rule is twenty special mentions for each top ten list, where the subject permits – and here it did, not surprisingly given the sheer scale of the Second World War.

Indeed, I could have had more entries. Other potential entries included the Lapland War, the war by Finland on Germany required as a condition of peace between the Finns and the Soviets, or the brief Franco-Thai war fought between the Vichy French colonial administration in Indochina and Thailand in 1940-1941. However, I noted the former in my top ten entry for the Soviet-Finnish war, and the latter just didn’t seem special enough for special mention.

Anyway, these are the special mentions for my Top 10 Second World Wars.

 

 

 

 

(1) FIRST WORLD WAR – GREAT WAR 1914-1945

 

I mean, this one’s obvious, isn’t it?

It’s impossible to consider the Second World War except as a continuation of the First World War, or at least originating in the latter’s aftermath. After all, it’s effectively implied in the names.

Indeed, their continuity has become a matter of serious historical study, possibly more so as time passes from the twentieth century, for the two world wars to be looked at as one.

Some have argued for the two world wars as the Second Thirty Years War. Others have argued for the two world wars as the war of 1914-1945, two periods of fighting with a twenty years armistice between them – indeed, as Marshal Foch, the French supreme commander of Allied forces on the Western Front, was said to have proclaimed upon the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Note that Marshal Foch’s proclamation was not, as fashionable historiography tends to these days, because those terms were too harsh, but because they were too lenient – a viewpoint that I am increasingly inclined towards, or at least that the Versailles Treaty was not that bad.

Note also that Marshal Foch’s proclamation is apocryphal, attributed to him variously by the subsequent French prime minister (during the Second World War) Paul Renaud or by Churchill.

The Great War 1914-1945 was indeed the title of a book compiled from different historians writing on the continuity or parallels between the two world wars, most strikingly (heh) in the first volume, subtitled Lightning Strikes Twice.

Some of those parallels or that continuity are or is obvious, particularly the role of Germany that, unreconciled to its defeat in the First World War, took another swing at re-fighting the same war again in the Second. I am a fan of the Fischer Thesis – the argument by German historian Franz Fischer that Germany essentially pursued the same aims in both world wars, that is an imperial policy (or weltpolitik) for Germany to transform itself into a world power by a continental empire in eastern Europe and Russia (or Mitteleuropa).

The other obvious parallel or continuity is the defeat of Germany in both – lending itself to the thesis by my favorite Second World War historian H.P. Willmott of the myth of German military excellence. As he paraphrases Oscar Wilde (from the Importance of Being Earnest) – to lose one world war might be counted as misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness. As I like to quip, all German leadership achieved in both world wars was their encirclement and attrition by enemies with superior resources.

And indeed, I am persuaded by Willmott’s thesis that, as demonstrated by both world wars, German military genius lay in fighting not war. That is, that in both world wars Germany demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of war, particularly the limits of military and national power – something Willmott observes Bismarck understood, but his successors who led Germany did not.

Even here, though, there are key points of distinction – perhaps foremost among them that Germany appeared to do substantially better in the Second World War than in the First. Ironically, that is because Germany followed a more Bismarckian political diplomacy prior to and at the outset of the Second World War, although that began to unravel once Germany committed itself to war, aptly enough as something Bismarck himself strove to avoid in his foreign policy once Germany was united.

Ultimately, Germany’s initial success was because it had its Brest-Litovsk moment from the First World War at the outset of the Second – the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, securing economic resources from the east and a free hand in the west.

That is, as opposed to achieving it too little and too late as it did with the original Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the newly formed Soviet Union in the First World War’s penultimate year of 1917 – after it had been effectively exhausted fighting on two fronts, and which ultimately led to decisive defeat on the Western Front.

On that point, the Soviet Union proved far more resilient and robust in the Second World War than its imperial Russian predecessor – and even its former self in 1917-1918 – in the First. Hence the ironic reversal that where Germany won on the Eastern Front and lost on the Western Front in the First World War, it won on the Western Front and lost on the Eastern Front in the Second.

Similarly, the United States had become stronger with a consequently larger role in the Second World War than it had in the First. One might quip that the Second World War was German romping about continental Europe crushing its smaller and weaker adversaries, until it drew the two true world powers in to crush it.

On the other hand, France proved far less resilient and robust in the Second World War, albeit something that was very much connected with the costs of fighting the First. That saw Germany achieve in a few weeks in 1940 what it failed to achieve in 1914 or indeed the four years of fighting that followed.

Another key distinction was in the roles of Italy and Japan that, formerly on the side of Allies in First World War, allied themselves with Germany in the Second – arguably a failure of Allied political diplomacy more profound than the appeasement of Germany itself, leading as it did to Italy and Japan each effectively adding a year to the war against Germany.

Once allied to Germany, Italy played a similar role to the former Austria-Hungary as Germany’s major European ally (and ironically Italy’s traditional adversary in the First World War and before) – down to the Germany description of each alliance as being “shackled to a corpse” – as well as to the Ottoman Empire against Britain in the Middle East, albeit from the opposite direction (west rather than east against Egypt).

Japan however played an entirely new role in Asia and the Pacific from anything comparable in the First World War – hence the Second World War assumed a truly global character well beyond that of the First World War, the latter sometimes being dubbed as a European Civil War.

I can’t resist including the somewhat cryptic quip by H.P. Wilmott that, paradoxically, WW2 might be regarded as the last war of the 19th century and WW1 was the first war of the 20th century. I understand that to mean WW2 was closer to 19th century wars, in part because the technology and technique of offensive mobility won out over defensive firepower and attrition – albeit briefly and with waning effect through the war’s duration – while its predecessor was more characteristic of the static 20th century wars of attrition that followed it.

Or alternatively, my own observation that WW2 was closer to the model of the Franco-Prussian War, at least in its European opening, or the Napoleonic Wars in its continuation within Europe. On the other hand, WW1 was closer to the American Civil War as the true precursor of twentieth century warfare, with the western front of the latter resembling the eastern theater of the latter, only with even more lethal firepower. Ironically, however, WW1 finished by armistice in a manner closer to the Franco-Prussian War except with France and Germany reversed, while the WW2 was fought to unconditional surrender like the American Civil War.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

 

(2) COLD WAR – LONG WAR 1914-1991

 

Well this one’s also obvious, isn’t it?

Perhaps not as obvious as the First World War but close to it as the Cold War seamlessly evolved from, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Second World War – indeed perhaps inevitably, as in the colorful phrase (and essay title) of historian Joseph Lieberman comparing the Cold War combatants to “the scorpion and the tarantula in the bottle”.

I’m not sure whom Lieberman intended to be the scorpion or the tarantula – but the bottle was the Second World War and its aftermath in the opposing occupations of Europe by the United States and the Soviet Union. Sometimes you drink the bottle and sometimes the bottle drinks you…

Other commentators, commencing with Philip Bobbitt in The Shield of Achilles, have even combined the world wars and cold war into a single continuity, the so-called Long War of the twentieth century or 1914-1991.

On the other hand, the Second World War also cut across the continuity of the Cold War – a temporary interbellum or suspension of hostilities between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, as an alliance against Germany and the other Axis powers, albeit one that resembled a marriage of convenience.

Or rather, a shotgun marriage, one that was thrust upon them. Neither Cold War antagonist chose its involvement in the Second World War – or at least the manner or timing of that involvement, as both were attacked first (and in the case of the United States, had war declared on it by Germany).

Of course, the hostilities began to bubble back to the surface as Allied and Soviet defeat of Germany loomed ever larger, becoming more overt when there was no longer the common enemy of Germany or Japan to unite them.

However, the continuity with the Second World War is inescapable. While the Cold War may have originated from opposition to the Soviet Union from 1917 onwards, it took its particular shape from the Second World War, such that it is difficult to imagine otherwise.

The Cold War antagonists of the United States and the Soviet Union were effectively the two last men standing, with the other great powers defeated or exhausted from the war – although that had essentially been the reality of power in the world from 1917 onwards, albeit masked by their isolationism, self-imposed or otherwise.

And the battle lines or fronts were effectively drawn by the territory each occupied or controlled after the war.

The western front of the Cold War – Europe – was effectively drawn by the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe – such that it was the immediate source of conflict in the Cold War, infamously as the Iron Curtain. Even the exceptions to the rule of Soviet occupation, Austria and Finland – exceptional in that they avoided regimes imposed on them by the Soviets – had neutrality imposed upon them instead. (Yugoslavia was arguably another exception, but primarily because it had largely liberated itself outside of Soviet occupation and did not directly border the Soviet Union itself).

Similarly to the Western Front of the First World War, it was largely a static front of siege or stalemate – static not by millions killed in trench warfare but by the prospect of millions dead in nuclear war (or renewal of war on the scale of the Second World War), as well as the resources spent on opposing armed camps.

The eastern front of the Cold War – Asia – was far more volatile, having been effectively drawn by the Soviet occupation of Manchuria and Korea – firstly with the communist victory in the Chinese civil war (which made the eastern front even more volatile) and secondly with subsequent wars with communist governments in Asia, particularly in Korea and Vietnam.

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

 

(3) APPEASEMENT – AXIS COLD WAR (1931-1941)

 

“Up to now, we’ve succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals…No, they let us through the danger zone. That’s exactly how it was in foreign policy too…They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and better armed than they, then they started the war.”

That statement by Joseph Goebbels – transcribed by a participant in a secret briefing to selected German journalists and quoted in Paul Johnson’s A History of the Modern World – “is, on the whole, an accurate summary of what happened in the 1930s”.

My previous special mention entry for the Cold War within the Second World War (or vice versa) overlooks that there was, in effect, another cold war that was far more entangled with the Second World War – the three-sided cold war in which Nazi Germany and other fascist states, the western democracies, and the Soviet Union all maneuvered with or against each other.

Indeed, the conventional depiction of the Second World War from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945 overlooks that this was simply the ‘hot war’ as the culmination of the longer cold war before that, from 1933 to 1939 for Germany and from 1931 to 1941 for Japan.

And, as the statement by Goebbels indicates, it was a cold war that Germany largely won, outmaneuvering and wrong-footing Britain and France to a remarkable extent.

Yes, it’s arguable – as some historians have argued – that it was the Soviet Union that won it, with the subsequent outbreak of war fought on Stalin’s terms and to his intentions. While there’s some substance to this, I think it overlooks his catastrophic miscalculation that war between Germany and the western democracies would be more protracted and exhausting for the combatants to the advantage of the Soviet Union.

Back to Germany, it reflects my own belief that Germany has only succeeded in foreign policy or war when it has, knowingly or otherwise, followed Bismarckian strategy – with Germany’s diplomatic or political successes in the thirties essentially replicating Bismarck’s strategy unifying Germany under Prussia, down to Germany’s successes in annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia mirroring Bismarck’s victories in the Austrian-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars, except through diplomatic rather than military force.

Of course, Nazi Germany failed the fundamental part of Bismarck’s strategy – avoiding general war as opposed to a carefully limited one – which ultimately undid all their Bismarckian successes. Even then, Germany managed to succeed coasting on the fumes of Bismarckian strategy – friendly relations with Russia and limiting the scope of the war to successive individual campaigns that resembled Bismarck’s small wars – until 1941.

It has been observed that had Hitler concluded his ambitions with Munich, he might well have been hailed as one of Germany’s greatest statesmen. That certainly accords with my view that the occupation of Prague and what remained of Czechoslovakia was perhaps his fatal mistake, prompting as it did Britain’s guarantee to Poland and dashing any prospect of reclaiming Danzig and other German territory from Poland without war.

Of course, as it turned out, Hitler’s ambitions were not limited to reclaiming former German territory, and given the Germany he led resembled a Ponzi or pyramid scheme that relied on ongoing conquest, it is not at all clear to me whether he could have stopped even if he wanted to do so. I have read that Germany’s need for gold and foreign reserves, as well as the Czech armaments industry, drove Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia as much as Hitler’s sense of buyer’s remorse that – extraordinarily – Britain and France had cheated him of complete victory at Munich.

Azar Gat has also observed that conflict between the western democracies and the fascist nations was one of cold war. Indeed, he observes it to be part of the standard trajectory of liberal democracies facing hostile non-democratic states – “a pattern progressing on an upward scale from isolationism to appeasement, to containment and cold war, to limited war, and, only reluctantly, to fully fledged war”.

The diplomatic and political confrontation of Britain and France with Germany in the 1930s essentially corresponded to evolving from appeasement to containment and cold war within that standard trajectory, except that they didn’t pull the latter off as well as the Americans in the Cold War because they lacked a credible deterrent, particularly that of strategic airpower and the nuclear deterrent the Americans had.

Their deterrent was essentially that of the threat of war, ultimately enacted in the guarantee to Poland. In fairness to Britain and France, that should have been a credible deterrent, as they saw what Hitler did not, that war would ultimately be self-destructive for all of them, reinforcing their decline to the Soviet Union and the United States as the two superpowers.

That standard trajectory flows from the tendency of liberal democracies to eschew preventive war – something the Romans or other pre-modern states would happily do without qualms. “Historically, they have chosen not to initiate war even when they are under threat, hold the military advantage, and are in danger of losing it”.

In effect, the observation of Gat dovetails with the statement of Goebbels in that it is harder to imagine a more clear-cut example of this than against Germany in the 1930s. “The remarkable thing is that the western liberal democracies did not intervene by force during the 1930s to prevent Hitler’s Germany from rearming, even though this meant that the complete military superiority that they held over Germany would be lost, making it possible for Hitler to embark on his radical expansionist policy.”

It remains that Britain or at least certainly France and even Poland – both of which should have been strongly motivated to keep Germany from rearming to attack them – could easily have intervened against Germany without any serious repercussions from 1933 to 1935 when Germany broke the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles restricting its military forces, such as when it introduced conscription or its air force.

That window of opportunity for intervention without serious repercussions probably remained open to France (and Britain) until 1936, when it could – and should – have intervened against Germany remilitarizing the Rhineland, which would have decisively defeated Hitler’s regime and may well have seen its collapse. That’s even more striking given that France (and Belgium) had no issue intervening to occupy the Ruhr industrial area when a weakened Weimar Germany sought to resist reparations in 1923. The same action probably would have won the war without fighting in 1936.

Much the same observations might be made of the Soviet Union, particularly in its choice of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact without which Germany could not have started the war – as opposed to any other choice, such as collective security with Britain and France or even just neutrality, that would have deterred Germany from war.

Thereafter however, Britain and France faced the prospect of war when it came to opposing Germany, once Germany had rearmed and fortified its western borders sufficiently to move to the next phase of occupying its two neighbors, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The latter – with the Munich Agreement that accompanied it – has become synonymous with appeasement, particularly as a pejorative term. That seems somewhat unfair, particularly for Britain and Neville Chamberlain. It might well have been better for Britain and France to declare war on Germany over Czechoslovakia, but the competing arguments seem finely balanced to me and it is easy to imagine the potential outcome might have been even worse than what happened with Poland a year later.

It just illustrates the various ironies or paradoxes that can be argued with respect to appeasement. One is that Britain and France enforced the wrong provisions of the Treaty of Versailles (reparations as opposed to military restrictions), or appeased the wrong Germany (Nazi Germany as opposed to Weimar Germany). Another is that they practised appeasement from a position of military superiority or strength when it made no sense, only to abandon it from a position of weakness when they could not effectively deter Germany, let alone effectively defend Czechoslovakia or Poland, at least without Soviet participation.

Yet another irony or paradox is that they appeased the wrong nation, alienating Japan and Italy, allies against Germany in the first world war, to the extent that those nations allied with Germany against them instead.

The alienation of Japan as an ally commenced as early as the 1920s, with perhaps one of the worst foreign policy mistakes by Britain – failing to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Japan is of course the reason this entry commences prior to the Nazi regime in 1933, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and continues after the start of the European war in 1939, as the various nations opposed to Germany – increasingly and primarily the United States – also faced off Japan until 1941.

The response to Japanese expansionist policy deserves as much attention as that for Germany – and each could well be the subject of its own top ten list. The failure to respond effectively to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 – which was at least possible by Britain and the United States in combination – was arguably as much a mistake as the failure to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance and certainly compounded it.

Thereafter, a large part of Britain and France being out-maneuvered by Germany in Europe arose from their need to deal with Japan in Asia at the same time, particularly after Japan expanded its aggression to China in 1937. That continued to confront the allies with tough strategic choices after the commencement of war in Europe, obviously even more so once the allies also had to divide their resources between that war and the war with Japan. At very least, the war with Japan added a year to the war in Europe.

Britain and France repeated much the same errors with Italy in the 1930s, continuing to 1940 when Italy joined Germany to declare war on them allied – again to ultimate effect that the war with Italy or war in the Mediterranean arguably added a year or so to the war with Germany. Italy’s support also arguably made Germany’s war possible in the first place, by opening up Austria and Czechoslovakia to German occupation. Fortunately, that was offset to some degree by Italy’s weakness as strategic liability to Germany. Amusingly, the British War Cabinet considered whether they were better off with Italy as neutral or with Italy as actively allied to Germany, before concluding (probably correctly if only just) that it would be better if Italy remained neutral.

The errors alienating Italy to ally itself with Germany are even more striking as Mussolini’s Italy was strongly aligned towards the allies against Germany well into the thirties – and arguably remained so at the level of its populace and institutions, a large part of why its performance as German ally was so mediocre. Indeed, Italy was initially a stronger opponent to Germany’s expansionism than Britain or France, successfully blocking Germany from taking over Austria in 1934.

The turning point was the response of Britain and France to Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia, which saw them get the worst of both worlds – initially opposing Italy, antagonizing Italy without showing any real teeth (such as by the use of naval forces or use of sanctions on oil, to which Italy was particularly vulnerable), which they then compromised by the secret but abortive Hoare-Laval Pact to appease Italy by partitioning Abyssinia.

Thereafter, while Italy still aligned itself with Britain and France against the German remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, it increasingly and inevitably began to align itself with Germany.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER)

 

 

 

(4) UNDERGROUND WAR –

PARTISANS, RESISTANCE & GOVERNMENTS-IN-EXILE

(1931-1945)

 

Special mention has to go to what might be called the underground war – the war of partisans, resistance movements, and governments-in-exile against the Axis powers occupying their nations, primarily Germany but also Italy and Japan (as well as their lesser Axis partners).

Indeed, it is again Japan that is the reason this entry commences in 1931, with the first aggression by any Axis nation (prior to any of the pacts or treaties comprising the Axis from 1936 onwards) with Japan’s invasion and conquest of Manchuria. That saw numerous Chinese insurgents or resistance movements against Japan, as well as resistance movements within Japan itself – although one might identify dissent or resistance against the Japanese imperial government or military well before that in Japan and Korea.

Likewise, German anti-Nazi resistance movements started with the rise of the regime to power in 1933 (and again arguably before that), as did Italian anti-fascist dissent or resistance with the rise of Mussolini to power from 1922 onwards. Of course, the latter became much more substantial as partisans or armed resistance against the Germans (and the German puppet remnants of Mussolini’s government, including Mussolin himself), from 1943 after Italy surrendered to the Allies and the Germans occupied it.

However, the war of partisans, resistance movements, and governments-in-exile against the European Axis powers by the nations they occupied took definitive shape from the Italian conquest of Abyssinia or Ethiopia in 1935 onwards. The primary dichotomy of these combatants was between the communist-led ones, usually preferred by the Soviets, and the various nationalist ones – often resulting in civil war between them.

Most of the entries in my top ten have significant or substantial partisan warfare or armed resistance movements – most notably the Nazi-Soviet war with the partisans on the Soviet side, the partisans or resistance movements within Poland, and the Yugoslavian civil war and war of national liberation, particularly with Tito’s Partisans.

For the most part, partisans and resistance movements lacked significant or substantial military effect or impact, with the primary exceptions being those with the numbers or even more so the terrain for guerilla warfare – most notably in the Soviet Union and the Balkans, but also in Poland, Italy, and the Maquis in France.

That is not to say that partisans or resistance movements lacked any effect or impact where they did not have any such military effect or impact – one could well compile a top ten of forms of resistance, most notably contributions to Allied intelligence.

Even for those partisans or resistance movements that did have a significant or substantial military effect or impact, only those of two nations were able to liberate their nations largely with their own forces – Yugoslavia and Albania, albeit there were also uprisings and partial or temporary liberations achieved by partisans or resistance movements in Poland, France, Greece and Italy. Of course, Yugoslavia and Albania did have outside help, in the form of Soviet operations in the Balkans as well as Allied air support or supplies. They also had the benefit of a combination of terrain and the relative benevolence of Italian occupation, from which they also gained with the withdrawal or even desertion to them of Italian forces after the Italian surrender in 1943. Even with those advantages, they probably still could not have done so without Germany’s defeat by and need to commit forces elsewhere against the Soviets or western allies.

It is also impressive how many occupied nations maintained governments-in-exile, both in the war in Europe and the war against Japan, on both sides but predominantly on the Allied side and in exile in Britain or with British forces. Some of those, such as the governments-in-exile of Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia, predated the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

And it is also impressive just how many of the Allied governments-in-exile made significant or substantial contributions to the Allied war effort despite, you know, losing their nations to occupation.

The Polish government-in-exile, as we’ve seen, commanded Polish armed forces or underground armies that were the fourth largest Allied armed forces in Europe. While the Norwegian government-in-exile commanded more modest armed forces, the Allies gained the services of its merchant navy, the fourth largest in the world and of substantial importance for the Battle of the Atlantic. The Dutch government-in-exile brought with it the forces it had in the Dutch East Indies or Indonesia. The Belgian government-in-exile brought with it the Belgian Congo – and the uranium from there used for the first atomic bombs.

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

 

 

(5) HOLOCAUST (1933-1945)

 

Probably the best known and most disturbing “war” within the Second World War.

Of course, war might seem an entirely misplaced or sanitized term given how one-sided it was for Germany and her allies or collaborators – and how far it was removed from anything we normally accept as the field of battle, even including war crimes, hence the charge of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials.

It did, however, involve objectives, organization, personnel, logistics, and of course targets or intended casualties on the scale of a war – so much so that it might be argued to have cut across the war (or wars) Germany fought against actual enemy combatants, probably to the detriment of the latter, as cold-blooded or macabre as such historical analysis or study might seem.

The primary target was of course the Jewish population in Germany and the European countries controlled by or subordinate to it through its military victories – definitively so to the extent that the Holocaust is often defined in terms exclusive to that population, although that would be more accurate by its Hebrew name of Shoah.

However, it was much wider than that, including millions of non-Jewish Soviet civilians or prisoners of war (in addition to about 2 million Soviet Jews), close to 2 million non-Jewish Polish civilians (to add to about 3 million Polish Jews), and various other groups of people. Indeed, depending on how or whether you tally wider civilian casualties as part of the Holocaust, the Holocaust may extend upwards to the range of 11-17 million people, of which about half to a third were Jewish (in turn about one third of the world Jewish population or two thirds of the European Jewish population).

Nevertheless, Germany’s regime primarily identified it – and for that matter the world war itself – as, to borrow the title of the book by Lucy Dawidowicz, the war against the Jews. And as such, it was a war Germany largely won, given how one-sided it was.

It was, however, not entirely one-sided – there was some resistance, both passive and active, by some within the European Jewish population as well as by others coming to their aid. The primary passive resistance was of course hiding, fleeing or escaping from it – arguably the most effective form of any resistance in terms of numbers saved.

There was also active resistance by fighting against it, even with some uprisings in the camps themselves. The most famous revolt or uprising was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from 19 April to 16 May 1943, “the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II” and the closest it ever came to a war fought between two sides, however unevenly matched. The Uprising was fought desperately and tenaciously from block to block, even into the sewers, by people who knew “victory was impossible and survival unlikely”, fighting so as “not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths”. I always remember reading somewhere that their resistance brought some grudging respect, if not mercy, in their opposing SS commanders that such “subhuman scum” could fight so well.

Sadly, such resistance when it occurred, passive or active, was tiny compared to the scale of forces and resources arrayed against it – and this war was largely fought through to its grim conclusion. That this grim conclusion left some surviving population is due in some small part to the resistance against it, overwhelmingly the passive resistance of hiding or flight from it, but more to Germany’s defeat in the wider war against enemy combatants – and also the extent to which it was at cross-purposes within itself or the wider war.

The largest cross-purpose perhaps reflected the extent to which the Holocaust cut across the wider war as an attempt to offset that extent – its use of industrial slave labor for war production. That also reflected the ambitions of Himmler to build the SS as effectively his own private empire within the German state and economy, something which was a strikingly recurring feature withing the inner circle of the regime – as indeed it was also for him and others raising what were effectively private armies within the Wehrmacht, of which SS combat units were one. As the tide of war turned against Germany, Himmler and others added a further cross-purpose to the use of industrial slave labor – the use of their prisoners as hostages for negotiations with or leniency from the Allies.

Some may query 1933 as the year of commencement but that reflects the history of its origins extending back at least to the rise of power of the Nazi regime in 1933, and arguably a prehistory well before that. Essentially, 1941 marks the commencement of it as a literal shooting war against Jewish and other civilian populations – with the invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, albeit predominantly behind the lines, particularly as the Germans regarded communist and Jewish as synonymous. The Germans effectively had a policy of summary execution for both – in the colorful words of the War Nerd, they had a “pretty flexible definition” for either “and when in doubt, they killed”.

In the key event of that war, that remains surprisingly not well known, despite ultimately looming larger in casualties than any battle in the wider war – the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, named for the Berlin suburb in which it was held – Germany extended that war throughout occupied Europe, literally under the official title of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

Of course, I say extended because it was a war that was not formally declared as such, indeed kept shrouded in euphemism or secret as much as possible, albeit that possibility was limited by Allied intelligence as well as its sheer scale and the number of people involved in it. Ultimately however it was to be the war that defined Nazi Germany the most.

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (DEVIL-TIER)

 

 

 

(6) CHINESE CIVIL WAR

(1911-1949)

 

Or how the Japanese won the Chinese Civil War for the communists.

The Second World War, or least the Second Sino-Japanese War part of it, cut right across the Chinese Civil War. The two largest warring parties in the civil war, the Communists and the Nationalists saw themselves as the true successors of the revolution led by Sun Yat-sen (or Sun Yuxian) and his Kuomintang or KMT party that overthrew the Qing dynasty as China’s last imperial dynasty in 1911-1912.

As was often the case with the collapse of central state authority in China, that revolution devolved into the usual competing warlords or warring states from 1916 to 1927.

The warlord period is generally considered to have transitioned to the first phase of the Chinese Civil War proper from 1927, as Chiang Kai-shek led two thirds of the KMT’s military forces under the mantle soon to be known as the Nationalists against Wang Jingwei’s socialist or communist third.

The Soviets assisted the main warring party, the Nationalists seeking to reunify China under their Republic, as the Soviets saw them as the necessary prelude to socialism.

Intriguingly, Sun Yat-sen had sent Chiang Kai-shek to train in Moscow – and Chiang then became head of the military academy training military leaders in China, with Soviet assistance in “teaching material, organization, and munitions”.

Even more intriguingly, the Germans also assisted the Nationalists – and more intriguingly, that assistance continued from the warlord period to the first genuine phase of the Chinese Civil War, by both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. It is intriguing to ponder how world history might have turned out if Nazi Germany had continued to support Nationalist China, but they swapped to the foreign power that ominously loomed over China to exploit its weakness and ultimately was the one to intervene most decisively of all – Japan.

In the meantime, Wang Jingwei was eclipsed by the new Chinese communist leader who became virtually synonymous with the Chinese Civil War and for whom Chinese communist ideology was named – Mao.

However, the Chinese communists did not do too well in this first phase of the civil war, with effective control of less than a twentieth of the population (compared to the third controlled by Chiang’s Nationalists) and poised on the brink of complete extinction. “Their doom was, historians agree, imminent and inevitable” – until they were effectively saved by the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937.

The Japanese had already indirectly given the Chinese communists some much needed reprieve with their invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In an episode which also showed that some of the warlord period chaos lived on in the Nationalists, the Xian Incident, two of Chiang’s generals kidnapped him to force him to form a united front with the communists against the Japanese.

Chiang subsequently reneged on the united front with renewed hostilities against the communists but the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 forced his hand again to put those hostilities on hold for a second united front against Japan, even if both he and the communists increasingly paid lip service to it. That lip service meant the Nationalists and Communists avoiding open battle with Japan as much as possible, looking for salvation from outside forces pending in the Pacific War while also looking ahead to renewed civil war with each other.

Despite the united front, Chiang’s Nationalists bore the brunt of Japan’s war in China, which arguably dealt them their mortal wound in China’s civil war.

Perhaps most of all in the one surprise Japan still had left for China, even while virtually collapsing in the Pacific War against the United States, and one that is almost entirely forgotten or overlooked in most Second World War histories – the Ichigo offensive in 1944. The largest Japanese army offensive of the whole war, it was also the most as well as last successful Japanese offensive – astonishingly so and on a scale unequalled for anything else by Japan or Germany at that late stage of the war.

It also severely weakened Chiang’s forces (as well as an economy increasingly ravaged by hyper-inflation), the last of a series of Japanese blows that ultimately proved fatal for the Chinese Nationalist government in the subsequent renewed civil war with the Communists – Japan arguably doing the most of anyone, including the Chinese Communists themselves, to win victory for the Communists in the civil war.

The civil war resumed soon enough – “as soon as it became apparent that Japanese defeat was imminent” (at the hands of the Americans) “with the communists gaining the upper hand in the second phase of the war from 1945 to 1949, generally referred to as the Chinese Communist Revolution”.

This again saw foreign intervention along predictable Cold War lines – the Soviets on the side of the Communists and the Americans on the side of the Nationalists, although each were cautious in their intervention, with that from the Americans notoriously resulting in accusations of “losing” China and communist infiltration of the American government.

However, the Soviets were equally cautious in their own intervention, perhaps from Stalin’s intuition that a united communist China would be their rival in the long term. Hence the Soviets consistently urged restraint on Mao to accept the north-south partition that was all the vogue in Cold War Asia – between a Communist north and a Nationalist south.

Mao ignored this and the Communists gained control of mainland China anyway, proclaiming the People’s Republic of China. However, the Communists ultimately had to accept a residual partition of a different kind with the Nationalists retreating to the island of Taiwan to proclaim their Republic of China there, as the Communists had no means to pursue them – particularly after the US gave their naval support to Taiwan. That partition of course continued even until today, remaining as a source of tension with no armistice or treaty signed between them.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(7) ITALO-ABYSSINIAN WAR / EAST AFRICAN CAMPAIGN

(1935 -1937 / 1940 – 1941)

 

Yes, everyone forgets (or overlooks) this war when it comes to the Second World War (or before it) – or indeed forgets or overlooks that any part of the Second World War was fought in Africa apart from North Africa.

Even if the Italo-Abyssinian War – or more precisely the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (or Second Italo-Ethiopian War to use its more modern but decidedly less glamorous nomenclature) – was fought on a scale to rival the Winter War, at least in numbers of troops, and for substantially longer.

Okay, the Italo-Abyssinian War received substantial attention at the time and since, as the second act of Axis aggression after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and another stepping stone towards the breaking point of the postwar international order after the First World War – but not so much the details of the war itself.

Its sequel during the Second World War, the East African Campaign, is almost completely overlooked on the other hand, let alone in any detail, despite being “the first Allied strategic victory in the war” and not without its challenges.

I’m fond of quoting H.P. Willmott’s quip that, paradoxically, WW2 might be regarded as the last war of the 19th century and WW1 was the first war of the 20th century.

Whatever else you take that to mean, it seems most apt to describing the war in East Africa, as a throwback to the Scramble for Africa and contest between European colonial powers.

Indeed, the Second Italo-Abyssinian War was literally a throwback to the First Italo-Abyssinian War, that last gasp of the Scramble for Africa in which the only African polity to preserve its independence, Abyssinia, did so by soundly defeating Italy at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, one of the few African defeats of a European colonial power. (Yes, I’m aware of Liberia as the other “independent” state in Africa but it was effectively an American creation).

In the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, Mussolini’s Italy set out to use its massive superiority in weaponry to avenge – and reverse – its defeat in the First Italo-Abyssinian War, invading and occupying Abyssinia. The First Italo-Abyssinian War might have surprised the world (and inspired Africa) with an Abyssinian victory, the Second Italo-Abyssinian War did not with its Italian victory, albeit Abyssinian resistance and a government-in-exile under Emperor Haile Selassie persisted afterwards.

In the longer term, Italy’s choice to invade Abyssinia seems foolish, given how isolated and vulnerable even a victorious Italian occupation of Abyssinia would be to superior British and French naval power if war broke out. That perhaps should have been the case back in 1935 but certainly turned out to be the case with Britain’s East African campaign during the Second World War – which Britain won, against skilful and protracted Italian defense that is also often overlooked for a general and somewhat unfair caricature of Italian military competence during that war.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(8) SPANISH CIVIL WAR

(1936 – 1939)

 

The war most seen as a precursor to the Second World War yet ironically not part of it, with the Nationalist victory in Spain on 1 April 1939 and Spain remaining neutral in the world war that erupted in Europe five months later. It was and is also seen as a Nazi-Soviet proxy war.

Also – George Orwell fought in it, reflecting that the Spanish Civil War “became notable for the passion and political division it inspired worldwide”, perhaps the most of any of the conflicts or events leading up to the war in Europe short of the outbreak of the latter war itself.

Ironically, its contemporary fame as political cause célèbre seems almost inversely proportional to its lack of actual impact in the Second World War, as Spain became something of a backwater to that war – no equivalent to the Peninsular War in the Napoleonic Wars to see here.

It always strikes me how much of an outlier the American Civil War is for civil wars in modern history, with its two neatly defined sides of the Union and the Confederates. The Spanish Civil War is more typical of most modern civil wars as a messy battle royale. Yes – again as in most civil wars, there were broadly two sides, but each side was chaotic or amorphous, to the point of at least one side almost as a civil war all on its own.

The war itself was also messy, although it was straightforward enough in broad outline. It originated from a military coup or revolt in July 1936 against the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic (which had been proclaimed in 1931). The coup failed as such but evolved into the Nationalists fighting to overthrow the Republic.

The Nationalists were a diverse alliance of groups “chiefly defined by their anti-communism” – and to a lesser extent, support for the Catholicism targeted by the Republic. Reflecting its origin in a military coup, the segments of the army and its officers opposed to the Republic predominated the Nationalists, among whom General Francisco Franco emerged as leader.

The Republicans were equally as diverse in their loyalty or allegiance to the Republic but reflecting the role of the Soviet Union as the primary source of support for the Republic, increasingly fell under the control of the more Stalinist elements, to the point of civil war within the civil war by them against anarchists and other factions on the Republican side.

From a combination of factors, the Republicans more consistently proved to be militarily ineffective, and the Nationalists ultimately won under Franco in 1939.

Of course, one of those factors – certainly the most famous and much of the reason for the war as cause célèbre – was the more effective foreign support for the Nationalists, above all from Italy and Germany in troops or advisors, munitions and armaments, and air support.

German air support – particularly in the form of the Condor Legion fighting in Spain – was arguably critical for the Nationalists by flying their troops that were otherwise stranded in Spanish Morocco to Spain in the early stages of the war. The Condor Legion also infamously bombed cities held by the Republicans, of which the bombing of Guernica led to international outcry against them (and a painting by Picasso that became iconic of the war itself).

International outcry perhaps but not too much support – with Britain and France declaring an official policy of non-intervention that was largely followed by the international community However, France and other nations covertly supported the Republicans, while tens of thousands of volunteers from non-interventionist countries fought in the war, mostly in the pro-Republican International Brigades.

“Only two countries openly and fully supported the Republic” – not surprisingly, the primary source of support was the Soviet Union, but I always find it surprising the second was Mexico. While Soviet support no doubt prolonged the resistance of the Republic, one might infer it was just not as effective as German or Italian support contributing to Nationalist victory.

And in some ways, it was a millstone around the Republic’s neck – as Soviet support brought with it Stalinist hardline organization or terror within the Republic and political commissars within its armed forces. Not to mention costing the Republic’s gold reserves in payment up front, diminishing Soviet interest in Republican victory when no longer expedient – as opposed to German or Italian interest in the Nationalists repaying their credit.

Franco ultimately led the Nationalists to victory in the civil war on 1 April 1939, although sporadic irregular or guerilla warfare persisted until 1965, and Franco’s government persisted for a decade after that until his death in 1975.

For all the furor during the civil war from 1936 to 1939, Franco’s Spain played little part in the world war that followed, remaining neutral if supportive to his Axis sponsors after they won his civil war for him – such as raising a volunteer division, the Blue Division, to fight as part of the German army against the Soviet Union.

However, despite the help Mussolini had given him in his civil war, Franco had more insight than Mussolini in recognizing that Spain would only achieve its self-destruction by anything more than token support in actively fighting on the German side or allowing German forces in Spain. Of course, a large part of that wisdom was born of necessity from Spain’s economic and military weakness recovering from its civil war.

However, Mussolini should have shared Franco’s insight as Italy was not much better than Spain in either economic strength or military readiness – which played a large part in its poor military performance and for which Italy’s own foreign adventures before the war, particularly including its support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, contributed a large part.

As it was, Franco played the few cards he had extraordinarily well in dealing with a Germany and Italy that now expected a return on their investment in his civil war by Spanish participation on their side. He so frustrated Hitler at their meeting in Hendaye on 23 October 1940, with such extravagant preconditions for Spanish participation in the war as a German ally, that Germany essentially gave up on plans on using Spain to attack the British base in Gibraltar.

It is interesting to speculate that Germany might have been better off if the Republicans had won the civil war, since the communist Republicans would have come under pressure to aid Germany because of the Nazi-Soviet Pact at the time. However, I remain skeptical whether Soviet pressure would have extended to requiring Spain to effectively fight on Germany’s side when the Soviets themselves refrained from doing so – or whether a victorious Spanish Republican government would have been willing or able to comply with such pressure.

It might be said that Germany did not get a return on their investment in the Spanish Civil War when it counted in 1940, but that overlooks that Germany otherwise did very well for their investment of resources – notably in combat experience for their air force servicemen but also in securing its new alliance with Italy and destabilizing the European status quo for their diplomatic victories prior to 1939.

Not so much for Italy as we’ve seen – as they expended somewhat more resources than Germany, particularly in soldiers deployed to the Spanish Civil War, which with the resources spent in other foreign misadventures strained or exhausted Italy’s military readiness for wider war. In 1939, Mussolini advised Hitler that Italy was not ready for war before 1943 – interestingly the same advice down to the year that Hitler’s naval commanders gave him for their navy – and subsequent events showed that advice to be right (for both Italy and the German navy).

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(9) ALBANIA – OCCUPATION & RESISTANCE

(1939 – 1944)

 

Everyone forgets about Albania in the Second World War – or that it was occupied by Italy in April 1939.

It’s easy to forget Italy’s occupation of Albania among the higher profile German occupations of Austria or Czechoslovakia, particularly the latter as Germany had effectively finished it off only the month before in March 1939, prompting Britain’s guarantee to Poland in April 1939.

It’s easy to forget even for Italy, overshadowed as it is by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia or intervention in the Spanish Civil War.

That everyone forgets about Albania is striking because it had important knock-on effects for the course of the whole war as it provided the platform or springboard for Italy’s ill-considered and ill-fated invasion of Greece. Without Albania as a base right next to Greece, it is difficult to see that Italy would have had the motive, means or opportunity for its invasion of Greece.

However, apart from its role in the Italian invasion of Greece, Albania was a backwater of Italian occupation, effectively as its own separate corner of the war.

There was Albanian resistance to occupation, which everyone also forgets about because it essentially followed the same lines as Yugoslavia, just on a smaller scale. Again, that everyone forgets about Albania is striking because it is the only nation other than Yugoslavia that can claim to have liberated itself through its own resistance, except even more so than Yugoslavia. Also, the Albanian resistance achieved the rare feat of saving most of Albania’s Jews.

Like Yugoslavia, it had a royal government-in-exile but the communist partisans and their political leader Enver Hoxha emerged as predominant among the rival resistance movements. Also like Yugoslavia, the Albanian resistance got a boost from the Italian surrender and desertion to it of Italian soldiers, only more so due to Italy’s larger and exclusive occupation, as well as Germany’s more pressing priorities than maintaining the occupation of Albania after that. The Albanian resistance liberated Albania from German occupation by 29 November 1944.

After the war, Albania and its communist government went from being its own strange separate corner of the Second World War to being its own strange separate corner of the Cold War – firstly with a ‘split’ from Yugoslavia aligning itself with the Soviets, then splitting off from the Soviets to align itself with China, before the inevitable Sino-Albanian split and aligning itself with no one.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(10) ANGLO-FRENCH WAR

(1940 – 1942)

 

It’s another war that tends to be forgotten or overlooked when it comes to the Second World War, similarly to the Italo-Abyssinian War and East Africa Campaign – perhaps not coincidentally because it was the other war within the Second World War that involved fighting in sub-Saharan Africa.

It was also something of a historical throwback but even further back than to the nineteenth century and the Scramble for Africa. Instead, it was throwback to the Anglo-French wars fought from 1689 to 1815 – dubbed the Second Hundred Years War.

Of course, it was a pale shadow of the former Anglo-French rivalry for nothing less than global dominion – evoking the quip of Marx that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Yes, it was fought as part of a war effectively for global dominion – but not so much by Britain or France, and the fighting between them was at the fringes or periphery of the larger war.

Indeed, Britain only fought France to pre-empt Germany (or Japan) – and was mostly limited to fighting France or Italy at the fringes or periphery of its war with Germany because it lacked the ability or means to attack Germany directly. Or as historian H.P. Willmott observed – “In this initial period, Britain, expelled from the continental mainland and unable to carry the war to Germany, was obliged to fight where she could rather than where she would”.

The war was technically not Anglo-French war but Anglo-Vichy war, which effectively was also a civil war between the German puppet Vichy regime in France and the Free French government, contested not in France itself but in – and for control of – the French colonies. With the safety of distance and the lack of strategic importance, most of the French colonies aligned with the Free French – with the significant exceptions of French North Africa and Indochina.

It was also not continuous but sporadic, with fighting isolated to brief campaigns in dispersed locations.

The first of these campaigns was the British naval attack on French navy ships at Mers El Kebir in Algeria on 3 July 1940, “the main part of Operation Catapult, the British plan to neutralize or destroy French naval ships to prevent them falling into German hands” after France surrendered to Germany. That played a large part in Vichy hostility to Britain that saw Germany court the Vichy regime – and Spain – as active allies against Britain in 1940 but fortunately both Vichy France and Spain declined to abandon their neutrality for war against Britain.

On 23 September 1940, Britain and Free French forces under de Gaulle launched Operation Menace to take the Vichy port of Dakar in French West Africa, but withdrew on 25 September 1940 when they met fierce resistance from Vichy forces – the one British defeat in the Anglo-Vichy war.

Otherwise, French colonies in Africa aligned themselves with the Free French, although one colony – French Equatorial Africa or Gabon – had to be occupied by Free French forces with British support in a campaign from 27 October 1940 to 12 November 1940 before the Vichy colonial government surrendered.

From 8 June to 14 July 1941, British and Free French forces fought and won the Syria-Lebanon campaign to capture those Vichy territories, effectively to pre-empt Germany (and Italy) exploiting them against Britain in the Middle East, as with the coup Germany had sponsored in Iraq to install an anti-British regime – which Britain crushed in May 1941.

From 5 May to 6 November 1942, British forces fought the Battle of Madagascar to capture that Vichy territory for Free French control, effectively to pre-empt Japan using it as a base for naval forces to seal off the Indian Ocean – something of a missed opportunity by Japan.

The final campaign in the Anglo-French war – which also included a brief Franco-American war – was of course Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa. The Vichy regime in North Africa initially resisted before by good fortune the Vichy commander Admiral Darlan was captured and effectively defected to the Allies, nominating himself as the leader of French North Africa and West Africa with their forces now on the Allied side. Vichy France itself effectively ceased to exist as Germany now occupied all France, although Germany kept up some semblance of the puppet regime in occupied France and subsequently as government-in-exile in Germany.

The Anglo-French war prompts to mind the snide observations by historian Gerhard Weinberg which he posed as questions for World War Two historians – why Britain was so consistently defeated by German and Japanese forces until the Battle of El Alamein (such that its only consistent victories were against French and Italian forces), and why Vichy France strongly resisted Allied incursions but so readily gave up Germany or Japan without resistance.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(11) ANGLO-IRAQI WAR

(1941)

 

Everyone forgets about the Middle Eastern theater in the Second World War. Granted, it wasn’t much of a theater in terms of actual fighting, but that was because Britain moved quickly behind the scenes to secure the Middle East under its control – behind the scenes that is, of Britain’s defeats fighting Germany elsewhere in the Mediterranean at the same time.

One part of that was the British taking over Syria from the Vichy French government in the successful Syrian campaign in June-July 1941. However, before that was the Anglo-Iraqi war in May 1941 which was the central part or ground zero of the Middle Eastern theater – not least because it then enabled (and led to) both the Syrian campaign as well as my next special mention entry.

Britain had taken over Iraq from the former Ottoman Empire, ostensibly as a mandate under the League of Nations, but effectively in real terms as a colony or protectorate. Iraq nominally became independent in 1932 but the British had been careful to lock in a pro-British government with the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930.

Iraqi nationalists as well as the Axis nations of Germany and Italy saw the opportunity of the war for a coup to oust the pro-British government in April 1941. As usual, German political diplomacy and material support counted for little beyond the effective projection of its military power, although it (and Italy) did supply material and even aircraft through Vichy French Syria (hence the subsequent Syrian campaign).

If it’s one thing Britain could still do well, even at this late stage of empire, it was to crush colonial revolts – which it did by quickly mobilizing forces from the neighboring parts of its empire, notably including Indian troops, and stamping out the Iraqi coup in four weeks from 2 May 1941 to 31 May 1941.

Thereafter, Iraq served Britain as its base of operations within the Middle Eastern Theater.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(12) ANGLO-SOVIET INVASION OF IRAN & IRAN CRISIS

(1941-1946)

 

Another part of the Middle Eastern theater that everyone forgets about when it comes to the Second World War. Following on the heels of Britain’s successful campaigns in Iraq and Syria, as well as the new Anglo-Soviet alliance in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly invaded and occupied the neutral state of Iran in the six days from 25 August 1941 to 31 August 1941.

Britain invaded from Iraq to the west while the Soviet Union invaded from its border to the north. Hopelessly outmatched, Iran largely did not oppose the Anglo-Soviet invasion and surrendered on 31 August 1941.

Its primary purpose was to secure Allied supply lines to the Soviet Union – and indeed the so-called Persian Corridor turned out to be the most reliable route for Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets.

Other purposes included securing the Iranian oilfields – although the Middle East in general had a lot less prominence for oil during the war than it was to have later – as well as blocking German influence in Iran (understandably enough from the Iranian perspective of a history of being stood over by Britain and Russia) or pre-empting an Axis through Turkey (and later the Caucasus), albeit unlikely.

Not pictured among those purposes – concern for what was, after all, a neutral nation, or for the effects of the occupation on Iran, which manifested primarily in that recurring handmaiden of both British and Soviet empires, famine, with the disruption of food supplies and transport.

For their part, the Soviet Union and Britain signed a treaty with Iran ruling that Iran was not to be considered occupied by the Allies, but in alliance with them. They also declared that they would remain in Iran until six months after the end of the war. Once in the war, the Americans were also drawn into Iran, helping to man the Persian Corridor (and providing Lend-Lease to Iran itself) while effectively guaranteeing the Anglo-Soviet withdrawal from Iran after the war.

That led to the Iran Crisis in 1946 – the first crisis of the Cold War and one in which the Americans succeeded in forcing the Soviets to back down. While the British withdrew according to schedule after the war, the Soviets did not – refusing to relinquish their occupied territory, and worse, supporting pro-Soviet separatist states of the Azerbaijan’s People’s Government and the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad.

Those states actually fought against Iran, but ultimately intense pressure from the United States forced Soviet withdrawal and the dissolution of the Azerbaijani and Kurdish separatist states.

 

RATINGS: 4 STARS****

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(13) PHILIPPINES – WAR OF OCCUPATION & RESISTANCE

(1941-1945)

 

The fighting Filipinos!

The role of the Philippines in the Pacific War has always struck me as similar to that of Poland in Europe. While not playing the same role as casus belli – which is more properly assigned to Pearl Harbor – it was effectively the front line or ground zero for commencement of the war, and then a center of resistance behind the lines of occupation in that war.

Indeed, the parallel with Poland continues in that, similar to the Anglo-French planning that effectively foresaw writing off Poland to liberate it after German defeat, so too did American planning effectively to write off the Philippines.

As I understand it, particularly from my reading of Ronald Spector’s The Eagle Against the Sun, while War Plan Orange – the original American plan for war against Japan which was largely followed in the actual war – did not explicitly plan to abandon American and Filipino forces in the Philippines, its hope for those forces to hold out on their own until relieved by the American naval counter-offensive was unrealistic.

As it turned out, whatever hope there was of the forces in the Philippines holding out on their own, it was dashed first by the naval losses at Pearl Harbor and then, through bad luck and timing, the loss of US aircraft at Clark Field from Japanese attack in the Philippines itself. The loss of air cover forced the retreat of the American Asiatic Fleet from the Philippines, so that American forces were effectively left stranded without air or naval support except for the limited use of American submarines.

The doomed American campaign from 8 December 1941 to 8 May 1942 to defend the Philippines from the Japanese invasion, with its famous landmarks of Bataan (with the infamous Bataan Death March of American prisoners by Japan that followed) and Corregidor, may be the stuff of heroism but is more properly considered as part of the Pacific War.

Equally, the victorious American campaign from 20 October 1944 to 15 August 1945 to return to and liberate the Philippines is also more properly considered part of the Pacific War.

However, in the two and a half years between those two campaigns was the war of resistance in the Philippines. Indeed, the war of resistance in the Philippines overlapped with both. Significant parts of the resistance came from American or Filipino forces that escaped or did not surrender in the 1941-1942 campaign and instead led or fought as guerillas against Japanese occupation.

Among other American commanders, General MacArthur, who had been ordered to leave his command in the Philippines by submarine, maintained a keen interest in the maintaining or supplying the resistance there, consistent with his declaration that he would return – and indeed, the resistance would also play its part in preparing the ground by sabotage and other means for the 1944-1945 campaign.

The resistance in the Philippines was of no more small scale or effect. “Postwar studies estimate that around 260,000 people were organized under guerilla groups, and that members of anti-Japanese underground organizations were more numerous”. Also, such was their effectiveness that Japan only controlled the key or major islands in their occupation, with their control of the countryside or smaller towns often tenuous at best – “of the 48 provinces, only 12 were in firm control of the Japanese”.

Ironically, some Japanese soldiers took a leaf from the Filipino resistance, with the notorious Japanese holdouts on more remote islands throughout former occupied territory after the Japanese surrender. Many of them, as individuals or in groups, were in the Philippines. Only in Indonesia did one confirmed Japanese soldier endure longer – holding out to 1974! – but unconfirmed reports persisted after that in the Philippines, with  the last report taken seriously by Japanese officials in 2005.

As for the Philippines, while their resistance received mixed or belated recognition from the US government, it at least bore fruit with the US honoring its commitment from 1935 for the independence of the Philippines in 1946.

 

RATINGS: 4 STARS****

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(14) GREEK CIVIL WAR

(1941 / 1945-1949)

*

“In April 1941, the Axis powers conquered Greece and Yugoslavia and thereafter the real struggle for the control of those countries began”- only in the case of Greece, the struggle for control was where the Second World War became the Cold War.

Yes – I’m again quoting how H.P. Willmott summed it up in The Great Crusade, his history of the Second World War. When I quoted him for my top ten entry for Yugoslavia, I noted that Greece will earn a place in my special mentions. And here it is.

Indeed, you could argue that Greece and the civil war that originated from its rival resistance movements should outrank Yugoslavia because of the significance of the Greek Civil War not only for the Second World War but even more so for the Cold War.

The Greek resistance to Axis occupation followed similar lines to that in Yugoslavia and Albania. While the Greek resistance can’t quite claim the same as that in Yugoslavia and Albania to have liberated their nation on their own, it was able to control much of the countryside prior to the German withdrawal from mainland Greece in October 1944.

Of course, in large part the liberation of Greece was because of the German withdrawal from mainland Greece, although German garrisons remained in Greek islands and were among the German forces to hold out until the end of the war.

Like both Yugoslavia and Albania, Greece had a royal government-in-exile, with both military forces serving within British forces in the Mediterranean and resistance movements within Greece itself. However, as in Yugoslavia and Albania (as well as elsewhere), the communists emerged as predominant among the rival resistance movements.

The big difference with the communists coming out on top in Yugoslavia and Albania was that the British were having none of that in Greece – and what’s more, they were in a position to do something about it. Churchill had effectively secured Greece for Britain’s postwar sphere on influence in his “naughty document” or infamous “percentages agreement” with Stalin in October 1944 – an agreement that Stalin appears to have kept when it came to Greece. British forces landed in Greece in October 1944 on the heels of (or even in advance of) the withdrawing German forces, entering Athens on 13 October 1944 and aiding the returning Greek government in exile to suppress or disarm communist partisans. That saw British and Greek non-communist forces fighting against the Greek communist forces from December 1944, with the former very narrowly prevailing as the Fourth Indian Infantry Division were flown in as British reinforcements.

There followed a brief interlude in 1945 effectively by way of treaty between the Greek non-communist government and Greek communists, which broke down into the Greek Civil War proper from March 1946 onwards.

While the Yugoslavian and Albanian communist governments supported the Greek communists, Stalin’s Soviet Union remained ambivalent in a way often seen as sticking to its agreement with Churchill – and actively opposed to the Greek communists after the Soviet split with Yugoslavia.

Britain continued to support the non-communist Greek government re-equipping and training the Greek Army but by early 1947 had to appeal to the United States that it could no longer afford to do so. That saw the first instance of what became known as the Truman Doctrine and effectively the American role as combatant in the Cold War, with the United States taking over from Britain in supporting the non-communist Greek government.

The Western assistance to the non-communist Greek government, and isolation of the Greek communists from support elsewhere but particularly from the Soviet Union, ultimately saw the Greek communists demoralized and defeated in 1949 – something “Western anti-communist governments allied to Greece saw…as a victory in the Cold War”, indeed one of the first such victories and commitments of American aid to anti-communist regimes.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(15) PALESTINE – INSURGENCY, CIVIL WAR & ARAB-ISRAELI WAR

(1939 / 1944-1948)

 

And now we come to my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars fought after the Second World War, but which took definitive shape during that war – above all in Asia.

Historian Ronald Spector, author of The Eagle Against the Sun, encapsulated this in the titles of his books, The Ruins of Empire and A Continent Erupts, reflecting their subject. In western Europe, the end of the war may have “marked the beginning of decades of unprecedented cooperation and prosperity…labelled the long peace”, but “east and southeast Asia quickly became the most turbulent regions of the globe”.

However, one region of western Asia soon vied as contender for the most turbulent region of the globe – the British mandate of Palestine or Mandatory Palestine, which Britain had administered since the end of the First World War as territory taken from the former Ottoman Empire.

The nascent conflict in Palestine, between Arabs and Jews, originated in the First World War – arguably in 1916-1917, with the Arab Revolt, Sykes-Picot Agreement, and Balfour Agreement in those years, although Palestine as the focus of Zionism or Jewish settlement and a Jewish “national home” originated earlier than that.

During the Mandate, there was further Jewish immigration and the rise of nationalist movements in both Jewish and Arab communities, culminating in the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine. Britain ultimately suppressed the Arab Revolt, but in part by means of the 1939 White Paper, severely restricting Jewish immigration and land purchases – hence my choice of 1939 as starting date for this special mention.

The combination of Arab Revolt and White Paper led to the formation of Jewish underground militias, primarily the Haganah which was to become the core of the Israeli Defence Force – as well as increasing Jewish sentiment that they could not achieve their aims in cooperation with the British, particularly after the war. It also contributed to the idea of partition as solution, as it became clear that Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine could not be resolved.

The Second World War saw some suspension of this conflict, as Palestine even came under Axis air attack and within potential reach of Axis armed forces with Rommel’s victories in 1942. That saw British training of forces within the Haganah, as well as the subsequent creation of the Jewish Brigade within British armed forces.

However, the Second World War had not even ended when the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine began in 1944 and persisted through to 1948, albeit in fairness the tide of war had passed well away from Palestine when it began. The primary insurgents were the more radical Jewish militias or underground groups – Lehi (or the Stern Gang) and Irgun. Even the Haganah sought to suppress them in cooperation with Britain or at least avoiding direct confrontation with British armed forces, instead mainly supporting immigration spurred by Jewish refugees from or after the Second World War.

From there, the conflict spiralled out of British control or even its ability to do so, and like many or most of Britain’s commitments elsewhere, Britain could not (or did not want to) maintain it and instead handed it over to someone else – in this case, the newly founded United Nations, which formulated a partition plan.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan – proposing the division of Palestine between Arab and Jewish states – prompted the 1947-1948 civil war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In turn, the conflict escalated into the 1948 Arab-Israeli War as five Arab states – Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq – declared war (and lost) against the new state of Israel that Jewish leadership declared when Britain ended the Mandate and withdrew its forces.

Arab-Israeli wars, and even more so Palestinian-Israeli wars have defined the region ever since. While Jewish immigration to and settlement in Palestine predated the Second World War, it gained new impetus from the war – albeit more before and after the war than during the war itself – and it is difficult to see that the formation of the state of Israel would have had the same force or support without the events of the war, one event in particular above all, perhaps to the extent that it may not have been formed at all in Palestine.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

 

 

(16) INDIA & PAKISTAN – INPEPENDENCE & PARTITION

(1942-1947)

Moving closer to the focus of my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars fought in Asia after the Second World War but which took definitive shape during that war – in this case, in south Asia or the Indian subcontinent.

India may have been fortunate in it did not have to fight a war of independence and Britain effectively ceded independence to it in 1947, but that independence was on the basis of partition into two independent states along religious lines – Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan (the latter as west and east Pakistan, with the latter subsequently seceding as Bangladesh).

Independence may have been relatively bloodless but partition brought with it displacement and violence on a large scale – with the former estimated as 12-20 million people displaced or as refugees, and the latter estimated as anywhere between 200,000 and two million people killed by sectarian violence, with the most common estimate as a million.

Both independence and the idea of Hindu-Muslim partition originated well before the Second World War. Indian independence movements arguably originated from resistance or revolts at the very outset of British imperialism in India by the British East India Company. However, the First World War “would prove to be the watershed of the imperial relationship between Britain and India” – as Indian independence movements hoped India’s contribution to that war would be repaid by British political concessions. Indian independence movements took even more definitive shape in the Second World War and India’s contribution to it – particularly with the Quit India Movement in 1942, hence my choice of 1942 as the starting date for this special mention.

My choice of 1947 as the end date for this special mention of course derives from the year of independence for the two new nations of India and Pakistan – with all the displacement and sectarian violence that this partition involved. The former persisted until at least 1951 and while the latter may have largely subsided by 1948, it laid the foundations for hostility and subsequent wars between Indian and Pakistan as well as the 1971 secession of the former east Pakistan as Bangladesh.

While the independence and partition of British India were probably inevitable, at least from the First World War onwards, it became inevitable on an almost immediate basis from the end of the Second World War due to Britain’s inability and unwillingness to maintain its former imperial or global commitments.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

*

 

 

(17) INDONESIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

(1942 / 1945-1949)

 

And now we come to the focus of my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars after the Second World War, but which took definitive shape during that war – the wars in east or south east Asia.

Of course, we’ve already seen one of the biggest such wars in my previous special mention for the Chinese Civil War, but it is also one that encapsulates many of the features of “the deadly confrontations that broke out–or merely continued–in Asia after peace was proclaimed at the end of World War II”.

“Under occupation by the victorious Allies, this part of the world was plunged into new power struggles or back into old feuds that in some ways were worse than the war itself”, compounded by the circumstance that “the U.S. and Soviet governments, as they secretly vied for influence in liberated lands, were soon at odds”.

“Within weeks of the famous surrender ceremony aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, civil war, communal clashes, and insurgency engulfed the continent, from Southeast Asia to the Soviet border. By early 1947, full-scale wars were raging in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, with growing guerrilla conflicts in Korea and Malaya. Within a decade after the Japanese surrender, almost all of the countries of South, East, and Southeast Asia that had formerly been conquests of the Japanese or colonies of the European powers experienced wars and upheavals that resulted in the deaths of at least 2.5 million combatants and millions of civilians.”

Unlike British India, Indonesia had to fight a war of independence, also known as the Indonesian National Revolution, against the Netherlands that had ruled it as the Dutch East Indies – expanding from the original holdings of the Dutch East India Company in 1603 through to its full extent under the Dutch government until Japanese occupation in 1942.

There are some ironies here. That was the Dutch government in exile, as the Netherlands had been occupied by Germany in 1940, so the Dutch government found itself exiled twice over with the loss of the Dutch East Indies to Japan. Also, while Indonesia may not have had British India’s more “peaceful” cession of independence, it had fewer casualties from its war for independence than British India had from its partition into two states. Indeed, it was fortunate that its war for independence involved comparatively few casualties among the new or continuing wars that emerged in east or south-east Asia after the Second World War.

The Indonesian independence movement began well before the Second World War, but the occupation by Japan from 1942 to 1945 “was a critical factor in the subsequent revolution”. Firstly, Japan “spread and encouraged Indonesian nationalist sentiment”, even if more for their own advantage. Secondly, the Japanese occupation effectively “destroyed and replaced much of the Dutch-created economic, administrative, and political infrastructure”. Hence I’ve chosen 1942 as the starting date for this special mention.

And the Indonesian independence movement came out swinging straight from the end of the war, with their declaration of independence on 17 August 1945 – only two days after the announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender (and prior to the formal ceremony of surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri).

The Dutch were able to regain some control of major towns or cities when they returned as a significant military force in early 1946. In the interim, other Allied forces occupied Indonesia or at least parts of it, primarily the British as it was assigned to Britain’s South East Asia Command.

Ironically, despite surrendering, the former Japanese occupying forces found themselves on both sides of the war. The overwhelming majority of them complied with the terms of surrender to assist the Allied forces to maintain order, albeit both Japanese and Allied forces often sought to avoid direct confrontation with Indonesian nationalists. However, some Japanese holdouts joined the Indonesian national revolutionaries – as did some defecting Indian soldiers from British forces.

Ultimately, Dutch forces were not able to extend or preserve the control they regained, partly because of the military situation facing “well-organized resistance with popular support”, but primarily because of international diplomatic and political opposition. That opposition came from neighboring Australia – where Australian maritime workers in their characteristic style boycotted loading or unloading Dutch ships – but also India, the Soviet Union, and most significantly, the United States. The opposition from the United States was the most significant because it threatened to cut off economic aid to the Netherlands under the Marshall Plan. The Dutch gave in, ceding sovereignty to Indonesia in 1949.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

*

 

 

(18) MALAYA – MALAYAN EMERGENCY

(1942 / 1948-1960)

 

“Communist resistance forces in Malaya settled old scores and terrorized the indigenous population, while mujahideen holy warriors staged reprisals and terror killings against the Chinese–hundreds of innocent civilians were killed on both sides”

Malaya continues the focus of my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars that broke out – or continued – in east or south-east Asia after the Second World War but originated in it. As opposed to Indonesia’s war of independence that commenced even before the formal ceremony of surrender by Japan on the U.S.S. Missouri, Malaya was a growing guerilla conflict that became full-blown war after Britain declared a state of emergency on 17 June 1948.

Hence the term Emergency – although it was also used by Britain to avoid referring to it as a war, apparently for insurance purposes, at least in part (as British insurers would not pay out claims in civil wars, presumably to rubber plantations or other British economic interests).

Like most of the postwar conflicts or wars in Asia, it had its origins and got its opportunity from the Second World War – in this case, the Japanese occupation of British Malaya and Singapore. The Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army or MPAJA “had been the largest anti-Japanese resistance group in Malaya” – a communist guerilla army “composed mainly of ethnic Chinese guerilla fighters” which had been “trained, armed and funded by the British to fight against Japan”. Its veterans then used that against the British themselves after the war, as the core of the communist Malayan National Liberation Army or MNLA which fought for Malaya’s independence from Britain and to establish a communist state.

The insurgency had its roots in Britain’s postwar restoration of its colonial rule, as well as the economic problems that came with it. Britain declared the state of emergency following attacks on plantations and the British victory in the Malayan Emergency that followed is often upheld as a model of counter-insurgency warfare, a counterpoint to the American defeat in Vietnam, although the better comparison may well be to the French defeat in Vietnam.

I’m not so sure whether the British strategy truly serves as either a model of counter-insurgency or as a counterpoint to French or American defeat in Vietnam. Britain had a number of advantages in the Malayan Emergency that were effectively unique to that conflict or at least were not readily adapted to the conflict in Vietnam, and its strategy was equally as much a sledgehammer as the latter rather than any surgical precision, even despite those advantages.

And in the end, Britain had to grant full independence to Malaya (as Malaysia) just as France did in the First Indochina War, while the communists remained able to renew their insurgency in what is known as the Second Malayan Emergency from 1968 to 1989.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

 

(19) KOREAN WAR

(1945 / 1950-1953)

 

“Korea became a powder keg with the Russians and Americans entangled in its north and south.”

The Korean War may have been its own distinct war, but it directly arose from the circumstances of the Second World War before it, overlaid by the new Cold War of which it was part (and for which it was the first major conflict).

The primary circumstance which gave rise to the Korean War was the occupation of the northern and southern halves of Korea by the Soviet Union and the United States respectively – similarly to the eastern and western halves of Germany in Europe.

Ironically, Japan itself was fortunate to avoid the division of Germany into Europe, because of its sole occupation by the United States (and selected western allies), but its former imperial territory of Korea was not. Indeed, Korea was doubly unfortunate in that, unlike Germany, war was fought along the lines of that division.

Of course, the key distinction between Korea and Germany was that any war along the lines of division in Germany would have involved war directly between the United States and the Soviet Union – the very thing that they sought to avoid in the Cold War, with its potential escalation to nuclear war after 1949.

In Korea, however, the Soviet Union could wage war by proxy – firstly the North Korean communist regime that was already fighting low-level warfare across the border with its non-communist counterpart in South Korea from 1945 onwards, and secondly the new communist government in China on North Korea’s behalf.

The Korean War was also “largely fought by the same commanders and with the same doctrines, weapons, and equipment as the Second World War” – including strategic bombing on the same scale, dropping more bombs than in the whole Pacific War, ranking North Korea as one of the most heavily bombed countries in history.

Some of those weapons were developed from their versions introduced or tested in the last days of the Second World War. Notably, jet aircraft – while the Allies had eschewed replacing their propellor-driven prop counterparts in service at that late stage of the Second World War, they came into their own in the Korean War. Jet aircraft confronted each other in air-to air combat for the first time in history and it was the first war in which jets played the central role in air combat. Similarly, the Korean War also featured the first large-scale deployment of helicopters, which had been developed during the Second World War.

It was also the closest the United States came to using nuclear weapons against an adversary in war since the Second World War, actively contemplating or planning their use against China, or North Korean and Chinese forces.

The Korean War also featured General Macarthur’s daring amphibious invasion behind enemy lines for the Battle of Inchon as the closest comparison to Normandy since the Second World War. The Battle of Inchon has commonly been considered among historians and military scholars as a strategic masterpiece or one of the most decisive military operations in modern warfare, a particularly distinctive accolade for an amphibious operation – “a brilliant success, almost flawlessly executed,” which remained “the only unambiguously successful, large-scale US combat operation” for the next 40 years.

That said, but for its first year which did resemble the more mobile warfare of the Second World War, the Korean War mostly resembled the First World War and the conventional static stalemate of the Western Front, albeit crammed into the narrower space of the Korean peninsula.

Ironically enough, the war stabilized at or close to the original border between South and North Korea. That is where the fighting largely stayed for the next two years – and also where it ended at ceasefire.

In this the Korean War again more closely resembled the First World War than the Second, with their inconclusive armistices or ceasefires that are far more typical of modern war than the Second World War with its decisive victories. The Korean War is still very much with us – with the ceasefire division of the Korean peninsula into opposing North and South Korea, still technically at war with each other, in a frozen conflict like bugs preserved in some strange Cold War amber.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

 

 

(20) INDOCHINA WARS / VIETNAM WAR

(1940-1979)

 

“In Indochina, a nativist political movement rose up to oppose the resumption of French colonial rule; one of the factions that struggled for supremacy was the Communist Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh.”

You knew this one was coming – the iconic twentieth century war after 1945 and second only to the Second World War itself as visual image in popular culture or imagination, and as metaphor or archetype in history or politics.

Of course, it serves as the counterpoint to the Second World War in those things, particularly in moral terms, highlighted by the defeat of the United States and its allies in Vietnam, with the diminished number of its allies as further counterpoint to the Second World War.

It also serves as counterpoint in its nature, both as a limited war and as insurgency or guerilla warfare, contrasting with the Second World War as both unlimited and as more straightforward conventional warfare. Indeed, a common criticism of American military proficiency or strategy in the Vietnam War is that it essentially sought to fight an unconventional war by conventional means more suited to the Second World War and hence entirely misplaced in the Vietnam War, resulting or at least contributing to defeat.

Few things encapsulate the unconventional Vietnam War wrongly fought by conventional Second World War strategy in popular culture or imagination more than American bombing during the war, usually seen as futilely dropping bombs on jungle.

In popular culture or imagination, the Vietnam War is typically that involving the United States in varying levels of engagement from about 1954, with the height of its military engagement from about 1965 to 1972. However, that war was actually the Second Indochina War, which followed almost directly from the First Indochina War from 1945 to 1954 against the French colonial regime – and the First Indochina War commenced immediately as the last shots were fired in the Second World War.

The First Indochina War in turn took shape in the Second World War itself. The Vietnamese resistance to French colonial rule predated the Second World War but took its definitive shape in that war – as the Vichy French colonial administration effectively had to concede control to Japanese occupation from 1940 onwards until Japan “had extended its control over the whole of French Indochina”.

Interestingly, the Japanese occupation and control of French Indochina was the trigger point for the United States to embargo Japan, which in turn led to war with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Interestingly that is, because it illuminates Vietnam as another American trigger point for the Cold War in Asia.

During the Pacific War, however, the United States placed little weight on French Indochina – with President Roosevelt even offering it to Chiang Kai-Shek. In fairness, this may have reflected the predominant role of China for Vietnamese resistance – “most of the Vietnamese resistance to Japan, France, or both, including both communist and non-communist groups, remained based over the border, in China”.

One exception was Ho Chi Minh and the underground communist resistance he led within Vietnam from 1941 onwards – gaining mass support from the effects of the 1945 Vietnamese famine on the populace.

In March 1945, the Japanese effectively sought to salt the earth of the remnants of the French colonial administration – which the Japanese revoked, imprisoning French administrators and taking full control of Indochina, nominally under Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai who proclaimed the Empire of Vietnam.

As Japan lurched to its surrender, the communists or Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh launched firstly their August Revolution from Hanoi and secondly declared Vietnamese independence. The latter had little real effect as the Allies had agreed to China occupying north Vietnam while the British occupied the south.

The Viet Minh remained largely intact under Chinese occupation of the north – such that they were even able to purge non-communist nationalist resistance – but British occupation of the south was another matter. I always recall reading how the British, having accepted the surrendering Japanese garrisons laying down their arms, then immediately rearmed them to keep order in Vietnam – which essentially translated to keeping order for the return of French colonial rule.

However, the Vietnamese communist resistance under Ho Chi Minh came out swinging against the restoration of French colonial rule from the outset and the First Indochina War took shape, along similar north-south lines as the postwar occupation and the subsequent Second Indochina War with the United States, with the Third Indochina War against China in 1979 echoing the postwar Chinese occupation of northern Vietnam.

 

RATING: 4 STARS*****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

TL;DR TIER LIST RANKINGS

 

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

(1) WW1 – GREAT WAR 1914-1945

(2) COLD WAR – LONG WAR 1914-1991

(3) APPEASEMENT – AXIS COLD WAR 1931-1945

(4) PARTISANS & RESISTANCE – UNDERGROUND WAR 1931-1945

(5) HOLOCAUST 1933-1945

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(6) CHINESE CIVIL WAR 1911-1949

(7) ITALO-ABYSSINIAN WAR / NE AFRICA CAMPAIGN 1935-1937 / 1940-1941

(8) SPANISH CIVIL WAR 1936-1939

 

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

(9) ALBANIA – OCCUPATION & RESISTANCE 1939-1944

(10) ANGLO-FRENCH WAR 1940-1942

(11) GREEK CIVIL WAR 1941 / 1945-1949

(12) ANGLO-IRAQI WAR 1941

(13) ANGLO-SOVIET INVASION OF IRAN & IRAN CRISIS 1941-1946

(14) PHILIPPINES – OCCUPATION & RESISTANCE 1941-1945

 

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

(15) PALESTINE – INSURGENCY, CIVIL WAR & ARAB-ISRAELI WAR

1939 / 1944-1949

(16) INDIA & PAKISTAN – INDEPENDENCE & PARTITION 1942-1947

(17) INDONESIA – WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 1942 /1945-1949

(18) MALAYA – MALAYAN EMERGENCY 1942 / 1948-1960

(19) KOREA WAR 1945 / 1950-1953

(20) INDOCHINA WARS & VIETNAM WAR 1940 /1945-1979

 

 

 

 

(18) MALAYA – MALAYAN EMERGENCY

(1942 / 1948-1960)

 

“Communist resistance forces in Malaya settled old scores and terrorized the indigenous population, while mujahideen holy warriors staged reprisals and terror killings against the Chinese–hundreds of innocent civilians were killed on both sides”

Malaya continues the focus of my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars that broke out – or continued – in east or south-east Asia after the Second World War but originated in it. As opposed to Indonesia’s war of independence that commenced even before the formal ceremony of surrender by Japan on the U.S.S. Missouri, Malaya was a growing guerilla conflict that became full-blown war after Britain declared a state of emergency on 17 June 1948.

Hence the term Emergency – although it was also used by Britain to avoid referring to it as a war, apparently for insurance purposes, at least in part (as British insurers would not pay out claims in civil wars, presumably to rubber plantations or other British economic interests).

Like most of the postwar conflicts or wars in Asia, it had its origins and got its opportunity from the Second World War – in this case, the Japanese occupation of British Malaya and Singapore. The Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army or MPAJA “had been the largest anti-Japanese resistance group in Malaya” – a communist guerilla army “composed mainly of ethnic Chinese guerilla fighters” which had been “trained, armed and funded by the British to fight against Japan”. Its veterans then used that against the British themselves after the war, as the core of the communist Malayan National Liberation Army or MNLA which fought for Malaya’s independence from Britain and to establish a communist state.

The insurgency had its roots in Britain’s postwar restoration of its colonial rule, as well as the economic problems that came with it. Britain declared the state of emergency following attacks on plantations and the British victory in the Malayan Emergency that followed is often upheld as a model of counter-insurgency warfare, a counterpoint to the American defeat in Vietnam, although the better comparison may well be to the French defeat in Vietnam.

I’m not so sure whether the British strategy truly serves as either a model of counter-insurgency or as a counterpoint to French or American defeat in Vietnam. Britain had a number of advantages in the Malayan Emergency that were effectively unique to that conflict or at least were not readily adapted to the conflict in Vietnam, and its strategy was equally as much a sledgehammer as the latter rather than any surgical precision, even despite those advantages.

And in the end, Britain had to grant full independence to Malaya (as Malaysia) just as France did in the First Indochina War, while the communists remained able to renew their insurgency in what is known as the Second Malayan Emergency from 1968 to 1989.

 

 

One of my favorite quips is that the Second World War is the American Iliad while the Cold War is the American Odyssey.

As usual, I’m joking and serious – but seriously, I’d go even further in that the Second World War is the modern Iliad, the modern historical epic of war.

And as such, I thought I’d compile my Top Second World Wars

Wait – what? Top 10 Second World…Wars? Plural?!

No – I’m not missing another noun there, such as Top 10 Second World War Battles, Top 10 Second World War Theaters, or Top 10 Second World War Campaigns. Those are subjects for their own top ten lists, indeed quite extensive ones, along with other Second World War subjects, albeit there is some overlap between theaters or campaigns and the present subject.

No – this isn’t some rhetorical sleight of hand, where I define some other previous conflicts as the first and second world war respectively. Again, the subject of conflicts that might be categorized as world wars – including but beyond the two world wars labelled as such – is surprisingly extensive, deserving of its own top ten.

So…what then? Wasn’t there only the one Second World War?

Well, yes – except perhaps when there wasn’t.

My tongue is (mostly) in my cheek – it’s one of my top ten lists where I look at a subject which has a fundamental continuity… but which also can be demarcated into distinct parts in their own right. If you prefer, you can think of it as my Second World War iceberg meme – in this case an iceberg of Second World War continuity. Hence, I won’t be doing my usual top ten countdown but just counting them out.

I can illustrate my point by posing a simple question – when did the Second World War start?

A simple question with what seems a straightforward answer – 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.

But is it so straightforward? Well, perhaps for the fundamental continuity of the war waged by and against Germany, but that is to focus on Europe rather than Asia. If one shifts to a historical focus on the latter, one might well substitute 7 July 1937, with Japan launching its full-scale war on China. Even then, one could look back to the earlier Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931 – or for that matter, even in Europe, to the background to the German invasion of Poland.

And that is my point. While wars may have a fundamental continuity that leads to them being described as a single whole in history with definitive starting or ending dates, they may also consist of – or evolve from or into – overlapping conflicts, particularly when they have a sufficient span or scale. Perhaps none more so than considering the largest war in history, at least in absolute terms, fought on a global scale for six years – the Second World War.

What is my baseline of the Second World War – or surface of the Second World War continuity iceberg? I define it according to the conventional historical frame and timeline of the Second World War – the war against Germany and its allies, subsequent to its invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, outlasting the surrender of Germany itself for a few months against Germany’s last ally standing, Japan, until the formal surrender of Japan on 2 September 1945.

So that said, these are my Top 10 Second World…Wars.

 

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

 

(1) NAZI-SOVIET WAR / GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR

(22 JUNE 1941 – 8 MAY 1945)

 

Wait – what?

Wasn’t the Nazi-Soviet War – called the Great Patriotic War by the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia – essentially just the Second World War, as in the central or primary theater of military conflict of the war? The First Front, as Winston Churchill readily admitted in his history of the war?

Yes – and that’s my point. The Nazi-Soviet War might well be viewed as THE Second World War – with all the other conflicts in the Second World War overlapping or as preludes or aftermath to the war between Germany and the Soviet Union.

And it is a war that can effectively be considered or studied in isolation from other theaters or conflicts, as a subject all of itself. Or indeed, many subjects, including as subject or subjects of its own top ten lists – notably battles, but arguably even of a top ten wars list or continuity iceberg like this.

It was fought, on land and in air, between the armed forces of the Soviet Union and those of Germany with its European allies – the latter often overlooked, albeit Germany remains of primary importance – with little overlap, at least in terms of military forces, with the other conflicts or theaters elsewhere. Yes – there were also naval forces involved but they were peripheral to the scale of conflict on land and in air.

The primary overlap – in terms of military forces was of course the increasing drain of military commitments imposed by the Western allies on Germany or its European allies in other fronts – albeit for Germany’s European allies that included their increasingly desperate search to desert their alliance with Germany for exit strategies from the war.

However, those commitments remained secondary, even arguably a sideshow, to Germany’s primary conflict on its Eastern Front. Sometimes I quip that the Second World War was, for the Western allies, a timely Anglo-American intervention in a Nazi-Soviet War. Timely that is, for the fate of western Europe and Germany itself, that might otherwise have seen more extensive Soviet occupation and one or two irradiated cities – as at the time of the Normandy invasion, the Soviet Union was quite capable of defeating Germany on its own.

Note that I am speaking in terms of military forces. The Western allies did of course also provide extensive economic support to the Soviet armed forces but I’m speaking strictly in terms of armed forces in actual fighting – as per Stalin, “how many divisions has he got?”. However, it is a pet peeve of mine when people attribute the survival of the Soviet Union in 1941 or even 1942 to Allied economic support or Lend-Lease. Such things are difficult to quantify and Allied economic support certainly aided Soviet victories from 1943 onwards, probably decisively – but that role is far less clear for the successful Soviet defense of itself in 1941 or 1942 as the large majority of Lend-Lease was delivered from 1943 onwards.

There is also its sheer scale of combatants and casualties – still the largest invasion and land war in history.

In terms of scale of combat, the Soviet Union mobilized over 34 million men and women for its armed forces – almost twice as many as the next largest combatant, Germany (as well as more than twice as many than either the United States or China.

Indeed, the Soviet Union represented more than a quarter of men or women mobilized in the entire war (over 127 million). And when one considers that the large majority of men mobilized by Germany (about 18 million) were for its war with the Soviet Union, as it was for its European allies, then easily over a third of all men and women mobilized for armed forces in the Second World War were or in for the Nazi-Soviet War.

Not to mention the scale of casualties – the Soviet Union had almost 27 million people killed, at least a third of the highest estimates for 80 million people killed in the whole war. When you consider once again the large majority of those killed for Germany and its European allies were in the Nazi-Soviet War, then you’d be getting close to half all casualties in the entire war – particularly if one were to include casualties for Poland (and I think there’s a strong argument for that).

There’s also the sheer scale of impact – which can be simply stated that on any account of it, the Nazi-Soviet war was the decisive conflict within the Second World War. It’s instructive to recall the ideologies underlying this impact – and perhaps a bit humbling to reflect how much the victory of liberal democracy in the twentieth century depended on the contigency of the casualties communism could sustain fighting fascism (as well as the concentration of economic power in the United States).

And then there’s the narrative of the Nazi-Soviet war, reasonably well known in broad outline albeit somewhat distorted or obscured in historiography until recently.

The broad outline essentially follows each year of the war. The first year of war – from 22 June 1941 to June 1942 essentially follows the German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa – and its defeat in its advance on Moscow.

The second year of war – from June 1942 to June the following year – essentially follows the German campaign in Case Blue against Stalingrad and the Caucasus – and its defeat.

The first two years of the Nazi-Soviet War often seem to present something of a paradox, as observed by H.P. Willmott:

“From today’s perspective, it seems incredible that Germany could have conquered so much of the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942 and that on two separate occasions could have brought her to within measurable distance of defeat. Hindsight provides the element of inevitability that suggests German defeat in his campaign was assured because the first time, Hitler raised the scale of conflict to levels that Germany could not sustain…and herein lies a paradox: before the campaign began there would seem to have been no means whereby Germany could prevail, yet once the campaign started it would seem impossible for her to lose”.

That paradox is resolved by a closer study of the war, but a large part of it is that the Soviet Union fought back from the outset, if not always well then certainly hard – imposing costs in casualties and time which Germany and its allies ultimately could not pay.

Something of this can be observed in the diminishing returns of Germany’s successive campaigns – that whereas the German campaign in 1941 was on all three parts of the front (north, central, and south – albeit shuffling between them as it went), the German campaign in 1942 was only on one part of the front, in the south.

Those returns diminished further with the German campaign that commenced the third year of the war – Operation Citadel against Kursk – where the German campaign was not only on one part of the front, the centre, but a smaller part even of that. And for the first time, the German campaign was defeated in the summer when it was launched.

Thereafter, the Germans were on the defensive or outright retreat from the relentless Soviet advances, albeit slowly in that third year. While it was the Soviet army that had originated (prior to the war) the true ‘blitzkrieg’ of the war – the concept of the ‘deep battle’ or ‘deep space battle’, a strategy aimed at destroying enemy command and control centers as well as lines of communication – it lacked the means to employ this strategy fully until the fourth year of war, when it had sufficient elite or experienced armored and mechanized formations as well as the logistics and mobility to support them.

And oh boy, it showed with the Soviet campaign that opened the fourth and final year of war – Operation Bagration, named for a Russian general in the Napoleonic Wars, on the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June. The Red Army took one of Nazi Germany’s three army groups on the Eastern Front, Army Group Center in Belorussia and Poland, completely by surprise – effectively destroying it, while exposing Army Group North to siege in the Baltic states and Army Group South to attack in the Balkans.

Operation Bagration well deserves to be compared as equal to the success of Operation Barbarossa for Nazi Germany, but without the same sting of ultimate defeat as the latter – although at least one subsequent Soviet campaign was arguably even better.

Indeed, by 1945, it is possible to argue, as Willmott does, the complete transposition of the German and Soviet armies in terms of military proficiency. By 1945, “the operational and technical quality of the Soviet army was at least the equal of the Wehrmacht at its peak” (with the Soviet Vistula-Oder offensive in January 1945 “perhaps the peak of Soviet military achievement in the course of the European war”).

On the other hand, “the German army of 1944-45, for all its reputation, had the characteristics so meticulously catalogued when displayed by the Soviet army in 1941: erratic and inconsistent direction, a high command packed with place-men and stripped of operational talent, the dead hand of blind obedience imposed by political commissars upon an officer corps despised and distrusted by its political master, failure at every level of command and operations”.

 

 

 

 

(2) ANGLO-GERMAN WAR

(1 SEPTEMBER 1939 – 8 MAY 1945)

 

This is the big one – the war everyone thinks or talks about for the Second World War, mostly because of the predominance of Anglophone history and popular culture

The war that started with the German invasion of Poland and Britain’s declaration of war on Germany to honor its guarantee to Poland, with a familiar narrative after that – Dunkirk and the fall of France, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, the war in the Mediterranean and Battle of El Alamein, and ultimately landings in north Africa, Italy, and France.

And yes – the Anglo-German war between Britain and Germany became what would more accurately be described as an Anglo-American war with Germany.

Even for the latter, however, the term Anglo-German war is apt as the Anglo prefix is as applicable to the United States as to Britain, whether in Anglophonic or Anglospheric terms (or both). Indeed, Hitler saw Germany’s ultimate contest for world power against the United States and its economic predominance – which he sought to offset by a Europe united under Germany and particularly by a German empire over the resources of the Soviet Union, with Russia in a similar role to Germany as India in the British Empire (at least as argued by historians such as Adam Tooze).

For that matter, that Anglo prefix is as applicable to the Dominions that were major combatants within the British Commonwealth – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even South Africa.

However, one should not overlook that for a year of the Second World War, from June 1940 to June 1941, the Second World War was almost entirely an Anglo-German war, with Britain as the only major combatant opposed to Germany, albeit with its Dominions and the Commonwealth.

That was a war very different from what might be characterized as the Franco-German war in the First World War – where France held the line on the Western Front and consequently remained the primary or supreme Allied combatant on land. Of course, Britain and France had the same hope for the Second World War, but the Franco-German component of the war effectively ended with the fall of France, with the primary contest no longer between French and German armies as in the First World War.

Instead, Britain found itself engaged in a war in which it relied predominantly on sea power and airpower against a German army which had won predominance in continental Europe. Of course, Britain had traditionally relied on sea power, as it did in both world wars – adding airpower in the Second World War – and sought to rely on allies with larger forces on land to bring to bear against its opponents.

On the one hand, Germany lacked the sea power and airpower to be able to defeat Britain. It might be observed that all of its major opponents in the Second World War, Germany was only able to defeat France – Britain had too much sea power and airpower, the Soviet Union was too big, and the United States combined the worst of both those worlds along with oceanic distance.

On the other hand, Britain could not defeat or even challenge German predominance on land, even with those allies briefly conjured up on the continent, Greece and Yugoslavia.

As H.P. Willmott noted in The Great Crusade:

“At no point could she challenge Germany’s control of western Europe. Never in British history, not even at the height of British naval supremacy, had British sea power been able to challenge, let alone defeat, a great continental power, and by 1940 the superiority of overland communication meant that German military forces could be moved in greater numbers and more quickly that any British force that attempted to establish itself on the mainland. In addition, the reality of the situation was that British naval power in 1940 was barely able to ensure Britain against defeat by the strangulation of her trade”.

In a sense, this was the war that both Britain and Germany had anticipated in the contest between them, both politically before the war and in the war itself – in which Britain stood as the guardian of the world order and of its world empire or power, secured by victory in the First World War, which Germany sought to challenge.

In The Winds of War, American author Herman Wouk has his German military analyst von Roon evocatively label the war as the War of British Succession – Germany’s bid for world empire to succeed Britain’s falling one – although even von Roon ruefully notes that all it (and the Soviet war effort) achieved was to see one Anglo-Saxon world empire replaced by another.

In that, it was arguably already too late – with the contest between Britain and Germany just shadowboxing over an illusion of world power that had already been eclipsed by the two true world powers, and which would only endure until those two powers ended their isolationism (or had it ended for them) to step into the conflict.

Britain’s strategic hope ultimately relied on the substitution of another power for France as ally with large forces on land to bring to bear against Germany. That hope was understandably focused on the United States but ultimately Britain saw not only one but two powers in that role, eclipsing Britain itself in the war and in the world – firstly the Soviet Union on the eastern front and secondly the United States on the western front.

However, even then it took some time for the United States to eclipse Britain in its army and air force in the European theater – the former in terms of American divisions engaged in combat shortly after the Normandy landings – although the British navy remained predominant in the Atlantic.

Speaking of scale, while even the Anglo-American war against Germany remained secondary to the Nazi-Soviet by a substantial margin, at least on land, it was still of an impressive magnitude – with the invasion of Normandy remaining as the largest seaborne invasion in history.

And speaking of the Normandy invasion, the Anglo-American landings throughout the war remain impressive, not least as that superiority of overland communications for Germany remained a factor to be overcome throughout the war. It is impressive that the Anglo-American alliance pulled off successful major landings not just once but three times – not counting the various minor landings on or about the same time – in north Africa in 1942, in Italy in 1943 (both Sicily and the mainland), and most of all in France in 1944, with the Normandy landings a military feat unequalled then or since.

Once again, while not so much a war in its own right as the previous entry – at least after 1941 given it overlapped with (and relied) on the Nazi-Soviet war to engage the majority of the German army – it is a war that can be a subject all of itself, or indeed many subjects, including that or those of its own top ten list or lists.

 

 

 

(3) PACIFIC WAR

(7 DECEMBER 1941 – 2 SEPTEMBER 1945)

 

The Eagle against the Sun!

And yes – that’s the title of a book by historian Ronald Spector, one of the best single volume histories of that war.

Like a mirror image of the Nazi-Soviet War on the opposite side of the world and in the vast expanses of sea rather than those of land, the Pacific War was the other central conflict of the Second World War, the war between the United States and Japan as the largest naval war in history.

And yes – again that’s my point, that the Pacific War might well be considered as a war in its own right and indeed having its own title as such, with which the other conflicts in the Second World War (and other wars in Asia) can be seen as overlapping or as prelude or aftermath.

As such, it is a war that can be subject all of itself. Or indeed, many subjects, including as subject or subjects of its own top ten lists – notably battles, but arguably even of a top ten wars list or continuity iceberg like this

It is a war that can effectively be considered or studied in isolation from other theaters or forces other than those of Japan and the United States – as indeed it was fought, with little overlap except the so-called CBI theater (for China-Burma-India) with which it merged to some extent.

Certainly, it was almost entirely separate from the conflict in Europe, except to the extent that it was a secondary commitment to that conflict for the United States in the guise of its Germany First strategy. It’s interesting to consider the possibility that it might have remained entirely separate, but for the German declaration of war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. Of course, on the other hand it is difficult to envisage how the United States would have entered the war but for Pearl Harbor.

However, as H.P. Willmott observes, the American Germany First strategy was somewhat belied by the disposition of American forces in 1943, which more resembled a Pacific First strategy. It was certainly not the case for the American navy, for which the Pacific War remained its primary theater of operations throughout the war – and for the Marines, for which it was their exclusive theater of operation.

While similar in scale, the Pacific War lacked the decisive impact of its Nazi-Soviet counterpart, as Japan was that much weaker than Germany and that much outmatched by its American opponent in the long term that the ultimate outcome was effectively a foregone conclusion.

However, while some parts of the narrative of the war are well known, there often seems to me a curious hiatus in popular culture or imagination about that narrative as a whole.

And that curious hiatus is the Pacific War in popular culture or imagination seems to leap from the dramatic victories of Japan at the outset of the war in the six months from December 1941, at Pearl Harbor and onwards through South East Asia through to its equally dramatic defeat and reversal of fortune in the Battle of Midway in June 1942 – to the dramatic victories of the United States in Iwo Jima or Okinawa in 1945, effectively within the home island territories of Japan itself, or perhaps in the Philippines in 1944 at earliest. Of course, it helps that the staged photograph of the Marines raising the American flag in victory at Iwo Jima is one of the most iconic photographs of the war, if not the most iconic photograph.

In other words, it seems to skip the hard-fought campaigns from 1942 to 1944 or 1945 that brought the United States to those home island territories of Japan – including one of the best and most hard-fought American campaigns in the whole Pacific War, fought in the most arduous circumstances before the American quantitative and qualitative material advantages became truly overwhelming against its Japanese opponent, the campaign in and for Guadalcanal.

In fairness, those campaigns often seem like slogging matches over small islands, yet ironically without the decisive or big battles that capture popular attention or imagination. The latter was increasingly by design, particularly after the Marine casualties capturing the Tarawa atoll in November 1943, when the Americans improved their amphibious landing tactics – but even more so changed their strategy, substituting island-hopping or leapfrogging in which they bypassed Japanese strongholds such as Rabaul to “wither on the vine”.

As such, although they were often surprisingly resilient even when bypassed, many Japanese soldiers were simply left stranded without supplies, dying of starvation or disease without sighting an enemy soldier – or dying again without directly engaging any enemy combatant when their ships were sunk by American submarines.

In that, they reflected the situation of Japan itself, simply writ large for Japan as it was increasingly strangled by the American submarine campaign against its shipping. I often opine on the American submarines as the unsung victors of the war with their decisive contribution to American victory. With a smaller submarine fleet than Germany and initially defective torpedoes to boot (das boot? – heh), it managed to achieve what Germany did not – destroying the shipping of a maritime empire to bring that empire to its knees, albeit helped by Japan’s woeful neglect of anti-submarine warfare.

Japan’s problems were compounded in that it faced not one but two American campaigns in the Pacific – arising from the split between the American navy and army, which essentially saw two separate campaigns by them, the American navy campaign in the central Pacific, and the American army campaign in the south-west Pacific.

(Of course, Japan had its own issues with such a split, only much worse – which effectively saw a successful navy coup in 1944 against the army government under Tojo that had launched the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor).

It may have been better, as historian John Ellis opines, to have resolved the split and focus on the one campaign – the south-west Pacific with its shorter distances – but the fact remains that the Americans had the resources for both while Japan increasingly lacked them for either.

As H.P. Willmott observes, the Pacific War was the second such war fought by the United States as it mirrored an earlier war – the American Civil War:

“Between 1941 and 1945, Japan was to the United States what the Confederacy had been 80 years before, and the parallels between the two wars were very considerable. Both wars, each about four years in duration, saw the United States opposed by enemies that relied upon allegedly superior martial qualities to overcome demographic, industrial and positional inferiority, but in both wars the United States’ industrial superiority and ability to mount debilitating blockades proved decisive to the outcome. In both wars, the United States was able to use the advantages of a secure base and exterior lines of communication to bring overwhelming strength to enemies committed to defensive strategies, and which were plagued by divided counsels, while in the military aspects of both wars there were close similarities…

The Union drive down the Mississippi that resulted in the capture of Vicksburg in July 1863 and the separation of the Confederate heartland from Texas has its parallel in the drive across the south-west Pacific to the Philippines to separate Japan from its southern resources area. The battles in the two-way states that culminated in the march through Georgia were not dissimilar from the central Pacific offensive that took American forces to Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the shores of the Japanese home islands”.

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(4) SINO-JAPANESE WAR

(18 SEPTEMBER 1931 – 27 FEBRUARY 1932 / 7 JULY 1937 – 2 SEPTEMBER 1945)

 

This is the other big one but in reverse to the Anglo-German war – the war no one thinks or talks about for the Second World War, despite its scale, not least reflected in Chinese casualties second only to the Soviets

That omission or oversight in popular culture or consciousness is reflected in the usual historiography of the Second World War commencing with the German invasion of Poland, rather than the Japanese war with China that commenced two years earlier – or arguably six years before that with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Well, for Europeans or Eurocentric history at least – it obviously gets more attention in Asian history. More accurately, it was the Second Sino-Japanese War, after the First Sino-Japanese war fought between Qing China and Japan in 1894-1895.

In fairness, it was largely isolated to the combatant nations of China and Japan. The actual combat was isolated to China itself, given that the Chinese forces involved could barely defend themselves or their territory. By barely I mean with extensive losses and limited longer term prospects of continuing to do so without outside aid or intervention, let alone any prospects of ejecting Japanese forces or taking the war to Japan. And of course, isolated is a relative term, given the scale of war with China as the world’s most populous nation and one of its largest in size.

I say largely isolated because there were various degrees of foreign involvement in support to China or on the edges of the war itself. The former surprisingly included aid from Germany at the outset, until Germany aligned itself with Japan and started its own war in Europe – prompting much of the foreign involvement on the edges of the war with Japan seeking to cut off routes of supply to China or resources for its own war effort in south-east Asia, ultimately leading to the larger Pacific War.

Also in fairness, the war received reasonably widespread attention at the outset, both for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and for the Japanese war with China from 1937, the latter most infamously for the R*pe of Nanking or Nanjing, the Chinese southern capital that the Chinese Nationalist government could not defend and had to abandon.

I am only familiar with the basic highlights of the war until the European war in 1939 – the loss of Nanjing of course and the loss of Shanghai that preceded it, the Chinese Nationalist regime under Chiang Kai-shek deciding to blow up the dams of the Yellow River to flood the North China plain to slow the Japanese advance in 1938, and the Chinese government having to retreat first to Wuhan and second to Chungking as its capital.

Looking it up, the battle of Wuhan in 1938 was the largest battle of the war – Wuhan was lost but China managed to hold the city of Changsha through two battles in 1939 and 1941, as well as win victory at Taierzhuang in 1938. In fairness to myself, the major combat operations in this period of the war from 1938 to 1941 are usually not common knowledge.

And in fairness to world attention at the time, the Sino-Japanese war was not only overshadowed by the war in Europe, but also largely settled into stalemate – where Japan had mostly defeated Chinese forces in battle but lacked the forces to extend its occupation further beyond coastal cities or railways in a country that remained overwhelmingly hostile to it. At the same, Chinese forces lacked the ability for anything other than a defensive strategy – that is, avoiding open battle as much as possible while looking for salvation from outside forces, with the Nationalists and Communists also looking ahead to renewed civil war with each other.

However, Japan still had one surprise left for China, even while it was virtually collapsing in the Pacific War against the United States, and one that is almost entirely forgotten or overlooked in most Second World War histories – the Ichigo offensive in 1944. The largest Japanese army offensive of the whole war, it was also the last successful Japanese offensive – astonishingly so and on a scale unequalled for anything else by Japan or Germany at that late stage of the war.

It was the last of a series of Japanese blows that ultimately proved fatal for the Chinese Nationalist government in the subsequent civil war with the Communists – Japan arguably doing the most of anyone, including the Chinese Communists themselves, to win victory for the Communists in the civil war.

 

 

 

 

(5) FOURTH PARTITION OF POLAND / POLISH WAR

(1 SEPTEMBER 1939 – 8 MAY 1945)

 

The invasion and partition of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union – in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which as popular historian Paul Johnson pointed out was something of a misnomer for what was more accurately a Nazi-Soviet aggression pact against Poland.

Speaking of Paul Johnson, he records an interesting vignette of how easy it was to forget Poland as casus belli of the European war. One guest swept his arm around at a London society wedding on 10 January 1946 to exclaim “After all, this is what we have been fighting for”, only for a female guest to retort “What, are they all Poles?”

And indeed, the invasion of Poland by Germany on 1 September 1939 was the commencement of the Second World War in Europe. The Soviet invasion followed on 17 September 1939, effectively to claim the Polish territory assigned to it under the Pact which in turn reclaimed the territory lost to Poland in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. But for the Pact, Germany could readily have occupied all of pre-war Poland. As it was, Poland ceased to exist as a state – and alone among the states occupied by Germany, did not have its own collaborationist government but instead the German-administered General Government.

The title of Fourth Partition of Poland is used by some historians in reference to the Three Polish Partitions – the three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1772 to 1795 by Russia, Prussia and Austria that progressively reduced the Commonwealth until it was eliminated as a state altogether by the third partition and completely divided up among the three partitioning parties.

However, other historians have pointed out that it might well be reckoned an even higher numbered partition – depending on how one reckons the subsequent restoration of Poland under Napoleon in 1807 and its partitions in 1815 (Congress of Vienna), 1832, 1846, 1848, and 1918 (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk).

I have classed the Fourth Partition of Poland as one of my top ten Second World Wars – indeed in top tier – as the German (and Soviet) war against Poland continued throughout the Second World War, albeit behind other active fronts, particularly in Poland itself behind the Eastern Front.

Active military fronts that is – Poland itself was the front line (or ground zero) of the war Germany fought against the populations of the nations it occupied, above all the Holocaust with it mostly occurring in camps in Poland and Polish Jews representing about half the tally for the Jewish population of Europe killed.

Of course, the most active part of the German war against Poland was its original campaign in September 1939 – which one book title christened as The War Hitler Won, and as H.P. Willmott observed in The Great Crusade, was a war Germany won before a single shot was fired due to its material and positional superiority over Polish forces.

The German victory still surprised observers at the time as being a matter of weeks rather than months. Poland might have had better prospects if weather – General Mud – had been more on its side, if its defense had been better planned or timed, and above all if Britain and France had properly planned or coordinated an offensive against Germany on the Western Front. The failure of the last has been considered as part of the larger Western Betrayal argued by Poles and Czechs from Munich to Yalta.

Even so, Polish forces defended Poland impressively – notably inflicting a similar proportion of casualties (for German personnel killed in action) as the French did in far better defensive circumstances the following year. That was despite the Soviet invasion on 17 September transforming the Polish situation from hopeless to completely hopeless – although as H.P. Willmott points out, it did little to change the military situation in reality other than to remove the Polish option of holding out in the so-called Romanian Bridgehead. As it was, some Polish forces held out even after the fall of Warsaw on 28 September, enduring until the last of them surrendered on 6 October, while others fled or escaped.

However, the war did not end there, either for Polish armed forces or in Poland itself.

With respect to the former, those Polish armed forces that managed to escape or flee continued fighting in Allied forces elsewhere (or in resistance within Poland), particularly as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, led by the Polish government-in-exile based first in France and then in Britain. Indeed, “Polish armed forces were the fourth largest Allied forces in Europe after the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain”, albeit reliant on arms and supplies from other allies.

Among the western allies, Poles served with distinction – perhaps the most famous examples being Polish airmen in the Battle of Britain and the Poles as the Allied “shock troops” in the Battle of Monte Cassino. The Polish navy and merchant marine also fought in the Polish Armed Forces in the West.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets either released Polish personnel to serve in the Polish Armed Forces in the West or had them raise the Polish Armed Forces in the East, the latter more to Soviet ideological taste.

Arguably even more impactful was the Polish contribution to Allied intelligence. Apparently almost half “of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in between 1939 and 1945 came from Polish sources” – and the Polish intelligence network described as “the only allied intelligence assets on the Continent” (after the French surrender).

Most impactful of all was the vital Polish intelligence contribution towards the decryption of the German Enigma codes, delivered to the western allies only five weeks before the war, and which underlay the British decryption known as ULTRA. Polish intelligence didn’t end there but also provided the Allies with key intelligence about the German camps, V-1 and V-2 rockets, and submarines, as well as an intelligence network for north Africa.

The Polish intelligence contribution to Allied victory has been described as “disproportionately large” and much more effective “than subversive or guerilla activities”.

Speaking of subversive or guerilla activities, finally there was the war in Poland itself – or rather the war on Poland itself. The German campaign may have ended but if anything that only represented an escalation in the German war on Poland – with far more Polish casualties from occupation than the military campaign in 1939. Poland has one of the highest casualties in absolute terms for those killed in the war – approximately 6 million, almost all civilians and over half of which were Polish Jews – and the highest as a proportion of its population, approximately 17%.

Of course, that wasn’t all the German occupation – a small proportion was from the Soviet occupation, most infamously the captured Polish soldiers killed by the Soviets at Katyn.

That prompted Polish resistance movements and the Polish Underground State, with an overall strength that was the largest or one of the largest resistance movements in Europe – in which the largest Polish resistance organization was the Home Army (Army Krajowa or AK), although there was a plethora of other organizations.

The Polish resistance fought two famous uprisings in Warsaw – firstly, the Warsaw Ghetto Rising by the Jews against deportation to the camps in April 1943, and secondly (even more famously and on a larger scale), the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944 as Soviet forces advanced on the city. Equally as famously, those Soviet forces sat it out while the Germans crushed the Uprising, destroying Warsaw far more thoroughly than the German campaign in 1939 did. The Soviet forces were at the limits of their supply and logistic chains, but they were also not inclined to do too much to address that (or otherwise assist the western Allied air forces to drop aid to the Poles), given the convenience of Germany destroying the non-communist Polish resistance.

H.P. Willmott observed the irony that Germany treated Poland atrociously and France leniently, while the reverse might have better suited Germany’s purpose. I have observed that I do not understand why Germany crushed the Warsaw Uprising, when it might have suited Germany better to withdraw to another defensive line, leaving it intact as a potential thorn in the side for the Soviets.

I’ve left the end date of this entry as the surrender of Germany but in effect part of the Polish resistance or underground war and indeed of the partition of Poland continued afterwards with respect to the Soviets – with the latter continuing to this day and onwards, as Poland never retained the loss of its territory from the Soviet part of the Pact.

 

 

 

 

(6) FRANCO-GERMAN WAR / THIRD FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

(1 SEPTEMBER 1939 – 25 JUNE 1940)

 

This was the big one – until it suddenly and surprisingly wasn’t.

The war that was the focus of everyone’s attention at the outset – the war at the start and the heart of the Second World War in Europe, set to replay the Western Front of the First World War and synonymous with the Battle of France…until France fell and signed an armistice with Germany on 25 June 1940.

After then, it was replaced in western Europe, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean by the Anglo-German war, which ultimately became the Anglo-American war with Germany.

Of course, the Anglo-German war commenced at the same time as the Franco-German war – with the German invasion of Poland – and both were fought side by side, literally with Britain and France as allies in western Europe against Germany. However, the Franco-German war predominated over the Anglo-German war, as France did the heavy lifting in terms of both being the Allied front line in western Europe and fielding the overwhelming majority of the Allied armies against Germany. While Britain did field an expeditionary force to France, its main strength was its navy, as had always historically been the case, as well as the newer addition of its air force.

The Franco-German war effectively ended with German victory and French defeat in the Battle of France, such that the primary contest was no longer between French and German armies but the Anglo-German war until 1941. Britain’s strategic hope relied on the substitution of another power for France as ally that could contribute similar large forces on land against Germany. That hope was understandably focused on the United States, which ultimately did replace France as larger army allied with Britain on the Western Front, but the Soviet Union played the role of France for both Britain and the United States as primary or supreme allied combatant on land, except substituting that role on the Eastern Front for France on the Western Front.

While some French forces fought on against Germany mostly from France’s colonies as the Free French, they effectively did so as a subordinate part of the Anglo-German war or Anglo-American war against Germany – as did the revived French forces after the Anglo-American liberation of France, the core of which were Free French forces in any event. As such, the Franco-German war very much ended with French defeat in the Battle of France.

The Franco-German war was more than just the Battle of France, albeit not much more as indicated by the title of Phoney War, or Sitzkrieg in German as an amusing contrast to blitzkrieg, from about September 1939 to May 1940. This title is a slight misnomer. Britain and France may not have conducted major military operations on the Western Front but they did implement economic warfare and waged naval warfare, including their naval blockade of Germany and targeting German surface raiders. They also planned operations, although the only one that saw any action was in Norway – when they came up against the German plans to invade and occupy that country and Denmark from April 1940.

The biggest lost opportunity by France was at the outset of the Franco-German war with the failure to launch a more robust and potentially decisive offensive against Germany while the latter only had weak forces in the west during its campaign in Poland – that is, other than the abortive Saar Offensive. Had France pursued or expanded that offensive more vigorously, it may well have won the Franco-German war and ended the Second World War right there.

For that matter, the Saar Offensive was simply the last in a long line of French inaction where even the most minimal action against Germany mght have won the war before it started, most notably with Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936.

However, it remains that the Franco-German war is defined by the Battle of France from 10 May 1940 to 25 June 1940 – and the French defeat in it. The reasons for the latter, as well as those for German victory, are perhaps best considered in a closer look at the Battle of France, but at least part of those reasons is from the same pusillanimity as shown by the French leadership in their Saar Offensive or any of their other failures to take more effective action against Germany when they held the advantage.

Although I feel obliged to point out that critique of pusillanimity and psychological defeatism should not extend to French military performance as a whole, unfairly the subject of caricature as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”.

The Franco-German war was the third such war in seventy years, such that it should be considered the Third Franco-Prussian War, after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871 and the First World War in 1914-1918, albeit the latter involved a Germany that been unified under Prussia and its monarchy after the former. The Prussian monarchy may have been forced to abdicate after the First World War, but Germany and even more so the German military or Wehrmacht effectively remained unified under a Prussian state. The Allies in the Second World War certainly thought so as they abolished the Prussian state after the war, identifying it with the German militarism of both world wars.

Although perhaps the Franco-German war of the Second World War should be considered the Second Franco-Prussian War – as the Germans managed to replay the same quick victory they had won in the Franco-Prussian War, achieving in only six weeks what they could not against France on the Western Front throughout the entire First World War.

That of itself, as well as the repetition of three Franco-German wars in effectively as many generations, is worthy of the Franco-German war being considered as its own separate war within the Second World War.

 

 

(7) GUERRA PARALLELA –

FRANCO-ITALIAN, ANGLO-ITALIAN & GRECO-ITALIAN WAR

(10 JUNE 1940 – 6 APRIL 1941)

 

It might seem odd to see Italy’s initial role in the Second World War as waging its own ‘guerra parallela’ or parallel war to that fought by Germany, but that was indeed how Mussolini saw it – and what’s more, that is what it effectively was until Italian defeats necessitated German involvement in Italy’s war, at which point Italy became a subordinate in Germany’s war.

It was also of fundamental importance to the Second World War, transforming the Mediterranean from a literal backwater, neutral albeit Axis-friendly, to an active theater of the war – certainly disastrous to Italy itself, ultimately a battlefield in that theater, but arguably to the detriment of everyone involved, hence my favorite epithet for the Mediterranean in the Second World War as the sea of folly.

Apparently prior to Italy entering the war, the British War Cabinet considered whether it was more advantageous for Italy to remain neutral or be a millstone for Germany as ally (or for Germany to be “shackled to a corpse”, using the phrasing for Germany allied to Austria-Hungary in the First World War). They concluded that it would be better for Italy to remain neutral, correctly in my opinion, but by a narrow margin. Italy as active ally to Germany was not the war-breaker for Germany of which Hitler subsequently complained on the eve of final defeat, but it did contribute to German defeat. On the other hand, the Mediterranean was a drain on resources for all involved, arguably delaying Allied victory by at least a year or so, although they could more readily afford that drain on their resources more than a Germany which increasingly could not.

Mussolini initially sought to sit out the war that commenced with Germany’s invasion of Poland – firstly for the sensible practical reason that, as he had confided to Hitler, Italy was not ready for war until 1943 (similarly to German naval commanders who advised Hitler of the same year with respect to the German navy), and secondly for ideological opposition to the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

It is unfortunate for Italy and Mussolini personally that he did not maintain this sensible neutrality – as indeed it was that he did not maintain his original opposition to Hitler and Germany, being the only effective such opposition in the period of appeasement by Britain and France, notably by blocking Germany taking over Austria in 1934. It’s why I perceive Mussolini with some sympathy as a tragic figure despite his many flaws, not the least of which was fascism – that he might have redeemed himself in history but for the fatal flaw that he was twice corrupted from his correct initial instincts, firstly of opposition to Germany and secondly of neutrality in the war.

Mussolini abandoned his initial neutrality because he could not resist the temptation of the opportunity from the French defeat by Germany for Italy’s own expansion or empire in the Mediterranean. Although the opportunity came from the French defeat by Germany, Mussolini perceived that Italy could not do so simply by begging crumbs from Germany at the table of victory as a power friendly to it, but would have to assume an active role in the war when it was still meaningful – and what’s more, by its own war effort separate from Germany, hence the ”guerra parallela” or parallel war.

That saw Italy declare war on a dying France and a defeated Britain, although Italy was to find that the latter may have been defeated by Germany in western Europe but was to prove far more robust elsewhere.

Unfortunately for Mussolini and his guerra parallela, Italy’s separate war effort did not shape up to his hopes for it. It was probably inevitable that Italy’s war against Britain in the Mediterranean and Africa would merge with the wider Anglo-German war at some point, but Mussolini might have pulled off his parallel war if Italy had been more successful militarily. Instead, Italy was unsuccessful, infamously and spectacularly so.

Like I did for France in the Franco-German war, I feel obliged to resist the common caricature of Italy’s military performance as execrable, often pumped up as such by contemporary British propaganda – much to the anger of the British personnel who had to do the actual fighting when the Italian military did perform effectively. Italy’s military was not universally bad as so often caricatured but it was inconsistent. The reasons for that inconsistency are manifold, including that Italians did not share Mussolini’s enthusiasm for his guerra parallela on the German side but also the same reason Mussolini himself shared to Hitler – that Italy simply was not ready for war before 1943. Italian military performance often reflected that Italy went to war with a totally inadequate industrial base and wretched equipment to match, particularly outside its most prized military asset – its navy. When Italian forces were buttressed by better equipment and leadership, such as in Rommel’s Afrika Korps, they could fight very effectively indeed.

Mussolini’s parallel war got off to a bad start with the Franco-Italian war, fought in the last fortnight or so (10-25 June 1940) of dying French resistance in the Franco-German war that had commenced fighting in earnest a month before. Albeit Italy did not have the same mechanized or armored strength as Germany – and faced more difficult terrain that would have been a check to it even if it did – for the invasion of south France or the Battle of the Alps as it is called, but the resistance by the few divisions of the French Army of the Alps under General Rene Olry was the one shining light of effective French defense during the Battle of France. I’ve read at least one history that opined the French defensive success effectively preserved south France for the autonomous Vichy regime. I’m not so sure about that, as Vichy’s autonomy seemed more due to the larger bargaining chips of continuing the war through the French navy and colonial possessions, but it probably helped. It certainly limited Italian territorial claims to the minimal territory they had obtained prior to armistice.

Italy’s military performance may have been lackluster in the Franco-Italian war, but that was positively rosy compared to the defeats it suffered in the Anglo-Italian war. Those defeats were, as noted previously, most infamous and spectacular in north Africa where Italy was not only defeated by Britain in its invasion of Egypt but looked in real danger of losing its own territory of Italian Libya to the victorious British forces. However, Britain’s victories against Italian forces in north Africa often overshadow its victories against the Italian forces in east Africa (Ethiopia and Somalia) as well as its naval victories in the Mediterranean, most notably the British air attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in the first carrier strike of history on 11 November 1940. The attack on Taranto was even more notable as a model the Japanese used for their subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor (along with their own attack on Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War) – and that Britain was notoriously deficient when it came to developing carrier aviation, particularly in comparison to Japan or the United States, with the air attack on Taranto being by the biplanes Britain used in naval aviation at that time.

However, the archetypal example of Italy’s parallel war was the Greco-Italian War it launched from 28 October 1940, attacking Greece from Albania. At least Germany was aware of Italian intentions in the Franco-Italian and Anglo-Italian wars, but Mussolini had deliberately not informed Germany of his intentions for the Greco-Italian War, resentful of what he perceived as German encroachment in the Balkans (by Germany negotiating between Hungary and Romania in conflict over Transylvania) as an Italian sphere of influence.

Once again, Italian forces faced difficult terrain, but also in the worst possible season for it, and were defeated by opposing Greek forces, only somewhat less spectacularly than in north Africa. A large part of the reason for the defeat of Italian forces in both Greece and North Africa was Mussolini splitting the Italian war effort between the two, something the British were to repeat in their victories by sending forces from north Africa to aid Greece.

As noted previously, Italy’s parallel war – the Anglo-Italian and Greco-Italian wars – effectively ended with German involvement to aid Italy at the latter’s request, reversing British or Greek victories with defeats by Germany, as well as subordinating Italy and its parallel war to Germany in the wider Anglo-German war. German involvement had commenced earlier in north Africa but commenced in Greece with the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece from 6 April 1941.

The latter has often been attributed as the fatal mistake that lost Germany the whole war, by delaying Operation Barbarossa until 22 June 1941, including by Hitler himself after the fact (and blaming everyone but himself). That has generally been revised by assessments that an unusually wet spring thaw would have delayed Barbarossa in any event, although it certainly didn’t help that the German units involved in their Balkans campaign were delayed in participating in Barbarossa – and the German airborne invasion of Crete deterred Germany from doing so to better effect elsewhere, most notably against Malta.

 

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

 

 

(8) SOVIET-JAPANESE WAR

(11 MAY – 16 SEPTEMBER 1939 / 8 AUGUST – 2 SEPTEMBER 1945)

 

It has always struck me as somewhat anomalous that two of the major combatants of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan, scrupulously avoided fighting each other for almost all the conflict, despite being on opposing sides and despite it obviously being to the detriment of Japan’s ally Germany.

Not that, on the latter point (and according to my reading), Germany particularly sought out Japanese involvement in its war against the Soviet Union – at least not until Germany’s initial victories began to wane to the point that Germany considered it might need Japanese involvement after all, by which point it was too little too late.

Hence Japan signed the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 13 April 1941, a little over two months before Germany invaded the Soviet Union – reflecting how little Germany had coordinated with or even informed Japan with respect to its intentions. Hence also the term scrupulously I used for the Soviet Union and Japan avoiding fighting each other – scrupulously that is, in terms of abiding by the Non-Aggression Pact.

And as I stated before, despite that scrupulousness on Japan’s part obviously being to the detriment of Japan’s ally Germany – reflected in, among other things, about half of American Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union in the war against Germany being shipped through the Pacific, as long as the ships had Russian flags (which I anticipate would simply have been a matter of lending them those ships or assigning ships Russian flags).

It’s even more anomalous when one considers the long-standing Japanese hostility to the Soviet Union – and indeed the Russian empire before that, Japan’s first European military adversary. Japan had both the largest and longest military intervention in the Russian Civil War, which persisted until Japan finally withdrew from Siberia and the Russian Pacific Far East in 1922.

The initial target of the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s was also the Soviet Union – outside of course the Japanese annexation of Manchuria, from which Japanese militarists began looking towards the Soviet Union – before that particular party of militarists was suppressed by other militarists looking towards China and elsewhere, although that didn’t stop repeated minor clashes with the Soviet Union on the Manchurian border or in Mongolia.

One can see why the Soviet Union stuck scrupulously to the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in its existential struggle against Germany, but less so for Japan. One factor was of course that both the navy and Japan’s need for resources, particularly oil, advocated the “Southern Strategy” against European Asian colonies (and the United States) as opposed to the “Northern Strategy” (against the Soviet Union) that was the contending strategy proposed, typically by the army, in war councils.

The other factor was the healthy respect that Japan had for the Soviet forces opposing them – something I share in terms of my uncertainly whether any Japanese involvement against the Soviet Union in 1941, when it was most optimal for Japan (and Germany), would have actually made any different to the outcome.

That respect arose from the first of the Soviet-Japanese wars that did occur during the Second World War, interestingly enough with those two wars bookending the main conflict at start and finish.

Indeed, the first Soviet-Japanese war commenced six months before the commencement of the war in Europe with the German invasion of Poland and indeed continued for a fortnight or so into the European war. However, it was kept mostly secret by both combatants – the Soviet Union presumably to avoid undermining its position against Germany and Japan because its army was soundly defeated by that of the Soviet Union, notably at Khalkhin Gol.

The Japanese defeat in this war, particularly at Khalkhin Gol, has taken on some notoriety in history since the Second World War – rightly so in my opinion, as having an importance on the outcome of events in the Second World War that were somewhat obscured by its secrecy at the time. In some ways, it is a pity that it wasn’t publicized more widely – as it, and Japanese intelligence on the strength of Soviet forces, might otherwise had some impact on German decisions, at least if the latter had been in the minds of more rational actors.

The other Soviet-Japanese war bookend came at the end of the Second World War, after Germany had surrendered – and in the form of the Soviet Union honoring its promise to the United States to commit to war against Japan. Ironically – and somewhat incredibly – Japan at this time harbored delusions that, consistent with the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviets could help Japan negotiate a more lenient peace.

Instead, the Soviets scrapped the Pact and absolutely smashed Japan’s Kwangtung Army in Manchuria – indeed proceeding into Korea and Japan’s northernmost island possessions.

While the Japanese army had previously romped through China in the absence of the latter’s industrial capacity and hence armored forces, now it faced the Soviet army – pretty much defined by its armored forces or tanks – honed to perfection fighting and winning against Germany.

As the War Nerd (Gary Brecher) colorfully observed in a column on this war – “This was a campaign between two great empires—both gone now, it occurs to me—but one, the Soviet, was at the absolute top of its game, and the other, Imperial Japan, was dying and insane.”

 

 

 

 

(9) SOVIET-FINNISH WAR – WINTER & CONTINUATION WARS

(30 NOVEMBER 1939 – 13 MARCH 1940 / 25 JUNE 1941 – 19 SEPTEMBER 1944)

 

The Soviet-Finnish wars have an odd place in the continuity of the Second World War – almost like Schrodinger’s wars, at the same time both within and outside the main continuity, with the latter effectively saving Finland from the same fate of occupation and unconditional surrender as Germany.

The Winter War has quite the notoriety within Second World War history, primarily for the obvious Soviet expectations of a walkover only to be undone by the Finnish underdog against the odds.

The ultimate Soviet goals in that war are contested, although most seem to agree that it was the complete occupation of Finland – consistent with restoring other former Imperial Russian territory to the Soviet Union, as with Poland and the Baltic states.

Whatever they were, they had to evolve as a result of the skilful and stubborn Finnish resistance that is the stuff of legend, while the Soviets seem to double down on one disaster after another.

But evolve they did, to a more realistic strategy not based on Finland conveniently collapsing from the first push – and which had seen Soviet overconfidence in attacking at the worst time of year for it in terms of seasonal weather. Ultimately, Finland had to negotiate while they still had the means to avoid worse defeat.

The Soviet-Finnish wars weren’t done, however, as the Soviets reaped the harvest they had sown in the Winter War with what the Finns called the Continuation War – the Finnish participation in the German invasion of the Soviet Union. That title reflected the common perception or intention that the war was to reverse the losses of the Winter War and no more, though some Finns argued for more ambitious war aims of a Greater Finland.

Whatever the Finnish goals in the Continuation War, Finland held itself aloof from Germany as much as possible, even to the extent of identifying as co-belligerent rather than ally and not signing the Tripartite Pact – which resulted in the United States never formally declared war on Finland.

Finland also refused to advance beyond certain points and had to demobilize part of its army from economic necessity in 1942. Finland was also the first to see the logic of German defeat if Germany could not secure a quick victory, attempting to start peace negotiations with the Soviet Union as early as autumn 1941.

And once again Finland managed to save itself with the Soviets accepting a more limited outcome than the occupation or unconditional surrender of Finland. That outcome did however require the Finns to declare war on Germany and eject German troops from Finland.

That saw the third and final war fought by Finland, this time against Germany in the Lapland war – which mostly came to an effective end in until November 1944 although some German troops held out until 27 April 1945, shortly before the surrender of Germany itself.

 

 

 

 

(10) YUGOSLAVIAN CIVIL WAR & WAR OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

(6 APRIL 1941 – 25 MAY 1945)

 

“In April 1941, the Axis powers conquered Greece and Yugoslavia and thereafter the real struggle for the control of those countries began.”

That’s how H.P. Willmott summed it up in The Great Crusade, his history of the Second World War. While Greece will earn a place in my special mentions, the partisan warfare in Yugoslavia deserves its place in my Top 10 Second World Wars.

That’s because of two reasons – its scale and the effectiveness of the partisans under Tito.

The former is reflected in its casualties, with Yugoslavia having one of the highest death tolls by population, usually estimated as at least one million (or approximately 7% of the population), of which over half were civilian.

The partisans were no slouches in number of combatants either – originally a guerilla force aided by their country’s mountainous terrain, they switched to a conventional force apparently numbering 650,000 in 1944 (and increasing to 800,000 in 1945) in four field armies in 52 divisions, with a navy and air force.

Their effectiveness is usually considered in terms of being Europe’s most effective anti-Axis resistance movement in the war – unique or almost unique among such movements or partisans to liberate their country with their own forces during the war.

(In its article on the Yugoslav Partisans, Wikipedia nominates Yugoslavia as “one of only two European countries that were largely liberated by its own forces during World War II” – I recall the other is Albania, although I also recall Greek partisans had liberated substantial parts of Greece).

Of course, they didn’t and probably couldn’t do without outside help. They were aided by joint operations with the Soviet operation against Belgrade, the national (and Serbian) capital. They were also aided throughout by logistics and air support from the western allies.

More substantially, they were aided by Germany’s priority to commit forces elsewhere against the Soviets or western allies, as well as by the desertion of Germany’s allies, both those allies surrendering to switch sides and of forces fielded in Yugoslavia itself, often literally deserting to join the partisans.

Even so, Germany and its allies came very close to destroying the partisans in spring and summer 1943 – that is, before the reversal of fortunes from the surrender of Germany’s most significant ally in Europe, particularly in terms of forces occupying Yugoslavia, Italy.

This illustrates that the Yugoslavian war of liberation was no simply two-sided affair, but rather a bitter battle royale on all sides – summed up by a quip from John Irving’s Setting Free the Bears to the effect that it was a hard war if you didn’t change sides at least once.

On what might be described as the Axis side, there was of course Germany, which had primarily defeated Yugoslavia in April 1941 but had then largely left the occupation of Yugoslavia to its allies – Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and their various client regimes, most notoriously the Ustashe of Croatia. That is, until the surrender of Italy and the threat of Allied landings in the Mediterranean extending to the Balkans forced Germany to commit more substantial forces.

On what might be described as the Yugoslav side, there was actually a multi-side civil war, albeit primarily between Tito’s communist partisans and the royalist Chetniks, although there were also the collaborationist forces of Axis client regimes as well as, bizarrely, the White Russian émigré “Russian Protective Corps”. The Chetniks increasingly collaborated with the Axis forces, with the Allies ultimately abandoning them to support Tito’s partisans.

Tito and his partisans emerged victorious as Yugoslavia’s postwar communist or socialist government, naming the war they had won as the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution. However, because they had won it largely with their own forces, they were able to remain outside the Soviet bloc – unlike the other eastern European communist states which had been essentially imposed by Soviet forces – effectively defecting from it in what was famously the first major split within the communist world, the Tito-Stalin split.

 

TOP 10 SECOND WORLD WARS (TIER LIST)

 

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

(1) NAZI-SOVIET WAR

(2) ANGLO-GERMAN WAR

(3) PACIFIC WAR

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(4) SINO-JAPANESE WAR

(5) FOURTH POLISH PARTITION / POLISH WAR

(6) FRANCO-GERMAN WAR / THIRD FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

(7) GUERRA PARALLELA – FRANCO-ITALIAN, ANGLO-ITALIAN & GRECO-ITALIAN WAR

 

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

(8) SOVIET-JAPANESE WAR

(9) SOVIET-FINNISH WAR – WINTER & CONTINUATION WARS

(10) YUGOSLAVIAN CIVIL WAR & WAR OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

 

(7) GUERRA PARALLELA –

FRANCO-ITALIAN, ANGLO-ITALIAN & GRECO-ITALIAN WAR

(10 JUNE 1940 – 6 APRIL 1941)

 

It might seem odd to see Italy’s initial role in the Second World War as waging its own ‘guerra parallela’ or parallel war to that fought by Germany, but that was indeed how Mussolini saw it – and what’s more, that is what it effectively was until Italian defeats necessitated German involvement in Italy’s war, at which point Italy became a subordinate in Germany’s war.

It was also of fundamental importance to the Second World War, transforming the Mediterranean from a literal backwater, neutral albeit Axis-friendly, to an active theater of the war – certainly disastrous to Italy itself, ultimately a battlefield in that theater, but arguably to the detriment of everyone involved, hence my favorite epithet for the Mediterranean in the Second World War as the sea of folly.

Apparently prior to Italy entering the war, the British War Cabinet considered whether it was more advantageous for Italy to remain neutral or be a millstone for Germany as ally (or for Germany to be “shackled to a corpse”, using the phrasing for Germany allied to Austria-Hungary in the First World War). They concluded that it would be better for Italy to remain neutral, correctly in my opinion, but by a narrow margin. Italy as active ally to Germany was not the war-breaker for Germany of which Hitler subsequently complained on the eve of final defeat, but it did contribute to German defeat. On the other hand, the Mediterranean was a drain on resources for all involved, arguably delaying Allied victory by at least a year or so, although they could more readily afford that drain on their resources more than a Germany which increasingly could not.

Mussolini initially sought to sit out the war that commenced with Germany’s invasion of Poland – firstly for the sensible practical reason that, as he had confided to Hitler, Italy was not ready for war until 1943 (similarly to German naval commanders who advised Hitler of the same year with respect to the German navy), and secondly for ideological opposition to the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

It is unfortunate for Italy and Mussolini personally that he did not maintain this sensible neutrality – as indeed it was that he did not maintain his original opposition to Hitler and Germany, being the only effective such opposition in the period of appeasement by Britain and France, notably by blocking Germany taking over Austria in 1934. It’s why I perceive Mussolini with some sympathy as a tragic figure despite his many flaws, not the least of which was fascism – that he might have redeemed himself in history but for the fatal flaw that he was twice corrupted from his correct initial instincts, firstly of opposition to Germany and secondly of neutrality in the war.

Mussolini abandoned his initial neutrality because he could not resist the temptation of the opportunity from the French defeat by Germany for Italy’s own expansion or empire in the Mediterranean. Although the opportunity came from the French defeat by Germany, Mussolini perceived that Italy could not do so simply by begging crumbs from Germany at the table of victory as a power friendly to it, but would have to assume an active role in the war when it was still meaningful – and what’s more, by its own war effort separate from Germany, hence the ”guerra parallela” or parallel war.

That saw Italy declare war on a dying France and a defeated Britain, although Italy was to find that the latter may have been defeated by Germany in western Europe but was to prove far more robust elsewhere.

Unfortunately for Mussolini and his guerra parallela, Italy’s separate war effort did not shape up to his hopes for it. It was probably inevitable that Italy’s war against Britain in the Mediterranean and Africa would merge with the wider Anglo-German war at some point, but Mussolini might have pulled off his parallel war if Italy had been more successful militarily. Instead, Italy was unsuccessful, infamously and spectacularly so.

Like I did for France in the Franco-German war, I feel obliged to resist the common caricature of Italy’s military performance as execrable, often pumped up as such by contemporary British propaganda – much to the anger of the British personnel who had to do the actual fighting when the Italian military did perform effectively. Italy’s military was not universally bad as so often caricatured but it was inconsistent. The reasons for that inconsistency are manifold, including that Italians did not share Mussolini’s enthusiasm for his guerra parallela on the German side but also the same reason Mussolini himself shared to Hitler – that Italy simply was not ready for war before 1943. Italian military performance often reflected that Italy went to war with a totally inadequate industrial base and wretched equipment to match, particularly outside its most prized military asset – its navy. When Italian forces were buttressed by better equipment and leadership, such as in Rommel’s Afrika Korps, they could fight very effectively indeed.

Mussolini’s parallel war got off to a bad start with the Franco-Italian war, fought in the last fortnight or so (10-25 June 1940) of dying French resistance in the Franco-German war that had commenced fighting in earnest a month before. Albeit Italy did not have the same mechanized or armored strength as Germany – and faced more difficult terrain that would have been a check to it even if it did – for the invasion of south France or the Battle of the Alps as it is called, but the resistance by the few divisions of the French Army of the Alps under General Rene Olry was the one shining light of effective French defense during the Battle of France. I’ve read at least one history that opined the French defensive success effectively preserved south France for the autonomous Vichy regime. I’m not so sure about that, as Vichy’s autonomy seemed more due to the larger bargaining chips of continuing the war through the French navy and colonial possessions, but it probably helped. It certainly limited Italian territorial claims to the minimal territory they had obtained prior to armistice.

Italy’s military performance may have been lackluster in the Franco-Italian war, but that was positively rosy compared to the defeats it suffered in the Anglo-Italian war. Those defeats were, as noted previously, most infamous and spectacular in north Africa where Italy was not only defeated by Britain in its invasion of Egypt but looked in real danger of losing its own territory of Italian Libya to the victorious British forces. However, Britain’s victories against Italian forces in north Africa often overshadow its victories against the Italian forces in east Africa (Ethiopia and Somalia) as well as its naval victories in the Mediterranean, most notably the British air attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in the first carrier strike of history on 11 November 1940. The attack on Taranto was even more notable as a model the Japanese used for their subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor (along with their own attack on Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War) – and that Britain was notoriously deficient when it came to developing carrier aviation, particularly in comparison to Japan or the United States, with the air attack on Taranto being by the biplanes Britain used in naval aviation at that time.

However, the archetypal example of Italy’s parallel war was the Greco-Italian War it launched from 28 October 1940, attacking Greece from Albania. At least Germany was aware of Italian intentions in the Franco-Italian and Anglo-Italian wars, but Mussolini had deliberately not informed Germany of his intentions for the Greco-Italian War, resentful of what he perceived as German encroachment in the Balkans (by Germany negotiating between Hungary and Romania in conflict over Transylvania) as an Italian sphere of influence.

Once again, Italian forces faced difficult terrain, but also in the worst possible season for it, and were defeated by opposing Greek forces, only somewhat less spectacularly than in north Africa. A large part of the reason for the defeat of Italian forces in both Greece and North Africa was Mussolini splitting the Italian war effort between the two, something the British were to repeat in their victories by sending forces from north Africa to aid Greece.

As noted previously, Italy’s parallel war – the Anglo-Italian and Greco-Italian wars – effectively ended with German involvement to aid Italy at the latter’s request, reversing British or Greek victories with defeats by Germany, as well as subordinating Italy and its parallel war to Germany in the wider Anglo-German war. German involvement had commenced earlier in north Africa but commenced in Greece with the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece from 6 April 1941.

The latter has often been attributed as the fatal mistake that lost Germany the whole war, by delaying Operation Barbarossa until 22 June 1941, including by Hitler himself after the fact (and blaming everyone but himself). That has generally been revised by assessments that an unusually wet spring thaw would have delayed Barbarossa in any event, although it certainly didn’t help that the German units involved in their Balkans campaign were delayed in participating in Barbarossa – and the German airborne invasion of Crete deterred Germany from doing so to better effect elsewhere, most notably against Malta.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(6) FRANCO-GERMAN WAR / THIRD FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

(1 SEPTEMBER 1939 – 25 JUNE 1940)

 

This was the big one – until it suddenly and surprisingly wasn’t.

The war that was the focus of everyone’s attention at the outset – the war at the start and the heart of the Second World War in Europe, set to replay the Western Front of the First World War and synonymous with the Battle of France…until France fell and signed an armistice with Germany on 25 June 1940.

After then, it was replaced in western Europe, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean by the Anglo-German war, which ultimately became the Anglo-American war with Germany.

Of course, the Anglo-German war commenced at the same time as the Franco-German war – with the German invasion of Poland – and both were fought side by side, literally with Britain and France as allies in western Europe against Germany. However, the Franco-German war predominated over the Anglo-German war, as France did the heavy lifting in terms of both being the Allied front line in western Europe and fielding the overwhelming majority of the Allied armies against Germany. While Britain did field an expeditionary force to France, its main strength was its navy, as had always historically been the case, as well as the newer addition of its air force.

The Franco-German war effectively ended with German victory and French defeat in the Battle of France, such that the primary contest was no longer between French and German armies but the Anglo-German war until 1941. Britain’s strategic hope relied on the substitution of another power for France as ally that could contribute similar large forces on land against Germany. That hope was understandably focused on the United States, which ultimately did replace France as larger army allied with Britain on the Western Front, but the Soviet Union played the role of France for both Britain and the United States as primary or supreme allied combatant on land, except substituting that role on the Eastern Front for France on the Western Front.

While some French forces fought on against Germany mostly from France’s colonies as the Free French, they effectively did so as a subordinate part of the Anglo-German war or Anglo-American war against Germany – as did the revived French forces after the Anglo-American liberation of France, the core of which were Free French forces in any event. As such, the Franco-German war very much ended with French defeat in the Battle of France.

The Franco-German war was more than just the Battle of France, albeit not much more as indicated by the title of Phoney War, or Sitzkrieg in German as an amusing contrast to blitzkrieg, from about September 1939 to May 1940. This title is a slight misnomer. Britain and France may not have conducted major military operations on the Western Front but they did implement economic warfare and waged naval warfare, including their naval blockade of Germany and targeting German surface raiders. They also planned operations, although the only one that saw any action was in Norway – when they came up against the German plans to invade and occupy that country and Denmark from April 1940.

The biggest lost opportunity by France was at the outset of the Franco-German war with the failure to launch a more robust and potentially decisive offensive against Germany while the latter only had weak forces in the west during its campaign in Poland – that is, other than the abortive Saar Offensive. Had France pursued or expanded that offensive more vigorously, it may well have won the Franco-German war and ended the Second World War right there.

For that matter, the Saar Offensive was simply the last in a long line of French inaction where even the most minimal action against Germany mght have won the war before it started, most notably with Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936.

However, it remains that the Franco-German war is defined by the Battle of France from 10 May 1940 to 25 June 1940 – and the French defeat in it. The reasons for the latter, as well as those for German victory, are perhaps best considered in a closer look at the Battle of France, but at least part of those reasons is from the same pusillanimity as shown by the French leadership in their Saar Offensive or any of their other failures to take more effective action against Germany when they held the advantage.

Although I feel obliged to point out that critique of pusillanimity and psychological defeatism should not extend to French military performance as a whole, unfairly the subject of caricature as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”.

The Franco-German war was the third such war in seventy years, such that it should be considered the Third Franco-Prussian War, after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871 and the First World War in 1914-1918, albeit the latter involved a Germany that been unified under Prussia and its monarchy after the former. The Prussian monarchy may have been forced to abdicate after the First World War, but Germany and even more so the German military or Wehrmacht effectively remained unified under a Prussian state. The Allies in the Second World War certainly thought so as they abolished the Prussian state after the war, identifying it with the German militarism of both world wars.

Although perhaps the Franco-German war of the Second World War should be considered the Second Franco-Prussian War – as the Germans managed to replay the same quick victory they had won in the Franco-Prussian War, achieving in only six weeks what they could not against France on the Western Front throughout the entire First World War.

That of itself, as well as the repetition of three Franco-German wars in effectively as many generations, is worthy of the Franco-German war being considered as its own separate war within the Second World War

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(20) INDOCHINA WARS / VIETNAM WAR

(1940-1979)

 

“In Indochina, a nativist political movement rose up to oppose the resumption of French colonial rule; one of the factions that struggled for supremacy was the Communist Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh.”

You knew this one was coming – the iconic twentieth century war after 1945 and second only to the Second World War itself as visual image in popular culture or imagination, and as metaphor or archetype in history or politics.

Of course, it serves as the counterpoint to the Second World War in those things, particularly in moral terms, highlighted by the defeat of the United States and its allies in Vietnam, with the diminished number of its allies as further counterpoint to the Second World War.

It also serves as counterpoint in its nature, both as a limited war and as insurgency or guerilla warfare, contrasting with the Second World War as both unlimited and as more straightforward conventional warfare. Indeed, a common criticism of American military proficiency or strategy in the Vietnam War is that it essentially sought to fight an unconventional war by conventional means more suited to the Second World War and hence entirely misplaced in the Vietnam War, resulting or at least contributing to defeat.

Few things encapsulate the unconventional Vietnam War wrongly fought by conventional Second World War strategy in popular culture or imagination more than American bombing during the war, usually seen as futilely dropping bombs on jungle.

In popular culture or imagination, the Vietnam War is typically that involving the United States in varying levels of engagement from about 1954, with the height of its military engagement from about 1965 to 1972. However, that war was actually the Second Indochina War, which followed almost directly from the First Indochina War from 1945 to 1954 against the French colonial regime – and the First Indochina War commenced immediately as the last shots were fired in the Second World War.

The First Indochina War in turn took shape in the Second World War itself. The Vietnamese resistance to French colonial rule predated the Second World War but took its definitive shape in that war – as the Vichy French colonial administration effectively had to concede control to Japanese occupation from 1940 onwards until Japan “had extended its control over the whole of French Indochina”.

Interestingly, the Japanese occupation and control of French Indochina was the trigger point for the United States to embargo Japan, which in turn led to war with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Interestingly that is, because it illuminates Vietnam as another American trigger point for the Cold War in Asia.

During the Pacific War, however, the United States placed little weight on French Indochina – with President Roosevelt even offering it to Chiang Kai-Shek. In fairness, this may have reflected the predominant role of China for Vietnamese resistance – “most of the Vietnamese resistance to Japan, France, or both, including both communist and non-communist groups, remained based over the border, in China”.

One exception was Ho Chi Minh and the underground communist resistance he led within Vietnam from 1941 onwards – gaining mass support from the effects of the 1945 Vietnamese famine on the populace.

In March 1945, the Japanese effectively sought to salt the earth of the remnants of the French colonial administration – which the Japanese revoked, imprisoning French administrators and taking full control of Indochina, nominally under Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai who proclaimed the Empire of Vietnam.

As Japan lurched to its surrender, the communists or Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh launched firstly their August Revolution from Hanoi and secondly declared Vietnamese independence. The latter had little real effect as the Allies had agreed to China occupying north Vietnam while the British occupied the south.

The Viet Minh remained largely intact under Chinese occupation of the north – such that they were even able to purge non-communist nationalist resistance – but British occupation of the south was another matter. I always recall reading how the British, having accepted the surrendering Japanese garrisons laying down their arms, then immediately rearmed them to keep order in Vietnam – which essentially translated to keeping order for the return of French colonial rule.

However, the Vietnamese communist resistance under Ho Chi Minh came out swinging against the restoration of French colonial rule from the outset and the First Indochina War took shape, along similar north-south lines as the postwar occupation and the subsequent Second Indochina War with the United States, with the Third Indochina War against China in 1979 echoing the postwar Chinese occupation of northern Vietnam.

 

RATING: 4 STARS*****

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(19) KOREAN WAR

(1945-1953)

 

“Korea became a powder keg with the Russians and Americans entangled in its north and south.”

The Korean War may have been its own distinct war, but it directly arose from the circumstances of the Second World War before it, overlaid by the new Cold War of which it was part (and for which it was the first major conflict).

The primary circumstance which gave rise to the Korean War was the occupation of the northern and southern halves of Korea by the Soviet Union and the United States respectively – similarly to the eastern and western halves of Germany in Europe.

Ironically, Japan itself was fortunate to avoid the division of Germany into Europe, because of its sole occupation by the United States (and selected western allies), but its former imperial territory of Korea was not. Indeed, Korea was doubly unfortunate in that, unlike Germany, war was fought along the lines of that division.

Of course, the key distinction between Korea and Germany was that any war along the lines of division in Germany would have involved war directly between the United States and the Soviet Union – the very thing that they sought to avoid in the Cold War, with its potential escalation to nuclear war after 1949.

In Korea, however, the Soviet Union could wage war by proxy – firstly the North Korean communist regime that was already fighting low-level warfare across the border with its non-communist counterpart in South Korea from 1945 onwards, and secondly the new communist government in China on North Korea’s behalf.

The Korean War was also “largely fought by the same commanders and with the same doctrines, weapons, and equipment as the Second World War” – including strategic bombing on the same scale, dropping more bombs than in the whole Pacific War, ranking North Korea as one of the most heavily bombed countries in history.

Some of those weapons were developed from their versions introduced or tested in the last days of the Second World War. Notably, jet aircraft – while the Allies had eschewed replacing their propellor-driven prop counterparts in service at that late stage of the Second World War, they came into their own in the Korean War. Jet aircraft confronted each other in air-to air combat for the first time in history and it was the first war in which jets played the central role in air combat. Similarly, the Korean War also featured the first large-scale deployment of helicopters, which had been developed during the Second World War.

It was also the closest the United States came to using nuclear weapons against an adversary in war since the Second World War, actively contemplating or planning their use against China, or North Korean and Chinese forces.

The Korean War also featured General Macarthur’s daring amphibious invasion behind enemy lines for the Battle of Inchon as the closest comparison to Normandy since the Second World War. The Battle of Inchon has commonly been considered among historians and military scholars as a strategic masterpiece or one of the most decisive military operations in modern warfare, a particularly distinctive accolade for an amphibious operation – “a brilliant success, almost flawlessly executed,” which remained “the only unambiguously successful, large-scale US combat operation” for the next 40 years.

That said, but for its first year which did resemble the more mobile warfare of the Second World War, the Korean War mostly resembled the First World War and the conventional static stalemate of the Western Front, albeit crammed into the narrower space of the Korean peninsula.

Ironically enough, the war stabilized at or close to the original border between South and North Korea. That is where the fighting largely stayed for the next two years – and also where it ended at ceasefire.

In this the Korean War again more closely resembled the First World War than the Second, with their inconclusive armistices or ceasefires that are far more typical of modern war than the Second World War with its decisive victories. The Korean War is still very much with us – with the ceasefire division of the Korean peninsula into opposing North and South Korea, still technically at war with each other, in a frozen conflict like bugs preserved in some strange Cold War amber.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(18) INDONESIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

(1942-1949)

 

And now we come to the focus of my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars after the Second World War, but which took definitive shape during that war – the wars in east or south east Asia.

Of course, we’ve already seen one of the biggest such wars in my previous special mention for the Chinese Civil War, but it is also one that encapsulates many of the features of “the deadly confrontations that broke out–or merely continued–in Asia after peace was proclaimed at the end of World War II”.

“Under occupation by the victorious Allies, this part of the world was plunged into new power struggles or back into old feuds that in some ways were worse than the war itself”, compounded by the circumstance that “the U.S. and Soviet governments, as they secretly vied for influence in liberated lands, were soon at odds”.

“Within weeks of the famous surrender ceremony aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, civil war, communal clashes, and insurgency engulfed the continent, from Southeast Asia to the Soviet border. By early 1947, full-scale wars were raging in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, with growing guerrilla conflicts in Korea and Malaya. Within a decade after the Japanese surrender, almost all of the countries of South, East, and Southeast Asia that had formerly been conquests of the Japanese or colonies of the European powers experienced wars and upheavals that resulted in the deaths of at least 2.5 million combatants and millions of civilians.”

Unlike British India, Indonesia had to fight a war of independence, also known as the Indonesian National Revolution, against the Netherlands that had ruled it as the Dutch East Indies – expanding from the original holdings of the Dutch East India Company in 1603 through to its full extent under the Dutch government until Japanese occupation in 1942.

There are some ironies here. That was the Dutch government in exile, as the Netherlands had been occupied by Germany in 1940, so the Dutch government found itself exiled twice over with the loss of the Dutch East Indies to Japan. Also, while Indonesia may not have had British India’s more “peaceful” cession of independence, it had fewer casualties from its war for independence than British India had from its partition into two states. Indeed, it was fortunate that its war for independence involved comparatively few casualties among the new or continuing wars that emerged in east or south-east Asia after the Second World War.

The Indonesian independence movement began well before the Second World War, but the occupation by Japan from 1942 to 1945 “was a critical factor in the subsequent revolution”. Firstly, Japan “spread and encouraged Indonesian nationalist sentiment”, even if more for their own advantage. Secondly, the Japanese occupation effectively “destroyed and replaced much of the Dutch-created economic, administrative, and political infrastructure”. Hence I’ve chosen 1942 as the starting date for this special mention.

And the Indonesian independence movement came out swinging straight from the end of the war, with their declaration of independence on 17 August 1945 – only two days after the announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender (and prior to the formal ceremony of surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri).

The Dutch were able to regain some control of major towns or cities when they returned as a significant military force in early 1946. In the interim, other Allied forces occupied Indonesia or at least parts of it, primarily the British as it was assigned to Britain’s South East Asia Command.

Ironically, despite surrendering, the former Japanese occupying forces found themselves on both sides of the war. The overwhelming majority of them complied with the terms of surrender to assist the Allied forces to maintain order, albeit both Japanese and Allied forces often sought to avoid direct confrontation with Indonesian nationalists. However, some Japanese holdouts joined the Indonesian national revolutionaries – as did some defecting Indian soldiers from British forces.

Ultimately, Dutch forces were not able to extend or preserve the control they regained, partly because of the military situation facing “well-organized resistance with popular support”, but primarily because of international diplomatic and political opposition. That opposition came from neighboring Australia – where Australian maritime workers in their characteristic style boycotted loading or unloading Dutch ships – but also India, the Soviet Union, and most significantly, the United States. The opposition from the United States was the most significant because it threatened to cut off economic aid to the Netherlands under the Marshall Plan. The Dutch gave in, ceding sovereignty to Indonesia in 1949.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(17) INDIA & PAKISTAN – INPEPENDENCE & PARTITION

(1942-1947)

Moving closer to the focus of my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars fought in Asia after the Second World War but which took definitive shape during that war – in this case, in south Asia or the Indian subcontinent.

India may have been fortunate in it did not have to fight a war of independence and Britain effectively ceded independence to it in 1947, but that independence was on the basis of partition into two independent states along religious lines – Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan (the latter as west and east Pakistan, with the latter subsequently seceding as Bangladesh).

Independence may have been relatively bloodless but partition brought with it displacement and violence on a large scale – with the former estimated as 12-20 million people displaced or as refugees, and the latter estimated as anywhere between 200,000 and two million people killed by sectarian violence, with the most common estimate as a million.

Both independence and the idea of Hindu-Muslim partition originated well before the Second World War. Indian independence movements arguably originated from resistance or revolts at the very outset of British imperialism in India by the British East India Company. However, the First World War “would prove to be the watershed of the imperial relationship between Britain and India” – as Indian independence movements hoped India’s contribution to that war would be repaid by British political concessions. Indian independence movements took even more definitive shape in the Second World War and India’s contribution to it – particularly with the Quit India Movement in 1942, hence my choice of 1942 as the starting date for this special mention.

My choice of 1947 as the end date for this special mention of course derives from the year of independence for the two new nations of India and Pakistan – with all the displacement and sectarian violence that this partition involved. The former persisted until at least 1951 and while the latter may have largely subsided by 1948, it laid the foundations for hostility and subsequent wars between Indian and Pakistan as well as the 1971 secession of the former east Pakistan as Bangladesh.

While the independence and partition of British India were probably inevitable, at least from the First World War onwards, it became inevitable on an almost immediate basis from the end of the Second World War due to Britain’s inability and unwillingness to maintain its former imperial or global commitments.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(16) PALESTINE – INSURGENCY, CIVIL WAR & ARAB-ISRAELI WAR

(1939 / 1944-1948)

 

And now we come to my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars fought after the Second World War, but which took definitive shape during that war – above all in Asia.

Historian Ronald Spector, author of The Eagle Against the Sun, encapsulated this in the titles of his books, The Ruins of Empire and A Continent Erupts, reflecting their subject. In western Europe, the end of the war may have “marked the beginning of decades of unprecedented cooperation and prosperity…labelled the long peace”, but “east and southeast Asia quickly became the most turbulent regions of the globe”.

However, one region of western Asia soon vied as contender for the most turbulent region of the globe – the British mandate of Palestine or Mandatory Palestine, which Britain had administered since the end of the First World War as territory taken from the former Ottoman Empire.

The nascent conflict in Palestine, between Arabs and Jews, originated in the First World War – arguably in 1916-1917, with the Arab Revolt, Sykes-Picot Agreement, and Balfour Agreement in those years, although Palestine as the focus of Zionism or Jewish settlement and a Jewish “national home” originated earlier than that.

During the Mandate, there was further Jewish immigration and the rise of nationalist movements in both Jewish and Arab communities, culminating in the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine. Britain ultimately suppressed the Arab Revolt, but in part by means of the 1939 White Paper, severely restricting Jewish immigration and land purchases – hence my choice of 1939 as starting date for this special mention.

The combination of Arab Revolt and White Paper led to the formation of Jewish underground militias, primarily the Haganah which was to become the core of the Israeli Defence Force – as well as increasing Jewish sentiment that they could not achieve their aims in cooperation with the British, particularly after the war. It also contributed to the idea of partition as solution, as it became clear that Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine could not be resolved.

The Second World War saw some suspension of this conflict, as Palestine even came under Axis air attack and within potential reach of Axis armed forces with Rommel’s victories in 1942. That saw British training of forces within the Haganah, as well as the subsequent creation of the Jewish Brigade within British armed forces.

However, the Second World War had not even ended when the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine began in 1944 and persisted through to 1948, albeit in fairness the tide of war had passed well away from Palestine when it began. The primary insurgents were the more radical Jewish militias or underground groups – Lehi (or the Stern Gang) and Irgun. Even the Haganah sought to suppress them in cooperation with Britain or at least avoiding direct confrontation with British armed forces, instead mainly supporting immigration spurred by Jewish refugees from or after the Second World War.

From there, the conflict spiralled out of British control or even its ability to do so, and like many or most of Britain’s commitments elsewhere, Britain could not (or did not want to) maintain it and instead handed it over to someone else – in this case, the newly founded United Nations, which formulated a partition plan.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan – proposing the division of Palestine between Arab and Jewish states – prompted the 1947-1948 civil war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In turn, the conflict escalated into the 1948 Arab-Israeli War as five Arab states – Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq – declared war (and lost) against the new state of Israel that Jewish leadership declared when Britain ended the Mandate and withdrew its forces.

Arab-Israeli wars, and even more so Palestinian-Israeli wars have defined the region ever since. While Jewish immigration to and settlement in Palestine predated the Second World War, it gained new impetus from the war – albeit more before and after the war than during the war itself – and it is difficult to see that the formation of the state of Israel would have had the same force or support without the events of the war, one event in particular above all, perhaps to the extent that it may not have been formed at all in Palestine.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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