Tag Archives: war

Operation Unthinkable

30 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Allies, Americans, British, postwar

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

Sometimes I wonder about the people who think up names for military and espionage operations. Sometimes those names are perfect.

Like Unthinkable.

It’s April 1945. The Allies sweep into Germany on two fronts, racing toward Berlin. The German capitol could’ve been the scene of a catastrophic clash of west and east if both sides had insisted on the prestige of taking the city. But the Americans wanted to avoid a confrontation with Moscow, and the Red Army was the first to raise its flag over Berlin.

This seemed to form part of a rude awakening for Winston Churchill. He’d assumed the Soviets would end the war weaker than American and British forces. But the Red Army had rolled over eastern territories, greatly expanding its sphere of influence. Above all, Poland had slipped into this Russian net. Britain’s responsibility for defending Poland’s sovereignty was a basis for entering the war to begin with. How could Britain stand by and let the Russians finish what the Germans started?

Mix this with Churchill’s anticommunism, and the unthinkable — a third world war directly after the second — was actually considered.

Churchill asked the Chiefs of Staff to draw up a plan to advance forces east against their old ally, the Soviet Union. It would have to be a surprise attack, because the staff recognized this would be the West’s only advantage in the face of Soviet strength.

Even more unthinkable, the plan called for German Wehrmacht troops to fight alongside the West. About 2 million Germans had surrendered to British custody. Some units weren’t disbanded; they were renamed Dienstgruppen (service groups) and used for labor. Confiscated weapons weren’t immediately destroyed. Some were stockpiled, while others were destroyed after a lag time that puzzled German soldiers held prisoner but with full kits and equipment. As one ex-soldier recalled, they could have started another war.

British planners concluded the whole idea was too big a risk. The Red Army was too strong, and the political fall out of an offensive war was too large. With a few exceptions such as the notoriously bellicose General Patton, the Americans weren’t interested in continuing a military advance into eastern Europe (at that time). In Britain, public opinion wouldn’t be on Churchill’s side. The Russians were still considered an ally that fought heroically against a common enemy.

So Operation Unthinkable never got off the ground. An active, hot war between west and east was discarded for a cold one that might not be as finished as we thought it was.

If you understand German, check out this video that summarizes Operation Unthinkable. The British historian Dr. Christopher Knowles (congrats on the PhD!) summarized the operation a few years ago on his excellent blog.

 

Postwar — a historian’s achievement

29 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Books

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

postwar croppedI haven’t finished the late British historian Tony Judt’s major work Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, but I wanted to write a brief review anyway. I can’t have a postwar Germany blog without including something about this amazing book.

Amazing not because I agree with everything Judt says. He admits up front much of what he writes is controversial and up for discussion. I like discussion, especially about history. People think history is a done deal, something in the past that doesn’t need to be rehashed. I think history is living memory, even if people who lived it have passed away. And something alive should be argued about, examined, rethought.

For that alone, Postwar is an amazing achievement.

The next thing is the book’s scope. After the Cold War world order fell with the break up of the Soviet Union, Judt thought about taking a new look at the post-World War II era. What everyone assumed was a more or less permanent or even natural state of things — the bipolar world of Soviet Union v. United States — and the role Europe played in it, was really an interlude, Judt argues. The conflicts that arose in Europe after the Soviet Union dissolved are some of the conflicts that lay dormant since World War II (or even World War I). It was time to look at Europe’s history again as a whole, not cut into west and east. Without Cold War blinders or the usual ideological tug-of-war that historians had during that era, it’s now possible to look at the whole postwar era in a new light.

And that’s what Judt did. A sweeping, epic look at sixty years of history framed by two Europes — the one that bled itself in two horrific wars, and the one capable of cooperation in a whole new political form, the European Union.

The book is beautifully written, accessible, full of interesting facts, references and quotes. The controversy comes in what conclusions Judt draws from his material (and what material he chose to include, of course), and when you read the book, you should do it carefully. Germany is so central to the postwar story. It’s what I know most about, so I look most closely at those references in Judt’s book. I got snagged in a problem with one of Judt’s conclusions early in the book, and it bothered me enough that I ended up discussing it with my German husband one night.

It wasn’t even a post-World War II issue, but post-World War I. Judt concluded Germany was in a relatively stronger position than it was before World War I because the cost of the war to the Allies was so high, and Germany didn’t pay its reparations after the war. This struck me as totally wrong, especially if you look at *why* Germany didn’t pay its reparations. This argument can’t ignore the famine, inflation, unemployment, assassinations and civil war fighting in Germany after World War I, as well as its difficult time establishing what for Germany was a brand new and unpopular political structure — a republic. France, which had suffered the worst along with Belgium in the war, sent troops to occupy cities in the German demilitarized zone when Germany couldn’t comply with reparations demands. In 1921 this turned into a full-blown occupation of the Ruhr area, Germany’s center for coal, steel and heavy industry. A “relatively stronger” Germany wouldn’t have allowed this. I’m not arguing about the right or wrong of the Ruhr occupation or even of reparations. I just can’t understand how Judt could conclude Germany was relatively stronger in this situation than it was before the war, even if the losses of the European allies are taken into account.

Regardless, I’m really enjoying Postwar, and would recommend it to anyone interested in 20th century history.

 

 

The “Sadness of War”

06 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Culture

≈ Comments Off on The “Sadness of War”

Tags

, , ,

The American presidential election is today, meaning I’ve been swamping myself with US news. An op-ed piece in the New York Times yesterday interrupted my Ami-centered mindset and reminded me of a big issue in postwar Germany.

In “The Permanent Militarization of America,” Aaron B. O’Connell, a history professor at the US Naval Academy, reminds us what former President (and WW2 General) Eisenhower had to say about the military in America, 1961. As O’Connell put it,

He cautioned that war and warmaking took up too large a proportion of national life, with grave ramifications for our spiritual health.

O’Connell argues, effectively, in my opinion, that today’s United States hasn’t heeded Eisenhower’s warning. What does this have to do with postwar Germany?

One of the pillars of the Allied policy on Germany was demilitarization. Disarming the Germans wasn’t the most important point. The blind respect and admiration for war and all things military had to be rooted out of the minds of the Germans. The Allies recognized that Nazism or Hitler weren’t solely responsible for Germany starting World War II. The roots stretched far back, perhaps as far as 1870 when Germany defeated France.  Bismark at last united the fractured German lands into one nation.

German pride became connected not only with culture, but with military might. The industrial strength of Germany was intertwined with its arms industry, showcased at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where the Krupp Gun Exhibit invited visitors to admire some of the world’s most advanced weapons.

Culturally, a Prussian (as people often called it) militarization infested the country. Children often wore miniature uniforms and were raised with the values of obedience and respect for authority. As Heinrich Mann pointed out in his books, especially Der Untertan, society identified itself almost slavishly with its leader, the Kaisers at the time, who of course presented themselves to the nation as military leaders in uniform. Military parades and shows of might were wildly popular.

World War I should have rooted this pro-military attitude out of the Germans. For many, especially on the political left, it did. But soon after the defeat, the right wing, including the National Socialists, propagated the Dolchstosslegende, that let the military and Kaiser off the hook for the devastating war. Other elements on the home front, especially the Jews, they argued, “stabbed the army in the back.” This was just what many Germans, smarting from defeat, wanted to hear. It was fertile ground for the Nazis.

The total defeat of World War II, and the Allied effort to teach democratic values, finally uprooted the Germans’ pro-military attitude. If it wasn’t for the Soviet threat in the postwar world, Germany might have never had another army. By 1955, the Allies saw the need for a buffer army in Europe, and the Bundeswehr, the democratic successor of the Nazi-era Wehrmacht, was born.

Only 10 years after the war ended.

In 1945, Germany was defeated, millions dead, the nation in ruins, a political, social and moral vacuum. The “lingering sadness of war,” as Eisenhower would put it years later, was daily reality. If any people saw the failure of glorifying all things military, it was the Germans of that generation. And it yielded a society that is still today deeply suspect of anything to do with war. In the 1950s, Germans protested against the founding of the new Bundeswehr. Young men refused to follow the draft, thinking they – like their fathers and grandfathers – were to be trained up for another war.

Back to Aaron O’Connell’s essay. This paragraph, read with Germany in mind, is frightening. Let it be a warning.

Uncritical support of all things martial is quickly becoming the new normal for our youth. Hardly any of my students at the Naval Academy remember a time when their nation wasn’t at war. Almost all think it ordinary to hear of drone strikes in Yemen or Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. The recent revelation of counterterrorism bases in Africa elicits no surprise in them, nor do the military ceremonies that are now regular features at sporting events. That which is left unexamined eventually becomes invisible, and as a result, few Americans today are giving sufficient consideration to the full range of violent activities the government undertakes in their names.