Hanson - The second world wars: how the first global conflict was fought and won

T HE MORE THAN three dozen missions carried out by my father, William F. Hanson, in a B-29 bomber over Japan, were a world apart from his cousins experience. Victor Hansons war ended in a fatal May 19, 1945, rendezvous with a Nambu machine gun nest on the crest of Sugar Loaf Hill with the 6th Marine Division on Okinawa. Both fought in a way foreign to their other cousin, Robert Hanson, who worked as a logistician in Iran, ferrying American military freight to the Russians.

All three Hansons experienced different wars from that of my maternal cousin Richard Davis. He rolled across France as part of Pattons Third Army. Dicks war in turn was unlike that of another maternal cousin, Beldon Cather. As a boy I remember an occasionally feverish Beldon on the farm as a lifelong semi-invalid, suffering neurological disabilities from serial bouts with dengue fever contracted while fighting in the Pacific. Beldon did not battle in the same manner or against the same enemies or in the same places as his brother Holt, killed while serving in combat with an artillery battalion of the Seventh Army in November 1944, and buried in France at the Epinal American Cemetery.

World War II sent the youth of American, British, German, Japanese, Italian, and Russian families across the globe in odd alliances against each other. They battled in the air, at sea, and on the ground for all sorts of expressed reasons, employing machines that were often new and fighting in ways still not fully understood, and against a variety of enemies. When the veterans of my family shared stories about their service at holiday gatherings in the early 1960s, we eavesdroppers listened to their descriptions of exotic locales and situations, wondering whether they had even fought in the same war.

They insisted that they were kindred soldiers in a shared struggle against a common evil with a variety of faces. How fighting different enemies, alongside disparate allies, in greatly different ways across the globe coalesced into one war is a paradoxand the subject of this book. Its aim is to explain why a single conflict encompassed global fighting in ways not true of most prior wars, fought in limited locales between predictable enemies and through familiar methods.

I TITLE THIS book The Second World Wars for two reasons. One, no supposedly single conflict was ever before fought in so many diverse landscapes on premises that often seemed unrelated. And, two, never had a war been fought in so many different waysto the extent that a rocket attack on London or jungle fighting in Burma or armor strikes in Libya seemed to belong to entirely different wars.

World War II, however, began traditionally enough in 19391940 in Europe as a series of border conflicts exclusively between European powers, including Britain. As is true of much of European history, aggressive states attacked their perceived weaker neighbors, usually through surprise and in reliance on greater preparation and armament. By the end of 1940, what had so far seemed to be familiar European infighting had achieved a Caesarian or Napoleonic scale. But by the end of 1941, something quite cataclysmic followed: all the smaller conflicts compounded unexpectedly into a total, global war, in which the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan were soon materially outmatched, strategically unprepared, and likely to lose in catastrophic fashion. Advances in Western technology and industrialization, when married with both totalitarian zealotry and fully mobilized democratic states, also ensured that the expanded war would become lethal in a way never before seen.

Three unexpected events explain why the border fights that had begun periodicallyand sometimes ended and started againbetween 1939 and 1941 were no longer seen as a series of separate wars but had coalesced and became redefined as part of what we now know as World War II in the United States, or as the Second World War in the Anglosphere. First, Germany without warning invaded its partner, the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941). Second, in addition to its long war with China, Japan took on new enemies by conducting surprise attacks on the Pacific and Asian bases of Great Britain and the United States (December 78, 1941). Third, both Germany and Italy then declared war against the Americans (December 11, 1941).

Only these unforeseen developments in the single year of 1941 recalibrated prior regional conflicts in Europe and Asia into a continuous and now interconnected global war that drew three new powerful participantsJapan, the Soviet Union, and the United Statesinto the two formidable alliances, with a vast array of aircraft carriers, sophisticated planes, artillery pieces, and vehicles. The new worldwide fight was rebranded as one of Germany, Italy, and Japan against Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Chinawith smaller and weaker allied states on both sides. Thus the holistic idea of a Second World War was born.

Despite the wartime propagandas that followed, there were few common fault lines of religion, race, or geography to make sense of this confusing conflictmuch less common methods of conducting the fighting. Being victims of Axis aggression, most often through unprovoked attacks, was about the only common bond that held the Allies together, a tripartite alliance that initially hinged on retaliating against Adolf Hitler and that thus dissipated months after his death almost as quickly as it had been formed.

T HIS BOOK DOES not follow a strict chronological sequence. Nor does it offer a comprehensive narrative history of all the diverse theaters and campaigns of the war. Rather, it focuses on particular battles emblematic of the larger themes of how the respective belligerents made wise and foolish choices about why, how, and where to fight the war. It is not, then, an operational history of the war that provides detailed accounts of day-by-day fighting, advances, and retreats.