By Richard Grudens
Henry Ford, the great industrialist, was busy celebrating his 81st birthday on a very warm July 30, 1944. Allied troops had landed in Normandy the previous month and, though they faced stiff German resistance, they were clearly winning.
At the celebration, Ford visualized what he called "great days ahead," but only, as he put it, "if we apply what we have learned and mix it with plenty of hard work." It was Ford's vision of mass production and its subsequent implementation that had harnessed the industrial might of the United States and had helped make staggering wartime production goals attainable. His mastery of manufacturing techniques has made Henry Ford's name a household word.
Ford was born on a modest farm near Dearborn, Mich., in 1863. Although his father's farm flourished, Henry was more interested in mechanics than farming. He attended a simple, one-room school and also tended to his farm chores. "There was too much hard hand labour on our own and all other farms of the time," he wrote in his biography, My Life and Work. "Even when I was very young I suspected that much might somehow be done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics."
Two events dramatically changed Henry Ford's life. First, he received a watch for his 12th birthday. Second, he saw a horseless farm machine for the first time–a road engine used for driving threshing machines. One year later, using crude tools, he was able to put together a watch. Shortly thereafter, he built a working model of the road engine that had occupied his dreams.
At age 17, Ford hiked the nine miles to nearby Detroit to take his first job, earning $1.10 a day for making repairs with the Michigan Car Works. He came across a copy of an English magazine, World Of Science, which described the Otto internal combustion engine. It excited his interest in engines, and he went to work at the Dry Dock Engine Company. There he mastered the machinist's trade within two years.
Young Ford had an ambition to produce watches so cheaply that he could sell them for a dollar a piece, but before he could pursue that plan he had to go home to help his father. In 1884, he attended a business school for three months and experimented with machinery while still helping on the family farm.
He married Clara Bryant, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, when he was 25. In the home he built for his wife on a 40-acre tract his father gave him, Ford drew his first diagram of a gasoline engine, which he was convinced was destined to replace the noisy steam engine. Ford soon realized that he could not build his engine on a farm, but needed the superior mechanical equipment that could be found in a city such as Detroit. So in 1891, the young couple moved to Detroit, where Henry found employment as a machinist. He worked a 12-hour day and earned only $45 a month. In his spare time, he continued to work on the gasoline engine.
Ford tested the engine in his kitchen, with the engine clamped to the sink, the spark plug connected to the ceiling light socket, and the oil cup tended by his wife. The engine, he later explained, consisted of "a length of one-inch gas pipe reamed out to serve as a cylinder, and in it rested a homemade piston fitted with rings. This was attached by a rod to the crankshaft, and had a five-inch stroke. A hand-wheel off an old lathe served as the flywheel. A gear arrangement operated a cam, opening the exhaust valve and timing the spark. A piece of fibre with a wire through the centre did for a spark plug. It made contact with another wire at the end of the piston, and when this was broken a spark leaped across, exploding the gasoline."
With his gasoline engine a success, Ford's next ambition was to make his engine drive a four-wheel carriage. Motor vehicles were being produced by hand in Europe, but there was no commercial manufacturing of any motorcar. In 1896, when he was 33, Ford drove his first automobile out of his backyard shop. Within a few days he added a seat, and then he confidently drove his wife and 3-year-old son, Edsel, the nine miles to his father's farm.
Soon Ford became chief engineer for the Detroit Edison Company, sold his first automobile for $200 and attracted the attention of several businessmen. He gathered $10,000 to start the Detroit Automobile Company, but soon left that venture. With another group of investors, he then organized the Henry Ford Company. When that organization also broke up, due to disagreements over his insistence on offering only a low-price car and his refusal to be hurried in his experiments, Ford returned to his own shop and began working on a four-cylinder motor. Intent on having one of his automobiles achieve the speed of a mile a minute, he began building racing cars. Famed racing driver Barney Oldfield won a race with Ford's "999" at the Grosse Point, Mich., track in 1902.
Meanwhile, companies like Oldsmobile and Cadillac were selling thousands of cars, which enabled Ford to locate new investors. With $28,000, he formed the Ford Motor Company. The Model A Ford mobile, a practical, utility auto, was produced in 1905 as a tough and simple car for a price of $850 (a second, much more sophisticated, Model A came out in 1928). Soon the business was prospering. The Model B was next in the line, and the Model C followed closely. Then came the Model T, Ford's best-known auto, which, as he later recalled, "contained all that I was able to put into a motorcar, plus the material which for the first time I was able to obtain."
The Model T was a noisy, uncomfortable, unattractive but efficient automobile. Within five years, half a million Model Ts were on the road. Strictly utilitarian, the car was the butt of many jokes. Taking the frequent needling about the Model T's appearance in stride, Ford himself joked about the car's colour, saying, "Any customer can have any car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black." The Model T's popularity resulted in the employment of 4,000 people in Ford's factory.
Increased demand called for increased speed of production. Ford achieved faster production by introducing the moving assembly belt, which he began to experiment with in 1913. He described it as "the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker, and the reduction of the movement to a minimum. He does as nearly as possible only one thing with only one movement….He must have every second necessary but not a single unnecessary second."
Ford increased the minimum wage for his employees to $5 for an eight-hour day. In 1918, the River Rouge plant was built, and he increased wages to an unheard of $6 a day. By 1924, Ford had manufactured 10 million Model Ts. In 1928, Ford brought out his second Model A, and in 1932 the sturdy V-8 engine appeared.
The Great Depression struck the Ford Motor Company hard. Wages were lowered and there were layoffs, as well. Labour unions were established within the struggling work force. Strikes were rampant, and Ford fought the unions hard, but eventually the United Auto Workers became an effective collective bargaining force.
Ford, a known pacifist, opposed America's entry into World War II. Nevertheless, he agreed to build airplane engines for the British government. In May 1940, he stated: "If it became necessary, the Ford Motor Company could, with the counsel of men like [Charles] Lindbergh and [Eddie] Rickenbacker, under our own supervision and without meddling by government agencies, swing into the production of a thousand airplanes of standard design a day."
It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that inspired Ford to begin a tremendous, all-out manufacturing effort. To the west of Dearborn, the giant Willow Run plant was built to produce B-24 Liberator bombers on an assembly line that was a mile long. The first bomber rolled off the line in May 1942, beginning the effective production of several hundred aircraft a month. Bombers were produced at the rate of one plane per hour, thereby confounding Ford's critics, who had called the plant undertaking "Willit Run." By the end of the war, Ford had built 86,865 complete aircraft, plus 57,851 airplane engines, thousands of engine superchargers and generators, and 4,291 military gliders.
Ford also turned out tanks, armoured cars, jeeps and engines for robot bombs. In the midst of the heaviest production during the war years, Ford returned to his post as chief executive of the Ford Motor Company when Edsel, who had taken over for his father, died in 1943.
Months earlier, Ford's plants in Great Britain and Canada had joined the production efforts of the United States and poured forth everything from mobile canteens to four-wheel-drive trucks and autos, grenades, bombs and engine-powered landing craft. The U.S. plants were the prime movers in the development of the famous Willys-originated jeep.
By the end of the war, Ford plants had built 277,896 of the versatile vehicles. In all, the Allies were supplied with more than a million fighting vehicles by Ford operations in the United States, Canada, Britain, India, South Africa and New Zealand.
At the height of World War II, Ford managed to transport vitally important, precision jig-boring machinery, obtainable only from neutral Switzerland, to Manchester, England–right through German-occupied France and Spain. The Swiss, uncompromising in their commercial neutrality, insisted upon their right to trade with all parties. Since Germany was dependent on Swiss machine tools, it was forced to allow the export of war products through its occupied territories to its own enemies. As a result, Ford's British plant turned out more than 30,000 complex supercharged V-12 engines–more than Rolls Royce built at its own plant in Derby, England. The engines were installed in British Mosquito and Lancaster bombers.
At the outset of the war, Ford's plant in Cologne, Germany, had been commandeered by the Nazis to turn out trucks for their war effort, and actually continued under Nazi control with the supervision of one of Ford's trained Danish managers. The manufacturing continued until constant Allied air raids made it virtually impossible for the plant to operate. Before the war was officially over, SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) asked Ford for immediate help to start operating the newly liberated plant again. The only actual damage to the facility was done by German artillery when the German army fell back across the Rhine and Cologne was occupied by American forces. German employees had ignored instructions to destroy the plant to prevent it from falling into Allied hands. The plant's first post-war truck, assembled from components on hand, rolled out on May 8, 1945, V-E Day.
Ford always loved visiting his factories, even when he was 81. His frequent motor outings with Harvey Firestone and his hero, Thomas Edison, were well-known around the world. In 1944, the American Legion awarded Ford its Distinguished Service Medal for his contribution to the rehabilitation of veterans of both the world wars.
Henry Ford died on April 7, 1947, at the age of 84. Most of his personal estate, valued at $205 million, was left to the Ford Foundation, one of the world's largest public trusts. Today Ford still has his supporters and detractors, but the industrial genius' significant contribution to the Allied effort in World War II is indisputable. *
By Richard Cavendish | Published in History Today Volume: 52 Issue: 7 2002
King Farouk was thirty-two when he lost his throne on July 26th, 1952. He had been King of Egypt for sixteen years.
Paunchy, balding and bloated, Farouk was thirty-two when he lost his throne. The Egyptian monarchy had been set up by the British in the 1920s and Farouk had been king for sixteen years since succeeding his father, Fuad I, in 1936. Sir Miles Lampson, the British high commissioner, described him in a report to the Foreign Office in 1937 as ‘uneducated, lazy, untruthful, capricious, irresponsible and vain, though with a quick superficial intelligence and charm of manner’. Farouk’s attempts to introduce reforms made little progress against the Egyptian establishment of politicians and major landowners. He also butted his head vainly against the British and by 1949 he was despised at home and abroad as an ineffectual playboy.
By that time a group of Egyptian army and air force officers was secretly planning a revolution to get rid of both the British and the entrenched Egyptian regime. They had all been stung by ignominious defeat in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and they blamed the King, the politicians and the corruption endemic in the system. The Free Officers, as they called themselves, gathered substantial support among the officer corps. Their leader was Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat was one of them. Many of them had been at the Military Academy in Cairo in the later 1930s and, according to Sadat, a secret officers’ revolutionary society had been founded as early as 1939. Nasser was a teacher at the Military Academy in the 1940s and influenced many up-and-coming young officers.
The Egyptian army had long been controlled by the king, but Farouk’s scandalous and grotesquely self-indulgent lifestyle and the belief that some of his closest associates had profited by supplying defective weapons and munitions to the forces had eroded the army’s loyalty. At the end of 1951 the Free Officers ran their own slate of candidates for election to the board of directors of the Officers’ Club in Cairo. Their candidate for club president was General Mohammed Neguib, one of the few high-ranking officers who had distinguished himself in the war. The King personally endorsed rival candidates of his own, but the Free Officers’ candidates won.
Farouk regarded his election defeat as evidence of a seditious conspiracy in the officer corps, as indeed it was. His efforts to recover control drove the plotters to drastic action. They feared that their counsels had been penetrated by informers and that they were in imminent danger of arrest.
The decision to attempt a coup seems to have been taken early in the morning of July 22nd. At midnight, while the court was enjoying a late champagne and caviar picnic in Alexandria, some 200 officers and 3,000 troops took control of army headquarters and put senior officers under arrest. Troops occupied the airport, the Cairo broadcasting station and the telecommunications centre, and tanks and infantry patrolled the Cairo streets. There was no opposition and at 7am on July 23rd Sadat announced the take-over on Cairo radio.
Farouk, at his summer palace in Alexandria, has been criticised for not immediately taking command of the troops there. Apparently, he turned that course down for fear of causing civil war and bloodshed. Instead he appealed to the American ambassador for help, but the Americans had no confidence in him and the CIA had been encouraging the plotters, whose armoured columns now took control of Alexandria. The British force in the Canal Zone made no move to interfere. Farouk betook himself to the Ras el-Tin palace by the western harbour in Alexandria, but the coup leaders ordered the captain of his seagoing yacht, the Mahroussa, not to sail without their orders.
Some of the rebel officers wanted Farouk knocked on the head, but early on Saturday the 26th, with the Ras el-Tin palace surrounded by troops, he was ordered to abdicate and clear out. He complied, almost in tears, and at 6pm that evening he sailed for Naples with his wife and children, seen off politely by General Neguib to the strains of the Egyptian national anthem and a 21-gun salute. He had to leave a thousand suits and his pornographic necktie collection behind, but with him went crates labelled champagne and whisky which had been surreptitiously packed with gold bars. His baby son, Prince Ahmed Fuad, was proclaimed king and a regency council appointed. In September, however, Egypt became a republic, with General Neguib as president. He was a figurehead who would soon be ousted by Nasser.
Meanwhile, Farouk had made for Capri and stayed, ironically enough, at the Eden Paradiso Hotel to begin with, eventually settling in Monaco. He died in Rome in 1965, soon after his forty-fifth birthday, after collapsing at a restaurant where he had been entertaining a blonde of twenty-two to a midnight supper. He had once been reported as saying: ‘There will soon be only five kings left: the kings of England, diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs.’
It’s 94 years since Britain first came to a standstill in honour of the dead of the First World War. Fiona Reid analyses how the way we commemorate the war has changed since that first Remembrance Day.
The Armistice of 11 November 1918 effectively ended the Great War, and many hoped that “all wars” had ended that day. However the conflict was only officially concluded with the signing of the peace treaties in June 1919, and victory parades took place that summer. Yet some objected to exultant military parades, and a number of ex-servicemen even refused to participate. As a result, the first Remembrance Day ceremonies were commemorative
rather than triumphant: “Today is Peace Day” announced the Manchester Guardian on 11 November 1919.Two features of that first Remembrance Day are central to today’s commemorations: the
Cenotaph in Whitehall and the silence. Alongside the official ceremonies, huge crowds gathered to lay wreaths at the newly erected Cenotaph. Many were wearing black, as they would have done at a funeral: this was a day of mourning, not celebration. The Cenotaph was the place around which people united, and the activity that united them was the
two minutes of silence. On the king’s initiative people were asked to remain silent at 11 o’clock: to cease activity, to stand with bowed heads and to think of the fallen.To unite the whole country in a moment of contemplation required some organisation, especially given that times were not fully standardised throughout the UK. The silence was announced by maroons or church bells – and it was universally observed. Everything and everyone stopped: buses, trains and factories halted; electricity supplies were cut off to stop the trams; wherever possible even the ships of the Royal Navy were stopped. Workers in offices, hospitals, shops and banks stood still; schools became silent; court proceedings came to a standstill and so did the stock exchange.
The minutiae of everyday life ceased completely in what The Times described as “a great awful silence”. There had been no instructions about where people should observe the silence – it was assumed that everyone would simply pause at their tasks – but most chose to go outdoors to stand silently in a public place.
There were church services, and the forces’ chaplain spoke at the Cenotaph. However, Remembrance Day was largely secular. It was also a day for looking forward, and throughout the country thousands attended meetings in support of the League of Nations.
Other Remembrance Day traditions developed quickly. In November 1920 the ‘Unknown Warrior’ was buried in Westminster Abbey. The tomb contained the body of an unknown
ordinary serviceman picked at random. It was laid in the abbey in the morning, and tens of thousands of people had walked past the grave by the end of the afternoon. Over a million people visited it in its first week.The tomb was designed to honour the ordinary serviceman and to provide emotional or spiritual relief for survivors. The poppy campaign was more practical. From 1921 artificial poppies were sold to support the Earl Haig fund for ex-servicemen. Former soldiers made the poppies – and so ensured their own employment – and the profits supported ex-servicemen in need. Yet the poppy became symbolic too, and everyone wore one. In fact, it was soon so ubiquitous that its absence was the clue to solving Dorothy Sayers' ’murder-mystery, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928): the victim could not have died as claimed because no respectable fellow would have left the house without a Flanders poppy on 11 November.
There were other sides to Armistice Day. Post-war Britain was not a “land fit for heroes”. It was a land of unemployment, poor housing and unrecognised pension claims. Some ex-servicemen grew tired of perpetual homage to the dead veteran when surviving ones were receiving such little help. In 1921 disaffected former soldiers disturbed the commemorations at the Cenotaph. And this was no one-off: unemployed ex-servicemen were to demonstrate at armistice ceremonies throughout the 1920s. The Ex-Officers’ Association even began referring to Armistice Day as ‘Obligation Day’, when people had
a ‘Duty of Remembrance’ to ex-servicemen in need.Conversely, Armistice Day also became associated with drinking, dancing and celebrating. Some argued that young people had been denied jollity for four long years. Why not let them celebrate? Yet for others, it was too solemn an event for festivities, and in 1925 commemorative balls were cancelled. Ceremonies became increasingly sombre by the late 1920s, and in 1934 the Peace Pledge Union began to sell white poppies – overtly pacifist symbols – each November.
Local war memorials were erected throughout the 1920s. At annual ceremonies the names of the dead were read out loud, and so the awful silence was accompanied by a vocal acknowledgement.
Countless servicemen had died without family funerals and 100,000 of them had no marked grave, so local memorials functioned as both familial and national sites of mourning. People also visited these sites on the days that were crucial to their own war. November 11 was not the most significant day for everybody: survivors remembered the day they first went over the top, the day their best friend died, or the last time they saw their husband.
Remembrance Day events were scaled down during the Second World War. The 1918 victory seemed hollow and people had to think about the current war, not the previous one. After 1945 both conflicts were remembered on the Sunday closest to 11 November. This signified a real change in the nature of the ceremony. In the interwar years a poignant two-minute silence had annually been inserted into the fabric of an ordinary day.
After the Second World War, those who chose to commemorate the wars went to some sort of service (usually in church) each year. The commemorations were thus marginalised. For the post-war generation – the Oh What a Lovely War! generation – they meant little. Yet by the 1990s, as veteran numbers declined, there was a growing public interest in the Great War, and there was a modern-day resurgence of the 1930s disillusionment literature, notably Faulks’ Birdsong (1993) and Barker’s Regeneration (1991). Meanwhile, there was a political decision to restore the two-minute silence in 1996: once again it was to become an integral part of national life.
In 2008 there were three British First World War veterans at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day. This year there will be none. That war is still meaningful – thousands attended Harry Patch’s funeral at Wells Cathedral in July 2008 – but the meaning of Remembrance Day has changed, despite a determination to maintain the outward symbols.
So what is the purpose of today’s ceremony? With British troops heavily engaged in Afghanistan, Remembrance Day can seem like a glorification of war, as an inducement to further sacrifice: it is clearly a military ceremony. Alternatively, is 11 November a day for pacifist sentiment? Should we still call it ‘Peace Day’? Certainly Harry Patch’s popularity lay partially in his willingness to condemn all war as futile.
Remembrance Day has never been a homogeneous, nationally-unifying event. It has provoked a variety of responses over the last 90 years: triumphalism, reverence, anger, pacifism, celebration. And no doubt it will continue to do so. Let us at least take this annual opportunity to think seriously about wars and their consequences.
Fiona Reid, of the University of Glamorgan, is the author of Broken Men: Shell Shock Treatment and Recovery in Britain, 1914–1930 (Hambledon Continuum).
From first Remembrance Day to remembrance today | BBC History Magazine
12 November 2012
Adolf Hitler was an unlikely leader but he still formed a connection with millions of German people, generating a level of charismatic attraction that was almost without parallel. It is a stark warning for the modern day, says historian Laurence Rees.
At the heart of the story of Adolf Hitler is one gigantic, mysterious question: how was it possible that a character as strange and personally inadequate as Hitler ever gained power in a sophisticated country at the heart of Europe, and was then loved by millions of people?
The answer to this vital question is to be found not just in the historical circumstances of the time - in particular the defeat of Germany in World War I and the depression of the early 1930s - but in the nature of Hitler's leadership.
It's this aspect of the story that makes this history particularly relevant to our lives today.
About Adolf Hitler
Source: BBC History
Before WWI he was a nobody, an oddball who could not form intimate relationships, was unable to debate intellectually and was filled with hatred and prejudice.
But when Hitler spoke in the Munich beer halls in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in WWI, suddenly his weaknesses were perceived as strengths.
His hatred chimed with the feelings of thousands of Germans who felt humiliated by the terms of the Versailles treaty and sought a scapegoat for the loss of the war. His inability to debate was taken as strength of character and his refusal to make small talk was considered the mark of a "great man" who lived apart from the crowd.
More than anything, it was the fact that Hitler found that he could make a connection with his audience that was the basis of all his future success. And many called this connection "charisma".
"The man gave off such a charisma that people believed whatever he said," says Emil Klein, who heard Hitler speak in the 1920s.
But Hitler did not "hypnotise" his audience. Not everyone felt this charismatic connection, you had to be predisposed to believe what Hitler was saying to experience it. Many people who heard Hitler speak at this time who thought he was an idiot.
"I immediately disliked him because of his scratchy voice," says Herbert Richter, a German veteran of WWI who encountered Hitler in Munich in the early 1920s.
"He shouted out really, really simple political ideas. I thought he wasn't quite normal."
In the good economic times, during the mid-to-late twenties in Germany, Hitler was thought charismatic by only a bunch of fanatics. So much so that in the 1928 election the Nazis polled only 2.6% of the vote.
Yet less than five years later Hitler was chancellor of Germany and leader of the most popular political party in the country.
What changed was the economic situation. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 there was mass unemployment in Germany and banks crashed.
"The people were really hungry," says Jutta Ruediger, who started to support the Nazis around this time. "It was very, very hard. And in that context, Hitler with his statements seemed to be the bringer of salvation."
She looked at Hitler and suddenly felt a connection with him.
"I myself had the feeling that here was a man who did not think about himself and his own advantage, but solely about the good of the German people."
Hitler told millions of Germans that they were Aryans and therefore "special" and racially "better" people than everyone else, something that helped cement the charismatic connection between leader and led.
He did not hide his hatred, his contempt for democracy or his belief in the use of violence to further political ends from the electorate. But, crucially, he spoke out only against carefully defined enemies like Communists and Jews.
Since the majority of ordinary Germans were not in these risk groups then, as long as they embraced the new world of Nazism, they were relatively free from persecution - at least until the war started to go badly for the Germans.
“Start Quote
Unemployment was 30% in Germany when Hitler took power, it is 25.1% and rising in Greece”
End Quote”
Paul Mason Economics editor, Newsnight
This history matters to us today. Not because history offers "lessons" - how can it since the past can never repeat itself exactly? But because history can contain warnings.
In an economic crisis millions of people suddenly decided to turn to an unconventional leader they thought had "charisma" because he connected with their fears, hopes and latent desire to blame others for their predicament. And the end result was disastrous for tens of millions of people.
It's bleakly ironic that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was greeted in Athens recently with swastika banners carried by angry Greeks protesting at what they see as German interference in their country.
Ironic because it is in Greece itself - amid terrible economic crisis - that we see the sudden rise of a political movement like the Golden Dawn that glories in its intolerance and desire to persecute minorities.
And is led by a man has claimed there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. Can there be a bigger warning than that?
Laurence Rees is a former creative director of history programmes for the BBC and the author of six books on World War II.
By Mark Grimsley
Originally published by World War II magazine. Published Online: November 05, 2012
On May 19, 1941, the German battleship Bismarck, accompanied by the cruiser Prinz Eugen and several escort vessels, made its way through the Kattegat Strait separating Nazi-occupied Denmark from neutral Sweden. The 50,000-ton warship's objective was to reach British convoy routes in the North Atlantic and do as much damage as possible. From the outset the Bismarck had no hope of reaching those routes in secrecy. Swedish aircraft identified the vessels in the German formation, news that made its way quickly and clandestinely to the British military attaché in Stockholm.
The Bismarck reached port at Bergen, Norway, the next day. On May 21 a British reconnaissance aircraft snapped a photo of the battleship at anchor. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen put out to sea on May 22; the following day two British cruisers spotted the enemy ships in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland. The British battleship Prince of Wales and battle cruiser Hood arrived on the scene early on May 24. In the ensuing fight, the Hood blew up spectacularly, with the loss of all but three seamen. The Prince of Wales suffered significant damage. The Bismarck was also damaged and now had a 9-degree list to port and a 3-degree trim to bow, the result of damage to fuel bunkers and efforts to transfer fuel to intact bunkers.
The German admiral in charge of the operation, Günther Lütjens, decided to defer the planned strike at the convoy lanes and instead make for France to effect repairs. He detached the Prinz Eugen; the Bismarck, now operating alone, briefly eluded the British before a Catalina PBY pilot spied the enormous warship. Dozens of British vessels were also hunting the Bismarck, for if the super-battleship ever did break out into the Atlantic, the result could be catastrophic. The Bismarck was nearing shelter at Brest, France, when a fluke of luck caused a torpedo from a carrier-based Swordfish biplane to jam the battleship's rudder. The Bismarck steamed helplessly in a circle until a British flotilla closed in and, on the morning of May 27, sank the Bismarck, killing all but 114 of the ship's 2,200-man crew.
So ended the Bismarck's first and only combat voyage—a saga that immediately gained worldwide fame. But what if the German battleship had successfully broken out into the Atlantic? For this to have happened, any of three alterations to the historical events would need to have occurred.
First, the Bismarck would have had to elude detection—an unlikely possibility. Second, the warship would have had to escape damage in the Battle of the Denmark Strait—a possibility, since historically the Bismarck had damage minor enough that Admiral Lütjens could have continued the mission. Third, and most likely, the Bismarck would have had to reach safety at Brest, where it would have joined two smaller battleships, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, that had just completed a successful though limited raid against British shipping. Within weeks of Bismarck arriving, all three battleships would have been able to put out to sea in another strike against the Atlantic convoy lanes.
What would have been the result? Historically, the chief of the German navy, Admiral Erich Raeder, chose to use his limited number of capital ships as surface raiders. His intention was to force the Royal Navy to dilute its strength by diverting warships to convoy escort duty and, in combination with Admiral Karl Dönitz's U-boats, to sever Britain's maritime lifelines. Prior to the Bismarck's sortie this strategy enjoyed some success. Between November 1940 and March 1941 the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer sank 17 merchant vessels totalling over 113,000 tons of shipping. During the same period the cruiser Admiral Hipper accounted for another 53,000 tons. In February 1941 the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau—under the joint command of Lütjens—had reached the Atlantic undetected. The battleships encountered four convoys, but British battleships were escorting two of the groups, and Lütjens's orders prohibited him from engaging enemy capital ships if at all possible. He therefore withdrew, inflicting little or no damage. Lütjens's luck was similarly bad with the other two convoys, in large measure because of the proximity of other British battleships. As a result, Lütjens did scant damage, destroying only about 27,000 tons of British shipping.
Lütjens's caution, however, was driven by the fact that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (like Admiral Scheer and Admiral Hipper) were lightly armoured and less powerful than their British rivals. In contrast, the heavily armoured Bismarck could outgun and outrun virtually any of Britain's
capital ships.Had Bismarck encountered a convoy, the battleship could have successfully engaged the escort vessels and picked off most of the freighters before they could escape, and in the open Atlantic the Bismarck would have been very difficult to locate. Further, the Kriegsmarine had stationed more than a dozen German support vessels ready to resupply and refuel the Bismarck, which would have allowed the battleship to remain at sea as long as three months. United under these conditions with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the Bismarck could have done a formidable amount of damage indeed.
Ironically, the original concept for the Bismarck's historical operation, Rhine Exercise, contemplated just such a raid by Bismarck and the two smaller battleships. Bismarck set out alone in mid-May because the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were not ready to go to sea. Events proved this course of action unwise, but had the Bismarck sprinted successfully to Brest—which certainly would have occurred but for the fortuitous damage to the Bismarck's rudder—Rhine Exercise could have proceeded in its original form.
In any counterfactual it is tempting to make extravagant claims—in this case that Bismarck and consorts could have won the Battle of the Atlantic. That is unlikely. However, the Bismarck's presence in the Atlantic would have forced the Royal Navy to guard each convoy heavily while at the same time maintaining an extensive fleet dedicated to finding and destroying the battleship. That, in turn, would have sapped British strength in other vital sectors, particularly the Mediterranean, where Major General Erwin Rommel's North African offensive was just getting underway. And the heightened threat of destruction to any given convoy would likely have resulted in larger, more easily protected convoys—which would have taken more time to assemble, thereby reducing the flow of vital war supplies to Britain. When combined with the German U-boat offensive, the damage and disruption to the British convoy system would have been even worse. The Bismarck would not have won the Battle of the Atlantic, but it would have severely harried the British war effort at a time when that nation could least afford it.
By Laurence Rees
Originally published by World War II magazine. Published Online: November 05, 2012
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 is remembered as Hitler's most catastrophic military mistake. But in 1941 it didn't seem to be a mistake at all. "Everyone thought at the beginning that the war will result in the complete defeat of the Soviet Union," said Aleksey Bris, who was an 18-year-old Ukrainian student in 1941. "When the war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, the population thought that things would change for the better. There was a feeling that the Soviet Union might collapse. The collapse that happened in the 1990s could have happened at that time."
Far from being frightened by the arrival of the Nazis, Bris and his friends welcomed them. "Ukrainians could see a different way of life. They saw they could go to dances and have different clothes and that there was free communication between people."
When I heard Bris say these words, as he sat in his small house near his home village of Horokhiv, they opened up for me a sudden vision of what might have been. Maybe he was right, maybe the whole course of the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union could have been different.
But then, after a moment's reflection, I realized that this could never have happened. The whole nature of Nazism meant that after the initial euphoria of their "liberation" from Soviet rule wore off, Ukrainians were destined to experience the Nazis as some of the cruellest conquerors in history.
Consider the words of Erich Koch, Reich commissioner of the Ukraine and one of Hitler's closest and oldest comrades: "We are a master race that must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here." Bris soon found out just what those words meant. He found a job translating for the Nazis, and even struck up a friendship with a German secretary. But within months he had a conversation with his boss that proved to be a turning point. Bris asked to go to a university and improve his education, but was told, "We don't need you Ukrainians as doctors or engineers. We need you as people to tend cows."
Bris's joy at the arrival of the Nazis was suddenly replaced by bitterness. And over the next few weeks his anger toward the Nazis grew so great that he felt "on the edge of a mental collapse." Finally, one day in fall 1942, came the moment that changed his life. While walking through his village he saw a German policeman hit a Ukrainian villager with a cane. Bris grabbed the policeman's arm and pushed him away. "The emotions come first," he said, "and you don't think about the consequences…?. I just hated that our nation was brought to slavery. When you feel that the whole nation is being humiliated you have to do something whether you like it or not, so I was ready to strike them."
Pursued by the police, Bris fled to the safety of the forest. For the next two years he fought in one of history's most brutal partisan struggles. With the nationalist Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) he fought the Germans as well as Soviet partisans. No prisoners were taken on either side in this shadowy war and atrocities were commonplace. The Soviet partisans, in particular, were infamous for cutting out the tongues of some of the Ukrainian Insurgents they captured. By comparison, Bris remembers, the Germans "just" hanged prisoners, and didn't usually torture them beforehand.
Aleksey Bris was fortunate enough to live to see the dream he once thought the Nazis would fulfil: Ukraine finally became an independent state in 1991.
By Gerhard L. Weinberg
Originally published by World War II magazine. Published Online: November 05, 2012
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, simultaneously invading the Pacific holdings of Great Britain and the Netherlands. Four days later, Germany handed declarations of war to the American chargé d'affaires in Berlin and to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington, D.C. The Reich's partner, Italy, did the same in Rome and the American capital.
Then, as now, these moves might seem an impulsive display of Axis solidarity. The reality is quite different. Hitler had long recognized that his hopes and plans for world domination necessitated war with the United States. As he stated explicitly in a follow-up volume to Mein Kampf written in 1928 (see "Mein Kampf: The Sequel"), preparing for war with the United States would be a central responsibility of any National Socialist government. The days after Pearl Harbor brought to a crescendo the dictator's protracted effort to orchestrate an international conflict to suit his and Germany's purposes.
The surprise for Hitler was not that Japan attacked the United States, but how and when. He learned of Pearl Harbor the way millions did: from someone who had heard a radio report about the raid. The Japanese had not given their allies any precise information on what they planned, so the bombing and torpedo assault itself startled Germany and Italy—hardly unusual. Neither had ever notified Tokyo in advance of intended attacks, either.
The news flash came soon after the German leader returned to the Wolf's Lair, his headquarters deep in a forest near Rastenburg. Hitler had travelled to East Prussia from the Eastern Front, where he had gone to address firsthand the crises arising from successful Soviet counterattacks at Rostov.
The setbacks to the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the crumbling of Italian forces amid a British offensive in North Africa had left personnel at the Wolf's Lair feeling gloomy. Late on December 7, Nazi press chief Otto Dietrich brought Hitler the news about Pearl Harbor. Hitler asked Dietrich to confirm the bulletin, but already word of the Americans' undoing was enlivening the atmosphere at the Wolfsschanze.
"A delirium of joy embraced everyone as far as one could see in the headquarters," General Walter Warlimont, a deputy chief of operations in the OKW, the High Command of the German Armed Forces, noted in his memoirs.
The exuberance erupted from certainty that the real fight—against the mongrel giant of the west—at last had begun. Hitler, who saw his life as a constant war, would not be cheated again, as he had been in 1938 when Allied appeasement over the Sudetenland spoiled his plans to invade Czechoslovakia.
Hitler and other German leaders so thoroughly expected the Reich to fight America that, after the initial delighted outburst, they gave Pearl Harbor scarcely a thought. Army chief of staff General Franz Halder, for example, merely noted in his diary entry for December 8 that "Japan appears to have opened hostilities against America and England by surprise air attacks and warship attacks on Honolulu and also against Shanghai and against Malaya." Halder's entry devotes more attention to the Eastern Front and to North Africa. On December 9, Halder writes that he conferred with an assistant on a "directive for conversations with attachés [of other countries] on the entrance of America into the war." The next day Halder briefly notes major Japanese successes, and on December 11 records that he heard a naval officer's report about "basic factors in the Japanese-American naval war." His December 12 entry notes a report on the "Asian theatre of war," but Halder does not consider Germany's declaration of war the day before worthy of note. As his master did, the army commander took for granted the Americans' inability to mount military operations serious enough to affect the German war effort.
Similarly, for December 7 and 8 the usually voluminous OKW war diary refers to the attack at Honolulu only by summarizing official Japanese announcements and dispatches from the Reuters news agency. The December 8 OKW entry mentions the sinking of the American battleship "New Virginia"; evidently no one at German headquarters had a list of American capital ships or knew that no U.S. Navy vessel with that name existed. On December 9 the OKW diary summarizes official announcements from Tokyo. On December 10, however, the diary merely mentions a report, and on December 11 it again distils Japanese headquarters and Reuters reports.
The December 11 entry, made after Hitler declared war, notes that General Alfred Jodl, the OKW chief of operations, called from Berlin to suggest that his deputy consider having the staff examine the question of whether the United States will concentrate its military effort first in Europe or in the Pacific. Thereafter, only minimal references to the Pacific War appear in the OKW war diary through 1945. Entries for December 12 and 13 ignore the fact that Germany has gone to war with another rather large country.
War with the United States had been on Hitler's wish list for two decades. Upon becoming chancellor in 1933 he began rearming Germany for the first fights he anticipated—against Czechoslovakia, France, and Britain. He was confident those weapons would also suffice for his next war, against Russia. In 1937, with a first generation of arms in production, he turned to the special weapons he needed to take on the United States.
A firm believer, like most of his political and military associates, that in World War I Germany had not been defeated at the front but "stabbed in the back"—the colloquial term, popularized by General Erich Ludendorff, was Dolchstoss, "dagger's thrust"—Hitler held that the Americans played no real role in bringing about Germany's loss. The United States had a tiny, weak army and minimal air force and Hitler had nothing but scorn for aircraft production quotas set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, even though American factories had been meeting those quotas for two years. (Told days before the war declaration that the United States expected by 1944 to be building 100,000 warplanes a year, Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring sneered that all the Americans could make was refrigerators.)
By Hitler's lights, so racially mixed a collection of degenerates as the Americans could not possibly mount an effective military effort anyway. But the United States was distant, and had a big navy at a time when Germany did not, so Hitler began developing the Me 264 Amerika Bomber, a four-engine behemoth capable of intercontinental attacks. At the same time, Germany began developing super-battleships whose guns would be large and powerful enough to demolish American dreadnoughts from afar.
But progress on the weapons of the future stalled and then stopped. Only prototypes of the Me 264 got off the ground, never the swarms of enormous aircraft that Hitler envisioned. German shipwrights laid the keel for the aircraft carrier Flugzeugträger A (later renamed Graf Zeppelin) in 1936, and keels for monster 56,000-ton battleships early in 1939, but the outbreak of war on September 1 created demands for materiel and manpower that took precedence over these next-generation warships, which never did sail. (Not every production order was cancelled; in June 1944 the German navy took delivery of four huge battleship engines that promptly were melted down for scrap.)
Admiral Erich Raeder, who had assumed the German navy's helm in 1928, had been pleading for war with the United States since soon after the invasion of Poland. Despite the U-boats' success, Raeder didn't have enough submarines to isolate England, and thanks to flawed designs and losses at sea the Kriegsmarine at times had few surface vessels larger than a destroyer. In 1940–41, Hitler and associates realized the foreseeable future would not include a huge German blue-water navy of battleships, aircraft carriers, and cruisers. To compensate, they looked to the obvious alternative: enlisting an ally that already had such a force. The equally obvious candidate: Japan.
Under these circumstances, Hitler adopted two parallel policies. He ordered Raeder to avoid incidents with the United States in the Atlantic, and began chivvying Japan to take Singapore away from Great Britain. With Japan openly joining the Axis side, the alliance would gain a world-class navy, not after years of building but right away, and so remove the main hurdle to Germany's making war on the United States.
The Japanese had seen Germany's victories in the west as a signal to move south to expand their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But after joining the Axis, Tokyo authorities demurred, explaining that they were not planning to invade Malaya until 1946, when the United States had announced it would give up its bases in the Philippines. Hitler countered that if concern about the United States was restraining Japan, Germany would immediately join in a war against the U.S. and its allies—provided Japan struck now, not five years later, when the Americans would be stronger. One way or another, Hitler expected to fight the United States, so it made no difference to him whether an American warship went down in the Atlantic or in the Pacific. The sooner Japan attacked, the better.
Having promised to fight on Japan's side, specifically at a March 1941 meeting in Berlin with Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke, German leaders chafed as Tokyo and Washington conducted seemingly endless negotiations on into that year. Japan's occupation of southern French Indo-China, coming as it did within a month of Germany's June 22, 1941, invasion of Russia, clearly pointed in the direction Germany wanted, but still the talks in Washington droned on. The Germans believed their attack on the Soviet Union would allay Japan's fears of any threat to its home islands from Russia's Pacific territories, encouraging the empire to strike southward into areas it had long coveted. The Germans also expected such an action to draw American attention and resources into the Pacific and away from the Atlantic, increasing Germany's advantage there.
Hitler worried that the Soviets' failure to collapse as quickly as anticipated might deter Japan from going after the United States. (From an opposite viewpoint, President Roosevelt hoped endless talk might lead Tokyo to see that a German victory was not the certainty the Japanese might be imagining.)
To spur Japan on, Hitler turned to propaganda. In an October 3, 1941, speech trumpeting a new offensive against the Russians, he boasted, "I say today, because I can now say it, that this enemy is already crushed and cannot ever recover." Within the week Dietrich was claiming the Reich had crushed the Red Army and won the war in the East. On November 8, Hitler insisted the offensive "had succeeded beyond all measure."
None of it was true.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels thought all three announcements were terrible mistakes. Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano also saw the agitprop as wrong-footed. Ciano was Fascist royalty; not only was he married to Mussolini's daughter Edda, but in 1936 he replaced Il Duce as foreign minister. He was present at the 1938 talks in Munich in that capacity. Ciano was also the recipient of phone calls at all hours from German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was trying to reinforce Italy's martial resolve. Even so, Ciano was not privy to Hitler's larger motives. In Ciano's diary entry for October 18, he wryly suggests, "Isn't this a case of their having sung their victory anthem too soon?" (Hitler did not keep a diary, so his private contemplations are unknown.)
Mistake or no, Hitler clearly meant the propaganda barrage to induce Japan to act. Looking back on events in a 1950 memoir, Bernhard von Lossberg, an assistant to OKW deputy chief Warlimont, concluded, "Dietrich's statement was probably designed to hasten Japan's entry into the war." Lossberg's suspicions are confirmed by a document from Hitler's special military historian that his secretary, Marianne Feuersenger, quoted in her 1982 memoir. Referencing "Dietrich's speech on his command," the historian wrote, "Propaganda fully under the control of the Führer…. It was decisive that Japan had to be held to the course. Führer had a terrible fear at the beginning of the crisis [before Moscow] that they might be scared off."
Events proved Hitler's anxieties well founded. Only days before the Japanese strike force Kido Butai came within range of Pearl Harbor, Tokyo was checking with Berlin and Rome to make sure that their promise to join Japan in war against the United States still held and asking that both nations agree to a treaty not to enter into a separate peace agreement. The communication brought prompt replies in the affirmative from both Germany and Italy.
Before Hitler could respond in earnest to Pearl Harbor, he had to get to Berlin, assemble the Reichstag, give its members the good news of war with the United States, and hand an American diplomat a formal declaration of hostilities. But he saw no need to keep Raeder and his U-boats on the leash. Late on December 8, 1941, Hitler ordered Raeder to authorize the Kriegsmarine to sink on sight any ship flying the flag of the United States, plus those of Uruguay and eight other Central American nations seen as its allies.
Once he reached Berlin, Hitler phoned and met with Goebbels to review the situation in detail. The propaganda minister documented the exchanges in his diary the following day, as was his custom. Goebbels's December 8 entry notes that Japan has attacked the United States. "I was…called by the Führer who is extraordinarily happy about this development," Goebbels writes. "He will summon the Reichstag for Wednesday [December 10] in the afternoon to clarify the German position on this."
After enthusing about the Japanese action at Pearl Harbor and the likelihood that it will shrink American deliveries of weapons and transportation equipment to Britain and the Soviet Union, Goebbels adds, "The development has produced the greatest joy for the Führer and the whole headquarters." Goebbels's December 9 entry summarizes developments in East Asia and the Pacific, mentions the coming Reichstag session, and repeats his assessment that the United States no longer will be able to aid England and the Soviet Union. "We can be extraordinarily satisfied with the way things have developed," the Nazi propagandist says in conclusion.
On December 10 Goebbels again predicts the demise of American deliveries of weapons and airplanes, refers to worldwide puzzlement over German policy in the new situation, and reports at length on a December 9 meeting in Berlin and Hitler's demeanour during it. "He is filled with joy over the very fortunate development of the negotiations between the USA and Japan and also over the outbreak of war," Goebbels writes. "He correctly pointed out that he had always expected this development."
Goebbels then summarizes comments by Hitler to the effect that the Japanese initiated war in the Pacific in a manner and at a moment that caught him unaware but which he found entirely correct. Hitler told Goebbels about his sink-on-sight order to the Kriegsmarine—which both men celebrated—and said that in his Reichstag speech he would declare war on the United States. Hitler added that he would urge all Axis partners to do the same. (Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria proceeded to do so, although Roosevelt had the State Department attempt for half a year to get the latter three to withdraw their declarations of war.)
In his conversation with Goebbels, Hitler claimed to be blasé about setbacks on the Eastern Front and predicted an end to American provisioning of England and the Soviet Union. Hitler summarized what he expected to say to the Reichstag, telling Goebbels that to give himself time to draft and polish the speech he was postponing it to December 11. "The Führer again projects a wave of optimism and confidence in victory," Goebbels writes.
On December 11 diarist Goebbels says how good it is to have Japan's aggressive and successful advances diverting attention at home and abroad from Axis setbacks on the Eastern Front and in North Africa. Japanese pilots have sunk the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya, the propaganda minister notes. He restates his conviction that America will stop being England's quartermaster. Writing of a noon meeting the day before with Hitler, Goebbels says the Führer is especially pleased about Prince of Wales and Repulse and about the timing of the Japanese successes, given the situation on the Eastern Front. Goebbels notes that although the Japanese wanted the Reichstag to convene earlier, Hitler is to speak at 3 p.m.
After offering considerable detail on matters in the Pacific, Goebbels's December 12 entry reports on Hitler's speech the day before. In his address, the dictator told the Reichstag that Germany was at war with the United States and had signed a treaty with Italy and Japan eschewing a separate peace. Goebbels raves about Hitler's presentation, and about Mussolini's own December 11 proclamation and speech about war against the United States.
Two days later Goebbels notes that he and Hitler met once again. He describes their shared excitement and pleasure at Japan's coups in East Asia. He notes that in the afternoon Hitler spoke to the Gauleiter, the district chiefs of the Nazi Party, telling his tribunes all will be well, with no chance that the entry of the United States will prolong the conflict.
In the meantime, Goebbels reports, Ribbentrop has handed Germany's declaration of war to the American chargé d'affaires; the German chargé in Washington presented the document to Secretary of State Hull. Ribbentrop and Hitler had worried that the United States might declare war before Germany was able to do so. ("A great power does not allow itself to be declared war on; it declares it on others," Ribbentrop once told a deputy.)
At every previous juncture expanding the war, Hitler heard warnings and even argument from his circle of political and military advisors. But prior to the German declaration of war on the United States, the only discouraging words came from Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, the former German ambassador to Washington. For once on a dangerous gambit, the Reichstag exhibited unanimity as enthusiastic as the leadership's.
Hitler and coterie may have had no second thoughts, but in Rome, Galeazzo Ciano's experienced eyes suddenly came into sharper focus. He connected the dots backward from Germany and Italy's twin declarations of war—the latter of which he personally handed the American chargé the afternoon of December 11—to Pearl Harbor, to Japan's demand for a treaty abjuring any separate peace, to autumn's bluster about the Eastern Front.
Although Ciano notes in his diary that Ribbentrop was "jumping with joy about the Japanese attack on the United States," he records a very different personal perspective.
Following a meeting on December 13 with the Cuban minister, who had come to declare war on Italy, Ciano mused on the private page about "having had the good fortune, or is it the misfortune, to declare war on France, on Great Britain, on Russia and on the United States."
Gerhard L. Weinberg served in the U.S. Army from 1946–47, and earned a PhD in history in 1951. During the next decade he worked on Columbia University's War Documentation Project, and established the program for microfilming captured German documents. Among these documents Weinberg found Hitler's lost manuscript for a sequel to Mein Kampf. He went on to become one of the leading scholars of World War II, serving on several U.S. government advisory committees. Now retired, he is the author or editor of 10 books including World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II, Hitler's Foreign Policy 1933–1939: The Road to World War II, and the comprehensive A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II
By Gerhard L. Weinberg
Originally published by World War II magazine. Published Online: November 05, 2012
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler laid out a philosophy that would trigger global war. But a later volume, not published in his lifetime, is at least as shocking as his notorious My Struggle.
Hitler's second book wasn't suppressed, only mislaid. In 1949, a former French intelligence officer noted the manuscript's existence, and in 1953 a reference to it that Hitler himself had made in February 1942 came to light.
So in the summer of 1958, when I was a young historian screening captured documents held in Alexandria, Virginia, for microfilming before the U.S. Army returned the papers to Germany, I had an inkling of what I might be holding when I picked up a file folder labelled as containing a draft of Mein Kampf that an American officer had confiscated in Munich in 1945 from the offices of the Nazi Party publishing house, Eher-Verlag.
Hitler dictated the 324-page typescript to Eher-Verlag publisher Max Amann in the summer of 1928. In elections that May, Nazi candidates for the Reichstag had done very poorly. Hitler seems to have traced that poor showing to rivals' attacks on the Nazis' advocacy of an alliance with Italy, a position most unpopular then. As a man who always stuck firmly to his ideology, Hitler responded to the dismal election returns by dictating a book explaining the correctness of his views on future German foreign policy—and the error of everyone else's.
Germany need not seek the return of snippets of territory lost at Versailles but rather conquer huge amounts of additional living and farming space, Hitler argues. To get this land Germany must defeat the Western powers, clearing the way for Germany's acquisition of vast lands in the East, he declares. He notes, approvingly, a vulnerability in the Soviet Union now that incompetent Bolsheviks have replaced the Germanic elite in Russia that had held together the racially inferior Slavs. Defending his party's embrace of Mussolini and his militia of Black shirts, Hitler says that in the coming war against France, Italy will be the obvious ally for Germany because Italy's expansionist aims place that nation in opposition to France and England. Besides waging these wars Germany could, under the Nazis, prepare for another war that Hitler says is both essential and inevitable: one against the United States.
We can only guess why this tract went unpublished. In 1928 Mein Kampf, in print for two years, was selling badly, boding ill for a kindred volume by the same author. As time passed, Hitler would have had to make many revisions. And after 1933, when he became chancellor, he no longer needed to advertise his intentions. (Had the document come to light in the mid-1930s, a strongly isolationist United States likely would have paid scant attention, if any attention at all.)
After word got around about the manuscript that I identified and informally titled Hitler's Zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928 (Hitler's Second Book: A Document of the Year 1928), the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich published a German-language edition in 1961. A revised update followed, with an English-language edition published by Enigma Books in 2003. The typescript I encountered more than 50 years ago is now in the archives of the German Federal Republic.
Here are some excerpts:
"No other state is as well-suited as Italy to be an ally of Germany."
"Germany cannot very well ally itself with a Jewish Bolshevist Russia, the result in all likelihood would be the Bolshevisation of Germany."
"The only state that will be able to stand up to North America will be the state that has understood how—through the character of its internal life as well as through the substance of its external policy—to raise the racial value of its people and bring it into the most practical national form for this purpose…. It is, again, the duty of the National Socialist movement to strengthen and prepare our fatherland to the greatest degree possible for this task."
By Gyanesh Kudaisya | Published in History Today Volume: 62 Issue: 11 2012
Gyanesh Kudaisya considers how the Sino-Indian war of 1962 has shaped relations between Asia’s two largest nations.
Refugees fleeing the Sino-India border war. Getty Images/Time Life/Larry Burrows
China and India share the longest disputed frontier in the world, extending over 4,000 km, with a contentious Line of Actual Control across the Himalayas. Fifty years ago, on October 19th, 1962, border skirmishes between China and India escalated into a full-scale war across the mountainous border. Hostilities continued for over a month, during which China wrestled 23,200 sq kms of territory from India and inflicted heavy casualties. The Indian government acknowledged the loss of over 7,000 personnel, with 1,383 dead, 1,696 missing in action and 3,968 captured by the enemy. The Chinese also conceded ‘very heavy’ losses. Then, quite suddenly, on November 21st, China announced a unilateral ceasefire and a return to border posts held by its army prior to the conflict, while retaining some 4,023 sq km of territory in the Ladakh region.
This brief war has come to define relations between Asia’s two largest countries and the border issue remains unresolved. Beijing still claims over 92,000 sq km of territory, mainly in the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
The war was a dramatic turning point for India. Most Indians saw it as a ‘stab in the back’, a grave act of betrayal by the Chinese leadership, whom Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister (1947-64), had lauded as brothers in the heyday of a friendly relationship in the mid-1950s. This was reflected in Panchsheel, ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’, upon which in 1954 China and India inked a bilateral treaty, and the 1955 Bandung conference, where Nehru had personally introduced Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to Afro-Asian delegates in order to minimise China’s isolation.
Indian elites took a more critical view of the war, attributing the defeat to Nehru’s altruistic policy of Non-Alignment, forged in response to the superpower dynamics of the Cold War and his failure to take a realistic stance vis-à-vis China. They also blamed his defence minister and protégé, Krishna Menon, for the appalling state of the nation’s defences and for his inept, often idiosyncratic, handling of the military top-brass. Nehru himself offered the explanation that China’s intolerance of India’s stature in international affairs and its championing of Non-Alignment among the Afro-Asian nations lay behind the aggression. No one either could fail to note China’s annoyance over Tibet, particularly the anti-Chinese propaganda put out by the Dalai Lama, whom India was hosting in exile. There was also the assertion of sovereignty by China over borders that had not yet been formally delineated and were seen as a difficult colonial legacy.
Fifty years later references to the 1962 conflict are likely to be mired in national amnesia in both India and China for complex and divergent reasons. In India the war continues to be seen as a moment of trauma, a humiliating episode of post-colonial history which the nation has not been able to come to terms with. In China the event is usually dismissed as a mere ‘border clash’, not a war, and history textbooks barely refer to it. Moreover, the stand-off came in the wake of Mao Zedong’s catastrophic experiment of the Great Leap Forward (1958-61), which aimed to transform China’s agricultural sector through collectivisation but brought about famine and human misery on an immense scale. For obvious reasons this phase of China’s national history is best forgotten.
Furthermore the terms of discourse in the China-India engagement have shifted dramatically from the tenets of national pride and self-reliance to increasing economic co-operation in a global environment. Over two decades bilateral trade increased 200 times to an estimated $73 billion in 2011. The figure is expected to reach $100 billion by 2015. In dollar terms China and India rank as the world’s second and 11th largest economies, respectively. Together, they contribute nearly a 12th of global GDP and a fifth of global exports. Proponents of globalisation would like to believe that China-India ties in the future will be defined not by the ‘B’ of ‘Border’ but of ‘Business’.
Such aspiration often overlooks unresolved issues of the past, not least the divergent perceptions China and India have of each other in the 21st century. At the same time there seems to be a mutual rejection of the possibility that a coming to terms with the past might help bring about reconciliation and trust.
A reassessment of the Sino-Indian war might usefully start by viewing it not simply in bilateral terms but within a wider global context. For instance, as the clouds of war gathered over the Asian horizon, there loomed an even greater crisis that threatened to bring humanity to the brink of Third World War. On October 21st, 1962, after Chinese troops started marching into Indian territory, US President John F. Kennedy ordered a blockade of Cuba. The ensuing Missile Crisis engaged the US and the USSR in brinksmanship and near combat, making it ‘the most dangerous moment in human history’. For much of the duration of the Sino-Indian war, Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stood ‘eyeball to eyeball’, preoccupied with the concern to avoid a larger global confrontation.
At this most heightened moment of the US-Soviet stand-off, an equally contentious rift was threatening to fracture the Communist Bloc. The priority of national interest over Communism, competition for global hegemony and divergent interpretations of Marxism were rapidly driving the Soviet Union and China apart. The Sino-Indian war aggravated this fissure.
It is now known that, when Indian morale stood at its lowest ebb, on November 19th, 1962, Nehru wrote two letters to Kennedy, describing India’s situation as ‘desperate’ and asking for comprehensive military aid, specifically ‘immediate support to strengthen our air arm sufficiently to stem the tide of the Chinese advance’. He asked for ‘a minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all-weather fighters’, radar cover and US air force personnel ‘to man these fighters and radar installations’. ‘Any delay in this assistance,’ Nehru warned, ‘will result in nothing short of a catastrophe for our country.’ Nehru also wrote to Khrushchev and to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to enlist support. Nehru’s assiduously crafted policy of Non-Alignment now lay in shambles.
But, if we are to take a broader comparative view of the Sino-Indian war, it is time to move away from narrow ‘national’ histories and to dispel myths and stereotypes. For example, two generations of Indians have accepted the fabrication that the Chinese carried out a sudden, unprovoked act of aggression in 1962, ‘a Himalayan Pearl Harbor’. But contemporary accounts testify to a steady build-up of tension dating from at least 1959. Likewise analysis must move away from explanations centred upon the personality of Nehru.
The grand narratives of globalisation conjure a vision of an ‘Asian century’, with China and India in concert. Yet emotive, bullish nationalism of the past cannot simply be wished away. Recent disputes between China and Japan in the East and South China seas are manifestations of such aggressive nationalism. If India and China are to avoid similar tensions, they must address the fault-line of 1962. They have a hope of doing so, not by shying away from history but by appreciating the complex factors that led the two Asian neighbours to war. There is no other recipe to fix the trust deficit that blights their relationship.
Gyanesh Kudaisya teaches Contemporary South Asian History at the National University of Singapore.
By Max Boot
Originally published by MHQ magazine. Published Online: November 02, 2012
Michael Collins waged a shadow war against the British for 12 years before forcing them out of southern Ireland and taking to the podium. (Roger Viollet/Getty Images)
'We had no jails,' Collins explained, 'and we therefore had to kill all spies, informers, and double-crossers
IN THE 21ST CENTURY we've become used to ragtag rebels beating military superpowers. Armed with little more than the will to carry out shocking acts of terrorism and the savvy to cultivate worldwide sympathy through the media, the little guy has come out on top more often than you'd expect. The paradigms are the 1962 French defeat in Algeria, America's 1975 withdrawal from Vietnam, and Russia's disaster in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The United States was similarly dealt defeats in Beirut in 1983 and in Somalia in 1993. It almost happened in Iraq—and may yet happen in Afghanistan. What few remember is that the script followed by groups as diverse as the Vietcong and the Taliban was written in Ireland during its 1919–1921 War of Independence, the first successful revolt against the British Empire since the creation of the United States of America. But at the beginning of the uprising, victory for the insurgents seemed highly unlikely. The Irish, after all, had been rebelling regularly and futilely against British rule since 1798. As recently as 1916, during the Easter Rising, the British Army had speedily repressed an attempt by Irish rebels to seize power in Dublin. What made the difference in 1919? For one thing, Britain was war-weary after the conclusion of the War to End All Wars. And while ideas of national self-determination spread like wildfire, the British appetite for imperialism rapidly declined. But it's doubtful the revolt would have succeeded without the genius of one man: the Irish Republican Army's de facto military commander, Michael Collins, described by one of his foes as a man "full of fascination and charm—but also of dangerous fire."
TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD in 1919, Michael Collins was already a veteran revolutionary who had spent time in a prison camp in Wales after taking part in the Easter Rising. He had grown up in County Cork, in southwest Ireland, the youngest of eight children born to a prosperous elderly farmer who died when Collins was a boy. He was convinced, he later recalled, that "Irish Independence would never be attained by constitutional means," and that "when you're up against a bully you've got to kick him in the guts." He was sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1909, then into the Irish Volunteers (precursor of the IRA) in 1914 while living in London, where he worked first for the British civil service and later for two financial firms.
"Mick," as he was known, was tall, broad shouldered, and athletic, with a quick mind, boundless energy, and undeniable charisma—"hearty, boisterous, or quiet by turn," in the words of an IRA officer. He was fond of whiskey, cigarettes, swearing, and female company—"a real playboy," recalled one woman. Though a keen practical joker, he also had a foul temper and a domineering personality. It was during his stint at the Wales internment camp, which one British intelligence officer called "the nursery of the IRA," that he first showed a gift for leadership, earning him the nickname "the Big Fellow" among the inmates. After his release in December 1916, having served six months, he assumed key leadership positions in all three major nationalist organizations—the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Volunteers, and Sinn Féin—an unusual hat trick that put him at the centre of the action.
In January 1919, the new Irish parliament, the First Dáil, issued a declaration of independence from England, and the IRA's war against the British commenced in earnest.
Collins was then minister of finance in the rebel government—a title that did not hint at his importance. Although he raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for the revolution via a bond drive, he played a bigger role in the rebels' military operations as director of intelligence of the IRA and president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He was, asserted one IRA officer, "commander in chief in fact, if not in name."
Half accountant, half swashbuckler, Collins could handle meticulous paperwork as well as great personal risk. Throughout the war he seldom left Dublin, even though he had a heavy price on his head. He worked from numerous homes and storefronts and frequently varied where he slept. He routinely put in 17- or 18-hour workdays before repairing to a pub or hotel to blow off steam. Sometimes he would pop up at an IRA safe house to swap a few jokes and ask, "Well, lads, how are ye getting on?" His visits bucked up morale among his men, who revered him.
Travelling without bodyguards or a disguise, he cycled through the streets on an "ancient bicycle whose chain," one of his men wrote, "rattled like a mediaeval ghost's." He was stopped many times, but in his neat gray suit, which made him look like a stockbroker, he always managed to bluff his way through—or to threaten police so convincingly that they dared not risk their lives to capture him. More than once he escaped out of a building through a skylight or a back door while British troops rushed in through the front door. One of his chief pursuers wrote that "he combined the characteristics of a Robin Hood with those of an elusive Pimpernel."
Some of Collins's success can be attributed to his penchant for keeping things close to his vest. "Never let one side of your mind know what the other is doing," he once said. His best-kept secret was the spy ring he cultivated inside the British administration. Four members of the Dublin police detective bureau, G Division, reported to him, along with a dozen uniformed constables. Other spies, working as secretaries in Dublin Castle, the British administrative seat, or clerks in the post office, passed along important British correspondence and ciphers.
That intelligence proved vital to the IRA's war efforts. In April 1919, one of Collins's moles gave him a midnight tour of G's headquarters, where he spent five hours reading the most sensitive files. He then sent his men to order the "G-men" to stop harassing the IRA. Those who ignored the warnings were targeted by Collins's hit team, known originally as the Twelve Apostles (it began with a dozen members) and then, when it grew, as the Squad.
While most IRA men were part-time volunteers, the Squad consisted of full-time, paid gunmen. Armed with powerful Webley .455-caliber revolvers, at least six members were always on standby at their headquarters, first a house, then a cabinetmaking shop. They would play cards or tinker with lumber to pass the time while awaiting the call for what was termed "extreme action."
By the spring of 1920, 12 Dublin policemen who were, in the words of a Squad member, "making themselves frightfully obnoxious" had been shot. Eight of them were killed, including the head of G Division. A similar fate awaited the few, inept British spies who tried to infiltrate the IRA's ranks. "We had no jails," Collins explained, "and we therefore had to kill all spies, informers, and double-crossers."
That shadow war was the essence of the conflict: There was hardly a single conventional battle. Broadly speaking, the IRA waged guerrilla war in the countryside, targeting police barracks and patrols, while in the cities its soldiers operated more as terrorists, killing off-duty policemen or civil servants.
On the British mainland, the IRA carried out a handful of largely terrorist operations. Among the most audacious: the failed assassination in December 1919 of John Pinkstone French, the British viceroy and supreme commander of the British Army in Ireland, and the burning of 17 Liverpool warehouses in November 1920.
Collins entertained even more ambitious plans, such as truck bombing the House of Commons, kidnapping its members, and executing members of the cabinet. But ultimately he concentrated his operations on Ireland.
AFTER COLLINS HAD ESSENTIALLY NEUTRALIZED G Division, the British brought in their own intelligence specialists—a group of retired army officers known as "the hush-hush men," who often operated undercover. Collins decided to wipe them out at a stroke, setting in motion the most critical clash of the war.
The operation, slated for Sunday morning, November 21, 1920, was assigned to the IRA's Dublin Brigade, working closely with the Squad. The night before, Dick McKee, the brigade commander, was snatched in a British raid along with his deputy. But Collins, displaying nerves of steel, decided to proceed anyway.
Dozens of gunmen, including the future prime minister Sean Lémass, assembled at rendezvous points in Dublin shortly before 9 a.m. on November 21, a calm, gray winter's day. They were to hit 20 targets at eight hotels and rooming houses.
At 9 a.m. Squad member Vincent Byrne led 10 operatives to a house where two British officers were staying. A servant girl told them where to find the officers' bedrooms and how to get in by a back door. Byrne and another gunman dashed into one bedroom and ordered the officer to put up his hands. He asked what was going to happen to him. Byrne replied, "Ah, nothing," and then ordered him to march to another bedroom where the other officer was being held.
Byrne later recounted, "When the two of them were together, I said to myself: 'The Lord have mercy on your souls!' I then opened fire with my Peter [a Mauser C96 pistol]. They both fell dead."
In all, 14 men were killed that morning, 5 wounded. Most were shot after surrendering, some in front of their terrified wives or girlfriends. "It has been a day of black murder," a British official wrote in his diary.
That afternoon a Gaelic football match was scheduled at Dublin's Croke Park. A substantial force of "Auxies" and "Black and Tans" showed up to surround the stadium and search the crowd. The Auxiliary Division was made up of 1,500 former British Army officers assembled as a counterterrorism unit to complement the Royal Irish Constabulary. The Black and Tans were 7,000 British recruits—many of them World War I British Army vets—sent to fill out the constabulary's ranks. Because of a shortage of uniforms, many wore a mixture of the constabulary's dark green, almost black apparel and the army's khaki—hence their nickname, shared with a breed of hunting dogs.
Both Auxies and Tans became notorious for their brutality, which they displayed at Croke Park when they opened fire on the crowd, killing 12 civilians and wounding 60. The police claimed they had been shot at first, although even one Auxiliary officer conceded, "I did not see any need for any firing." The IRA believed the slaughter was straightforward revenge for that morning's assassinations.
All the facts of the first "Bloody Sunday" (there was another one in 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland) will never be known for certain, but its impact was clear. Like the Tet Offensive in 1968, it belied official claims of progress and encouraged the government to look for a negotiated solution.
And just as the U.S. armed forces during Tet lost the battle for public opinion even as they defeated the Vietcong, so too did the British Army badly hurt its own cause. Even the normally nationalistic Times of London harshly criticized the army's "lynch law," writing in 1920 that "an Army already perilously undisciplined, and a police force avowedly beyond control have defiled, by heinous acts, the reputation of England." Like counterinsurgents throughout the modern world, British soldiers in Ireland were upset when their government failed to adequately challenge reporting that they said exaggerated their misdeeds while downplaying those of the enemy.
General Nevil Macready, the army commander, raged against the "blackguard Press" and the "frocks" who ran the failed British propaganda effort to paint the IRA as the bad guys. His protests made no difference—the British were losing the battle of the narrative.
FOR SECURITY'S SAKE, many officials and officers had to move into Dublin Castle, where, wrote General Macready, they were "reduced to a state of nerves that it was pitiable to behold." In the countryside, the British closed constabulary outposts and isolated police in large, fortified barracks. Such measures cut off security forces from the populace and made it harder to gain intelligence to suppress the uprising. An Auxie wrote that he felt hunted every time he left Dublin Castle—"a horrible feeling." Even General Macready never ventured out without an automatic pistol, safety off, handy in his pocket or, when driving, in his lap. But increasingly the British forces were like a blinded fighter flailing at an elusive adversary.
The British forces found it extremely difficult to operate with such paltry intelligence about the IRA's full-time guerrillas, the Flying Columns. The Auxies would set off in their Crossley trucks or Rolls-Royce armoured cars to chase rumours of a pending IRA action, only to find that the rumour was false or that the enemy, warned of the raid, had melted away.
In frustration, following various deadly IRA operations, British troops or police rampaged through towns, burning homes and businesses, shattering shop windows, beating and sometimes killing. "Towns showed jagged stumps of broken teeth where fire had spread," wrote an IRA officer; "raiding parties smashed property and looted." This clumsy retaliation only increased support for the IRA among a people who had been largely apathetic at the start of the struggle. A British intelligence estimate concluded that "from the beginning of 1921…the bulk of the population was in a state of open rebellion or was in sympathy with such a rebellion." In many areas the "Shinners" (rebels, after Sinn Féin) even ran a shadow government, complete with its own police force and courts, that was more efficient than the Crown.
The British eventually deployed 50,000 troops and 14,000 constables to fight 5,000 of Collins's Volunteers. It was not enough. British generals estimated that pacifying this nation of fewer than three million people would have required dispatching tens of thousands more troops, possibly hundreds of thousands more, for an extended period.
That was more than a country so tired of war could bear. Having just waged a world war to liberate Belgium, the British were not willing to fight indefinitely to subjugate the small state next door—particularly when its people had expressed their preference for independence.
The prime minister, David Lloyd George, a Liberal, was willing to place several counties under martial law, thereby allowing suspects to be tried in military court. He even turned a blind eye to Black and Tan rampages and the interrogation and occasional killing of suspects "while trying to escape." But he was not willing to bomb Irish villages, execute captured terrorists en masse, or round up tens of thousands of civilians in concentration camps. He was not, in short, willing to treat Ireland as Britain treated Iraq in 1920, when it ruthlessly suppressed a much larger revolt at a cost of almost 9,000 lives, or India in 1919, when its troops killed more than 370 unarmed demonstrators in Amritsar.
Even War Minister Winston Churchill, while defending "the integrity of the British Empire," would not countenance a policy of "murder and counter-murder, terror and counter-terror."
By July 1921 the British had had enough and declared a truce. Eventually an Irish negotiating team that included Michael Collins took the best deal it could get. The British government was determined to defend the northern counties, which were chiefly Protestant. Under a treaty signed on December 6, 1921, the 26 southern counties would become the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion of the British Empire like Canada, while the six counties of Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom.
Bad as the exclusion of Northern Ireland was to many republicans, even more galling was a provision that Dáil members would have to swear loyalty to the Crown. A narrow majority of the Dáil endorsed the treaty, but half the IRA would not recognize the result and took up arms against the British and Collins's Irish Free State.
As commander of the Free State Army, Collins led the fight against his former comrades, a move that ensured he would not live to see a peaceful independent Irish state. On August 22, 1922, he was killed in an ambush by the anti-treaty IRA while motoring with a small security detail through his native County Cork.
The Big Fellow, who had eluded so many British manhunts, was only 31. Just a few weeks before, he had turned down his fiancée's entreaties to be more careful: "I can't help it and if I were to do anything else it wouldn't be me," he wrote her, "and I really couldn't stand it." When they heard of his death, a thousand anti-treaty republicans in a Free State prison spontaneously kneeled to recite the rosary in tribute to the man who had once been their leader.
THE CIVIL WAR ENDED in May 1923 with a resounding victory for the pro-treaty forces. Even if the so-called Tan War did not secure independence for the entire island, it was a remarkable achievement that presaged the success of colonial revolts throughout the world. The cost: 4,000 killed or wounded, including 950 British soldiers and police.
To this day Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom, despite decades of terrorism by diehards of the Provisional IRA (a group that split off from the IRA in 1969 to pursue the independence of Northern Ireland from England through any means necessary). The more recent IRA campaigns failed mainly because the British in later years regained the intelligence edge they had lost between 1919 and 1921. In the 1980s, when the Provisional IRA tried to launch a Tet-style offensive employing weaponry supplied by Muammar Qaddafi, high-ranking informants tipped off the Royal Ulster Constabulary's Special Branch.
"The British knew the IRA was coming," wrote Irish journalist Ed Moloney, "and they were ready."
The Provisional IRA also failed because its extremism cost it public sympathy, both in Ireland and Britain. In 1979 the Provisional IRA murdered Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, and five years later attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the entire British Cabinet by bombing their hotel in Brighton. Michael Collins had been astute enough to avoid such excesses—he knew when to stop fighting. The Irish experience in 1919–1921 shows that the most successful terrorist campaigns are waged for causes, usually nationalist, that are accepted broadly by the public and supported by major political parties. Fringe groups seeking radical social change—whether the anarchists of the 19th century or Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang of the 1970s—have little chance of success.
Terrorists also do better if they fight a democratic nation with a free press, whose coverage will help to magnify their attacks while restraining the official response. There is not much terrorism in totalitarian states, because the secret police can ruthlessly snuff it out. The British government, on the other hand, could not even censor the press without a declaration of war, which never occurred in Michael Collins's Ireland.
That was a lesson the Algerian National Liberation Front, the Vietcong, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other guerrilla and terrorist groups would learn and apply in their own battles.
While the Irish War of Independence demonstrates that insurgents can defeat liberal democracies like Great Britain, the British were much more successful in subsequent years in Malaya, Kenya, and Northern Ireland, among other battlegrounds. The Americans had considerable success in Iraq, as did Israel in the Second Intifada in Palestine, and Colombia in its battles against the FARC. But the 1919–1921 conflict shows that democracies must maintain public support to win wars against guerrillas and terrorists. Lucky for them, few insurgent leaders are the equal of Michael Collins.
Max Boot, the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article is adapted from his forthcoming Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present.
'Kick the Bully': Michael Collins Launches the 1921 Irish Rebellion
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