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The course of World War II was largely determined by the differing societies of the countries involved. By considering the societies, we can learn why the U.S. Army did well and the Italian did not, for example.
What affects the ability of a society to field a good army? A good soldier is healthy, intelligent, self-reliant, and willing as he enters the military. He then is trained well, and when he goes into the field he is well-equipped, well-led, and well-supplied. He is, further, rested from action at reasonable intervals, and fights as part of a well-knit and cohesive unit, cooperating with other such units. A country that can manage all of these will have a superb army. (About the closest I can think of the the Gulf War U.S. army.)
So what would be the ideal sort of society to make war? It would have good health care, good education, and a militaristic bent. It would be wealthy, and would be willing to spend on the troops. Soldiers would be respected, and the military virtues esteemed. There is a catch here, and that is that said society would be spending a lot on warfare. Since, presumably, most young men would spend two years or so in the service, and it would have a fairly high level of military spending, it would be outpaced, economically, by countries that spent less on the military and more on the economy. (This is one large reason why the United States grew economically before World War II, and shrunk, relatively, after the war.)
It should also be noted that every power practicing anything like total war had a manpower shortage, in that it could have used many more young men than it had. Nor was a "levee en masse" possible, since every power needed large numbers of men in other fields: industry, shipping, the navy, the air force, and so forth. Further, for various social reasons, many societies wasted available manpower. We will look at the impact on various societies in this manner.
Different countries also had different motivations. The Germans and Japanese had very similar "Master Race" attitudes, and fought hard to gain land, resources, and slaves for their peoples. The Italians fought for martial glory and little else meaningful, and Italian motivation improved markedly after their surrender, when they were fighting to liberate Italy from Germany. The rest of the Axis, Finland excepted, were German or Japanese allies because it seemed safest, but could never forget that a decisive Axis victory could be as dangerous for them as a decisive Axis defeat. The Allies, for the most part, were fighting for their homelands or to eliminate a grave threat. Allied motivation was mostly clear, apolitical, and strong.
The United States had been in an enviable position for much of a century at the time of World War II: large and growing population, abundant natural resources, a thriving economy with enough capitalism for rapid growth and enough trade unions to keep it from becoming too unbalanced, and little involvement in large-scale war. The result was that the U.S. had the best public education system in the world and an immense industrial base. The apparent handicaps were the lack of real military experience. Further, the United States had spent a decade in a major economic slump (the Depression), and so it was very easy to underestimate its industrial potential.
The United States did not begin to form a large army until mid-1941, when Europe had been at war for nearly two years. (Even then, the necessary legislation passed by one vote.) U.S. troops were fighting of necessity in the Pacific as early as December 1941, but did not fight by choice until the Guadalcanal invasion of August 1942. They did not appear in the European half of the war until late 1942, in the invasion of North Africa, by which time Germany and the British Empire had been at war for over three years. U.S. doctrine (as reflected by field manual 100-5) was basically sound, but contained many problem areas and the troops were not practiced in it. U.S. troops did not do well in North Africa.
There were great demands for American manpower. The Navy absorbed millions of men, the bombing offensive did also, the demand for war materials absorbed many millions of men and women (the need for workers pulled women out of the home and into the work force), and there was about 10% of the population that had the wrong skin color and therefore went underutilized.
During the 1930s, the Soviet Union developed some very good ideas of how a war should be fought, the "deep battle" concept. In 1935, the Red Army was possibly the most capable in the world. In 1936, Stalin started purging the Army of possible opposition, making sure that all of the top officers were politically reliable, and working his way to the lower ranks. The "deep battle" concepts were shelved as being politically suspect.
The purges continued for years, although the Siberian troops escaped the worst of them (partly because of sheer distance, partly because they faced a serious threat in Japan). In 1941, Stalin considered the situation threatening enough to end the purges and make one last reshuffle of officers, after which he planned some stability. The result was that most officers had no time to get used to their new roles when the Germans attacked. Meanwhile, the "deep battle" ideas were partially resurrected, but the tank forces were mostly untrained. Two tank divisions had good training, and fought well, but most had little idea what they were doing. On the northern section of the front, the tank drivers had an average of an hour and a half of training in their vehicles.
The prewar Red Army fought bravely but usually poorly. Commanders often arranged their men in formations from the textbooks, regardless of terrain, threat, or anything else. The Soviet High Command (Stavka) issued orders that commanders not distribute their anti-tank guns evenly across their front. Before long, the "old" army was in tatters, and the Soviets had to form a "new" army.
The old Red Army was mostly shattered, and the enemy was overrunning large population and production centers. This did not stop the Soviets; they formed a new army in combat, a tremendous achievement. When the new army showed up, it was packed into small, simple formations and thrust into combat. Once the Germans were stopped just outside Moscow, the Soviets could start training their troops more.
Nothing was going to completely compensate for the generally low educational level of the troops, but the Soviets did their best. Lower-level officers were expected, by and large, to carry out commands without displaying much initiative (although many did use their initiative when necessary). Soviet equipment was generally simple and fairly reliable. The Red Army won the war with the quality of its strategy, as opposed to the usually competent but uninspired tactics.
The French had gone into World War I with the belief that the offensive spirit would carry the day. The Germans showed them otherwise, and the war in France became a very slow, deliberate, defensive war. The French prepared for World War II by expecting the same. French commanders were not in easy contact with their subordinates. In World War I, it would not have mattered much; in World War II, it meant that French units would usually be responding to orders that had ceased to make sense.
Italy was united in the 1860s. Prior to that, it was several smaller countries and possessions. These countries shared a common language and, to a large extent a common culture, but not a common economy. Southern Italy was and is poor, backward, and uneducated by European standards. Northern Italy was and is a modern industrialized European country, and the Northerners tend to look down on the Southerners. (These are gross generalizations, but accurate enough for this discussion.)
The result was that Italian manpower could be roughly divided into two classes, the Northern and the Southern. Most officers and specialty troops were drawn from the North, and most of the infantry from the South. This meant that, in the line infantry units, the officers expected the troops to behave poorly. Naturally, the troops responded by performing below their abilities. Some of the infantry came from the Fascist party (the "blackshirts"). The Army was considered politically suspect (much as the German army was), and they received their military training from the Party. They were largely worthless in combat.
The Italian economy was also in a bad way. Neither the Fascists or the Nazis proved able to run a country in a sustainable manner. The Italian government had conducted a massive military buildup in the late 1930s, which ran the economy out of steam. The Italians had large quantities of aircraft and tanks that were good by 1938 standards and antiquated by 1942 standards. Some of their infantry support weapons simply defied rational explanation. Further, since withdrawing men from the economy weakened it further, divisions in Italy were normally kept at skeleton strength, and reinforced to full strength as they were about to ship out. No army could fight well under these circumstances, and the Italian one was no exception.
The Italian army was perhaps the least consistent in quality, though. Most of the infantry was bad, but some fought extremely well. British troops in the Eastern Africa campaign of 1940 and 1941 had great respect for their Italian opponents, and some Italian forces fought well in the Soviet Union. Since most popular accounts of the war focus on Italian performance in North Africa and Greece, this is frequently overlooked. Further, Italian artillery was generally good.
Things changed when Italy surrendered and went over to the Allied side. The British raised and armed Italian infantry formations, since they were running low on riflemen and replacements. In German-occupied Italy, partisan bands formed and made a real nuisance of themselves to the Germans. In this phase of the war, the Italians were not overly hurt by their inferior equipment, and the officers and men were largely drawn from the same groups, improving cohesion. More Italian soldiers were killed fighting for the Allies than the Axis, and they fought considerably better.
The Japanese had been blasted out of feudalism not long ago, and their culture was still greatly influenced by medieval concepts. The result was that the Army, at all ranks, was imbued with courage, determination, and brutality. This made the common soldier very dangerous, and the average officer mostly useless. Most Japanese soldiers were willing to do their utmost and achieve their objective or die trying. Most officers were unable to distinguish between attainable and unattainable objectives, and sentenced their men to die trying.
Having been only recently brought into the modern era, and living on an overcrowded island with few natural resources, the Japanese economy could not support a massive war effort. The militaristic Japanese government could misrun an economy with the best of the European Axis, and production was hindered by constant changes in design to reflect what the troops had just asked for. By any Western standard, the Japanese army was appallingly underarmed. The Japanese had few and weak tanks, and had difficulty making sufficient ammunition for the small amount of relatively light artillery they had.
Obviously, the Japanese were not going to win in the Allied manner of outproducing the enemy, so they were going to have to win against the odds. Japanese religion guaranteed that the Japanese were going to win, if they persisted, so the Japanese looked at ways of using willpower against the decadent Westerners. The most obviously futile method was the banzai charge, in which a Japanese unit would charge en masse, yelling fierce battle cries, against the Americans. The usual American response was to shoot at the Japanese with everything they had, and the usual result was that the Americans were frightened for an hour or so and the Japanese were dead.
All contents of these pages Copyright 1997 by David H. Thornley.