Book Review: World Empire Lost

My Honourable Mention in Scott Alexander's Book Review Contest

Early this year I entered and achieved an Honourable Mention in Scott Alexander’s annual book review contest for my review of World Empire Lost by General Armin von Roon. I’ve reposted my full entry below.

This was the first year I’d entered I was pretty pleased to get an Honourable Mention¹: it put me in the top 13.3%² of what’s traditionally a pretty competitive field of strong writers. The finalists got their entries published on Scott’s blog, for people to vote on; the Honourable Mentions didn’t, hence publishing it here.

I hope you enjoy it!

Your Book Review: World Empire Lost by Armin von Roon³

Written by a convicted Nazi war criminal from his cell, World Empire Lost is a history of World War II such as you’ve never read before. It combines lucid military analysis and geostrategic insights with abominable racial views and the downplaying of atrocities, giving a small window of comprehension into how and why Germany unleashed the hell it did upon the world.

Most of us are somewhat familiar with World War II. As far as the military campaigns go, the book is a straightforward mirror of our usual histories of D-Day, the Battle of Britain or the Pacific War. He has a gift for summarising the aims and objectives of a campaign in a few well-put lines, or in describing individual battles vividly and clearly. His cutting dismissal of other nations’ military mistakes (particularly the Italians and French) is even, at times, genuinely amusing.

But if this is history through a mirror, it is a dark mirror. The author, General Armin von Roon, was a professional German soldier who - like many others - served willingly and eagerly under Hitler. The military analysis is frequently interrupted for discussions of Hitler’s vision for Germany, or arguments about why Germany deserved to conquer, exploit and starve the people of Eastern Europe.

He takes time to lay out the overall aims and ambitions of Germany, in his view a nation unfairly victimised by Versailles, shut out by England and France from colonial possessions, with Hitler a flawed genius doing no more than claiming his due. Mussolini and Churchill become self-aggrandising bombasts, Hirohito a gallant underdog and Stalin a mass murderer.⁴ But for von Roon, it is Roosevelt who is the real villain of the war, the crippled genius in his wheelchair⁵, orchestrating tens of millions of deaths so that America could achieve world domination:

“This great manipulator so managed the war that other nations bled themselves almost to death, so as to hand his country the rule of the earth on a silver platter... America in four years of global war lost about three hundred thousand on all fronts including her war with Japan! For this almost bloodless conquest of the earth, which has no parallel in all history, the American people can thank that enigmatic, still shrouded figure, the Augustus of the industrial age, the Dutch-descended millionaire cripple, Roosevelt.”  

The book was first published in 1965, at a time when von Roon was still serving time for the atrocities for which he was convicted at Nuremberg, primarily on the Eastern Front. It was written as a summary for ‘popular’ consumption of his much larger two-volume operational analysis of the war, entitled Land, Sea, and Air Campaigns of World War II.

The version I read was translated into English a year later by a senior US naval officer, Victor Henry - and in this review I will also be referring to his translation notes at times, particularly where they offer a biting comment on the (in)accuracies of von Roon’s account. As Henry puts it:

“His version of events, while professional and well informed, can scarcely be taken at face value. He was a German through and through. On the whole I have let General von Roon describe the war his own way. I could not, however, translate certain passages without challenging them; hence my occasional comments. - VH.”⁶

In this review we will be looking in some detail at the war’s opening stages, as well as von Roon’s - deplorable - views on Hitler, the other belligerents and the Holocaust. We will skip most of the blow-by-blow military analysis, though I will include a couple of examples, to give a flavour. And we will conclude by considering the book’s overall theme, of ‘World Empire’ won and lost, and the extent to which the war can be considered “The War of the British Succession.”

But before that, we have one important question to answer:

Why read a book by a Nazi war criminal?

“In these pages, therefore, one peers into an able but distorted mind. - VH”

There are plenty of other good histories of World War II. However good the military analysis in World Empire Lost, why not read one of the many alternatives that were not written by a Nazi?

The great question we must face when looking back at World War II is not, “Why did they do what they did?” but “How might it happen here?” There was nothing unique about Germany. As an American Pulitzer Prize winner reminded us in October 2001, after a small group of Al-Qaida terrorists had flown planes into the Twin Towers, “That eternal benchmark of barbarism [the Holocaust], let us remember, was set not by a Third World country, not by Orientals, not by the Muslims, but by the Germans, an advanced European nation. The evil in human hearts knows no boundary, except the deeper, stronger human will to freedom, order, and justice.”⁷

In less than a decade, Hitler and the Nazi party took Germany from a respectable member of the community of nations to a global pariah at war with the world and the perpetrator of a slaughter that has never been equalled, before or since. How did he do it? Why did the millions of Germans, in industry, in the diplomatic service and above all in the military - many of whom had not initially supported the Nazis - go along with him so enthusiastically? As Henry says, when discussing why he translated him,

“Without the Armin von Roons who followed him and fought for him to the last, Adolf Hitler would have lived and died an impotent fanatical loudmouth, instead of becoming the most powerful monster of history, who all but brought down the civilized world…For six years these people battled almost the whole world to a standstill, and they also committed unprecedented crimes - VH.”

The worst of reading World Empire Lost is that, the more one reads, the more von Roon’s warped logic and twisted worldview begins to get inside your head. In that it is like C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters: von Roon, like Screwtape, is eloquent and entertaining, his arguments persuasive, and his assertions are based on truths and half-truths more than on outright lies.

It is true, after all, that the Poles treated the Jews badly - and that the rest of the world refused to take in them, even once Germany’s actions were revealed:

“If Hebrews were no longer welcome in Germany, it developed that they were not much more welcome anywhere else. Year by year after Hitler took power, western Europe stiffened its restrictions against admitting Jews. The sparsely settled vast lands of the New World, led by the “haven of oppressed mankind,” the U.S.A., clanged iron doors shut in the Jews’ faces. This was a black chapter in the tale of man’s inhumanity to man.”⁸

Von Roon’s justification of atrocities is indefensible and at times hard to read. One can have more understanding when he discusses the failures of the Weimar Republic and the Great Depression - and the very real threat the communists posed to Germany. Most seductive is his central thesis, that underpins the entirety of World Empire Lost including the title, that “Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s one war aim was to destroy Germany so as to win unimpeded rule of the world for American monopoly capital.”⁹

To read World Empire Lost is to voluntarily dip oneself into a cesspit. It is not comfortable, nor is it pleasant; upon emerging, one must check oneself to be sure that no stain remains. But the events described in it did happen, and were justified and carried out by tens, if not hundreds, of thousands who thought the same way as von Roon. That is something it behooves us to understand.

 The War Begins

“The reader will have to grow used to the German habit of blaming other countries for getting themselves invaded by Germans - VH.”

Von Roon describes the opening stages of the war vividly, with crisp sentences that explain the strategic position and how the subsequent conflict unfolded. His perspective provides an unusual insight into how and why Germany took gambles, as well the times when an onslaught that, from the usual Western perspective often appears inexorable, rested on shakier foundations than it might appear.

Politically speaking, he strongly supports the arguments set out by Hitler in his speeches: that Germany, mistreated at Versailles, is simply reclaiming what it is due, and has a natural right to carve out an empire in Eastern Europe.

He is scathing about the efforts of the French and the English to counter Hitler, saying that “France, war-weary, luxury-loving, and rotted by socialism, was reluctant to take effective action,” or that “Chamberlain’s defiant move, like the weak pawing of a cornered rabbit, only spurred the Führer to greater boldness.” But it turns out that much of this is simply that they expect Hitler to act like a normal politician, not the deranged megalomaniac he was.

Von Roon considers the other world leaders (Roosevelt excepted) are simply idiots for not being as treacherous and power-hungry as Hitler. In justifying Hitler’s seizure of the rest of Czechoslovakia, shortly after the Munich Treaty, he simply argues that, “Hitler’s promises, like those of all politicians, were merely contingent and tactical, of course. It was asinine of Chamberlain to think otherwise, if he did.” He will use the same argument later on to justify Germany’s breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Russia.

One of the more darkly amusing parts of this section is von Roon’s, apparently earnest, attempt to apply moral realism to other nation’s decisions to resist Germany aggression. The basic argument takes the form:

●       Country X had ethical failings.

●       Also, it was weaker than Germany.

●       By resisting Germany’s invasion they suffered much more than if they had not resisted

●       Therefore morally speaking they should have surrendered to prevent that suffering.

●       Therefore any death to civilians is therefore the fault of their stupid and corrupt leaders.

Let us see how this unfolds with Poland (I have taken key paragraphs of his longer argument, which he scatters amongst descriptions of the military campaign):

“Poland in 1939 was a backward and ill-informed dictatorship of reactionary colonels and politicians with fantastic territorial aims, a government extremely brutal to minorities (especially the Ukrainians and the Jews) and unjust and mendacious to its own people; a government that pounced like a hyena on Czechoslovakia at the Munich crisis and tore a province from that country in its hardest hour.”

As England could not help Poland, in von Roon’s view the guarantee was futile and counterproductive. (More interestingly, he argues that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact only came about because “the British gentlemen-politicians disdained the Bolsheviks”; i.e. that it was a failure of allied diplomacy that gave Germany its chance. I am unsure if this is true, but it seems plausible: certainly there was little love of communism in England at that time, and indeed some who thought Nazi Germany was the lesser evil.)

“Whatever the motive for the Polish guarantee, it was a piece of suicidal stupidity. It stiffened the corrupt Polish army oligarchy to stand fast on the just German grievances involving Danzig and the Polish Corridor. It placed in the hands of these backward militarists the lever to start another world war. Otherwise it had no meaning, because in the event, England was unable to give Poland actual military help.”

Poland’s resistance - and England and France’s declaration of war - was similarly pointless because Poland never recovered its former borders:

“The Second World War began over the question of Polish territorial integrity, but Poland has not recovered, and will never recover, its 1939 borders. It has lost that part of its territory which, through the deal between Hitler and Stalin, was absorbed into the Soviet Union. England went to war with us over the question of these borders, dragging in France and eventually the United States. At Yalta, England and the United States endorsed forever Hitler’s gift of Polish territory to the Soviets. Such are the ironies of history.”

So clearly, the right and moral thing to do was to surrender Poland to Germany:

“The final absurdity of this inept start to a terrible global struggle was that Czechoslovakia, betrayed by England in 1938, did not fight, and in the whole war period lost less than one hundred thousand people. Poland, supported by England in 1939, fought and lost almost six million dead (though about half of these were Jews). Both countries ended up as Communist puppets under the heel of the Soviet Union. Which government then was the wiser, and which people the more fortunate? When great powers fall out, small powers do well to bow to the storm wind, in whichever direction it blows strongest. That was what the Poles forgot.”

It is all rather like the ‘she provoked me’ ‘defence’ for wife-beating.

Furthermore, it is a false equivalence. Czechoslovakia, with its large German population, was not Poland. Given the explicit plan, and subsequent reality, to enslave and starve the Poles, not to mention slaughter the Jewish population, it is hard to blame the Poles for resisting, however futilely - nor to blame the Allies for finally taking a stand.

Later we will see similar arguments deployed with respect to Yugoslavia, where we are told that, “the unfortunate Yugoslav people thus paid with wholesale deaths, a surrendered army, and national destruction, for the scheming of Churchill and Roosevelt,” and even that, “Adlerangriff, the Luftwaffe’s “Eagle Attack” on England in the summer of 1940, was essentially a peacemaking gesture.” I doubt the blitzed citizens of London felt the same way!

Alongside the surreal justifications for Germany aggression can be found a highly readable summary of the opening of the war. Von Roon has a gift for summarising complex strategic situations swiftly and readably. We learn, for example, that:

“Poland is a plain: a larger Belgium with few natural obstacles and no real boundaries. The Carpathian Mountains to the south are breached by the Jablunka pass, affording ready access from Czechoslovakia to Cracow and the Vistula. The rivers Vistula, Narew, and San present problems, but in the summer and early autumn the water levels are low and the rivers are in many places fordable by motor vehicles and horses.

The plan called for simultaneous flank attacks from the north and the south, aimed to cut off the Corridor and proceed to Warsaw. The Poles elected to stand all along their indefensible border, thus inviting quick fragmenting, encirclement, and reduction. They should have prepared their main defenses along the lines Vistula-Narew-Bug. This would have prolonged hostilities, and encouraged the British and French to attack our weak holding force in the west.”

The book is also open about German weaknesses:

“While the Luftwaffe played a strong support role, it was the horse-drawn artillery massed outside Warsaw, and not the air bombardment, that in the end knocked out the city’s capacity to resist and brought the eventual surrender. This heavy reliance on horses betrayed our serious lack of combat readiness for world war.”

Poland aside, these opening stages are described in quite high-level, strategic terms - in contrast to the level of detail with which Von Roon will describe later campaigns.  We learn of the Winter War between Russia and Finland (in which Russia performed abysmally), and of the invasion of Denmark, Belgium and Norway. For my part, I had always been rather uncertain about why Germany had invaded Norway¹⁰, but von Roon explains that, in doing so, Germany, “forestalled the British, opened up a much wider coastline to counter the blockade, and secured the Swedish iron ore supply for the rest of the war.”

He is appropriately scathing about France’s lamentable preparations and performance. Von Roon’s pen treats the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’¹¹ no more mercifully than Guderian’s panzers, with his description of the Maginot Line being one of my favourite passages in the book:

“Informed military men had a question or two about this Maginot Line. It was indeed a marvel of engineering, but was it not too short? Beginning at the Swiss Alps, it ran along the French-German border for more than a hundred miles to a place called Longuyon. There it stopped. Between Longuyon and the English Channel, there still remained a hole of open level country, the boundary between France and Belgium, at least as long as the Line itself. In 1914, we bestial Germans had attacked through Belgium precisely because this hole offered such a flat fine road to Paris. Couldn’t we just go around the famous Maginot Line and come down by that route again?”

After a rapid description of the equally rapid campaign, “The French passed from the stage of historical greatness. Germany’s implacable enemy of the centuries had at last come to grief. Strategically, they had guessed wrong on the use of industrial power in war, and had wasted their national energy and treasure on an enormous tragic joke in steel and concrete: half a wall.”

Von Roon and Hitler

“His concluding estimate of Hitler overlooks one or two small points - VH.”

Von Roon has a love-hate relationship with Hitler. On the one hand he repeatedly blames him for foolish and reckless decisions that led to German defeats (consistent with his general attitude that the Wehrmacht can do no wrong). It is in these sections that he sees Hitler most clearly - and he correctly attributes these to Hitler’s arrogance and self-delusion (at one point he refers to Hitler’s “tantrums”; in another to “obtuse political egotism”), as well as the broader folly of a political leader trying to micro-manage a war in the modern age: “Hitler’s amateurishness showed up badly in Norway. It cropped up again and again in every campaign, tending only to get grosser as time went on.”

But like so many Germans of that period, at other times he falls under the siren song of Hitler that seduced the German nation to follow him. Despite his later blunders, the defeat and catastrophe to which he led Germany, the scales can never entirely fall from his eyes. The man who “brought prosperity and rearmed us” could be forgiven a multitude of sins.

A traditional army officer from an aristocratic Prussian family, von Roon was not a natural fan of the Nazis: he writes that “A riffraff of vulgar agitators, philosophic idealists, fanatics, opportunists, bullies, and adventurers, some of them extremely able and energetic, swept into power with Hitler.” Even top Nazis, such as Goering and Himmler do notescape the caustic stroke of his pen (“Himmler’s idea of generalship was to execute officers who failed to hold hopeless positions he had ordered held.”).

But Hitler is different. His successes von Roon attributes to genius - even when they stem from the same meddling impulses that caused the disasters. On a purely objective level, he is correct that Hitler’s rise from obscure nobody to all-powerful dictator of Germany, its successful rearming, and its bloodless capture of Austria and Czechoslovakia was an achievement of a highly successful, if utterly immoral, politician.

“It was Adolf Hitler’s political genius to weld the mystique of the nationalist Reich to the rabble-rousing appeal of socialism. National Socialism resulted, an explosive mass movement.”

Von Roon’s admiration is helped by the fact that he is not repulsed by the slaughter that Hitler unleashed. In fact, he explicitly argues this on a number of occasions:

“Conventional morality cannot apply to the deeds of such men, for it is they who create the new modes and themes of morality in each age. This Hegelian world view is, of course, at the other pole from the petit bourgeois morality which expects great nations to behave like well-brought-up young ladies in a finishing school, and would hold a mighty armed people no different, in the rules applicable to its conduct, than some pale shoe clerk.”

In my reading this is a specious attempt to deflect moral responsibility. Von Roon may or may not believe in the “Hegelian world view” - but it is clear that he himself cares little  for the destruction brought about by World War. He may not himself hate the Jews, but their slaughter is, at most, “regrettable.” Fundamentally, his aims are Hitler’s aims, his ambitions for Germany Hitler’s ambitions, and his belief in Germany’s right to dominate, Hitler’s belief.

“We went on following Adolf Hitler to the last, to unbelievable triumphs and unparalleled disasters, from Pearl Harbor to the fall of Berlin, because he was our national destiny. A romantic idealist, an inspiring leader, dreaming grand dreams of new heights and depths of human possibilities, and at the same time an icy calculator with iron willpower, he was the soul of Germany…

…He fully expressed our people’s vigorous yearning for a place in the sun, and for a healthy German culture uncontaminated by the poisons of Asiatic communism, Western materialism, and the weak negative aspects of Judeo-Christian morality exposed by Friedrich Nietzsche. His domestic policies brought prosperity and tranquillity. His foreign policies brought diplomatic victories over the world’s strongest nations, our recent conquerors. When he led us to war, against the forebodings of our General Staff because we were far from ready, our nation won magnificent military triumphs…

…He had his faults, including a definite taste for cruelty, a certain ingrained petit bourgeois vulgarity, an exaggerated opinion of his military acumen, and the well-known, regrettable tendency to anti-Semitism.”

As the war turns against Germany, von Roon’s criticisms become more frequent and damning. He admits that, “There is no question that this man’s lust for power was insatiable, and it is certainly regrettable that the German people did not understand his true nature until it was too late.” And at one point he claims that “at Stalingrad the later Hitler was born”.

But as Henry correctly points out, “Stalingrad occurred at the end of 1942. By then Hitler had led his people to commit virtually all the crimes for which the world execrates National Socialist Germany - VH.”

Regardless of what he writes, one is left with the feeling that, for von Roon, Hitler’s only unforgivable sin was to lose.

The Other Belligerents

“Roon’s mentality cannot absorb American combat policy, which is quite simple and non-European: to lose as few lives as possible, yet win battles and wars - VH.”

In keeping with Nazi ideology, racial stereotypes underly World Empire Lost’s discussions of the other belligerents. We are told that “the stolid Slav fights best in defense of his fatherland” - and, indeed, the Russians are rarely referred to without invocation of the word “horde.” His description of Stalin is, however, entirely accurate:

“Stalin was fully as ruthless a personage as Hitler. He ordered many vast secret slaughters of his own Russian people, which his minions obediently carried out.”

Meanwhile the Americans are “a mongrel nation”, the “spoiled children of modern history” while the English pilots in the Battle of Britain “performed with dash and valor, like their German racial cousins.”

Von Roon is schizophrenic with respect to the Japanese. At one point he asserts, without evidence, that, “Adolf Hitler at once embraced these doughty little Asians as comrades. The mystical bunkum of Nordic supremacy was for Nazi fanatics,” later going on to argue that, “It was far more moral for this Asiatic people to take over administration of this rich sphere, than for a few drunken white civil servants of defunct European empires to continue their pukka-sahib parasitism.¹² Adolf Hitler had sought only friendly ties with this clever hard-working people of destiny.”

On the other hand, racial stereotypes pervade his discussions of specific Japanese admirals and their decisions, and in his discussion of Midway his Nazi race essentialism shines through strongly:

“To this day few Americans grasp that at Midway their navy won a sea victory to stand in military chronicles with Salamis and Lepanto. For the third time in planetary history, Asia sailed forth to attack the West in force, with ultimate stakes of world dominion. At Salamis the Greeks turned back the Persians; at Lepanto the Venetian coalition halted Islam; and at Midway the Americans stopped, at least for our century, the rising tide of Asiatic color.”

Regarding England, World Empire Lost echoes Hitler’s own writings in claiming that, “Of all things, Hitler wanted no war with England,” and buys into the dystopian vision in which “Germany [would] gain ascendancy over the Euro-Asian heartland in a world-dominating partnership with the sea lords of Britannia.”

This, as far as it goes, is probably true, in that it would have been highly convenient for Hitler if England had chosen to sit out the war. How long a Germany dominant over much of Europe would have respected British neutrality is another matter.

His perspective on Churchill is intriguing. He describes him as “A Hitler restrained by democracy”:

“Churchill was exactly the kind of brilliant amateur meddler in military affairs that Hitler was. Both rose to power from the depths of political rejection. Both relied chiefly on oratory to sway the multitude. Both somehow expressed the spirit of their peoples, and so won loyalty that outlasted any number of mistakes, defeats, and disasters. Both thought in grandiose terms, knew little about economic and logistical realities, and cared less. Both were iron men in defeat. Above all, both men had overwhelming personalities that could silence rational opposition while they talked.”

What he means by this is that Hitler’s assumption of absolute power meant he could indulge his worst mistakes, leading Germany to disaster, whereas Churchill could not:

“The crucial difference was that in the end Churchill had to listen to the professionals, whereas the German people had committed itself to the fatal Führerprinzip…With a Führer’s authority, Churchill would also have frittered away the Allied landing craft, always a critical supply problem, in witless attempts to recapture the Greek islands and to storm Rhodes.”

While any moral equivalence between Hitler and Churchill is absurd, it seems that von Roon has struck on an element of truth here. Both Hitler and Churchill were gifted orators, outstanding for their ability to unite a nation under their will and commit it whole-heartedly to deeds that any rational observer would baulk at. Both thought best at the strategic level and made many mistakes of detail (indeed, Churchill’s career was littered with mistakes and failures - it was only in the Second World War itself that he truly excelled).

Where von Roon errs is to assume that democracy was somehow a fetter upon Churchill’s nature, rather than integral to it. The true difference between the two men is that Hitler used his oratorical brilliance for evil, while Churchill used his for good, committing Britain to the ultimate moral cause of stopping Nazi tyranny, even at the cost of his beloved empire.

For it is true, as von Roon says, that the easiest, safest, most ‘logical’ course for Britain in 1940, after the fall of France and the desperate evacuation of Dunkirk, would have been to make peace.

“For them, a clear wise course lay open: negotiated peace with Germany. As this writer has often pointed out, had England made such a peace the British Empire would exist today…Germany, after all, entered the war with little to lose, but in 1939 England was the world’s first power. As a result of the war, though a supposed victor, she lost her world-girdling empire and shrank to the size of her home islands. Had the Adlerangriff induced her to make peace with Germany in 1940, that empire would almost surely still be hers…

…England threw away her last chance to prolong her world role, linked to a vigorous rising continental power; after that, she allied herself with Bolshevism to crush that power, Europe’s last bastion against barbaric Asia; and she became as a result a weak withered satellite of the United States.”

In the summer of 1940 Britain was put to the test and was not found wanting. It recognised in Nazi Germany an evil that surpassed national interests, an evil that threatened all of humanity - and that was worth sacrificing everything to stop. And Britain’s resolve in this matter can be traced primarily to one man: Winston Churchill.

Roosevelt

In World Empire Lost Roosevelt is the principal villain of the war. He is the one foreign leader whose ability von Roon respects.

His principal thesis is that Roosevelt deliberately set out to manipulate the Second World War in such a way as to destroy the empires of Britain and France, defeat Japan and use the Soviet Union to bleed Germany until such time as the United States could deliver the final blow - all to secure the world for American domination.

“His real opponent, produced by fate at this point in time, was an even craftier and more ruthless political genius, with more sober military judgment and greater material means for industrialized warfare: Franklin D. Roosevelt…

…Our propaganda office called him a tool of the Jews, but of course that was the silliest bosh. Roosevelt did nothing to save the Jews. He knew that any such action would annoy Congress and interfere with winning the war. Under his clever façade of a Christian humanitarian liberal, he was one of the coldest, most ruthless calculators in history.”

It is a fascinating thesis, one that draws in the reader with a logic that is both compelling and - largely - internally consistent. Like all of the best conspiracy theories it is founded upon more than a grain of truth.

It is true, for example, that Roosevelt was not an isolationist, recognised the threat of Nazi Germany and, accordingly, was more willing to consider committing the United States to war against Germany than many in the United States. It is true that he used his political influence to keep the United States militarily strong or to implement policies that would strengthen those fighting Hitler, such as lend-lease. It is also true that Roosevelt, like most Americans, was not a fan of colonialism and was sympathetic to the various independence movements around the world. World Empire Lost is not wrong about this.

Similarly, looking at the deeds of the United States, one must acknowledge that both lend-lease and - in particular - their approach to convoying - went well beyond what one would expect of a ‘benevolent neutral’. And US and UK military planners were indeed working together well in advance of America’s entry into the war.

But none of this means that Roosevelt, rather than Hitler was the principal aggressor or ‘warmonger’. His support for first Britain, and then the Soviet Union was to keep them in the fight against Germany - not to sap their strength.

Von Roon argues that Roosevelt delayed help, such as Lend-Lease until the last possible moment, similar to how Stalin halted his march on Warsaw until the Polish resistance had exhausted itself against the Nazis. He claims that, “This was what Roosevelt had been icily waiting for in his wheelchair: this written confession by the British Prime Minister that without American aid the Empire was finished. Within two weeks he had proposed Lend-Lease to his advisers, and within a month he had laid it before Congress.” But there is simply no evidence to support this.

In World Empire Lost, “Roosevelt was ready for war with Germany, he ardently desired it.” He is in possession of incomparable advantages: “America had the largest and most advanced industrial plant on earth. This mercenary nation, devoted to the almighty dollar and blessed with wonderful mineral resources stolen from the Indians, had reared an immense plant capacity for making toys and trifles. But it was a capacity readily convertible to munitions manufacture on the most fantastic imaginable scale.” His only obstacle is the American people, who do not want to go to war:

“The weakness of the American President was both internal and external. Where the German people were united behind their leader, the American people, confused and nonplussed by Roosevelt’s supercilious and untrustworthy personality, were divided. Where Hitler disposed of the greatest armed forces on earth, at their peak of strength and fighting trim, Roosevelt had no Army, no Air Force, and a dispersed, ill-trained Navy. How then could the American President bring any weight to bear?”

For two years, frustrated by Congress, Roosevelt plays one stroke after another, keeping Britain in the war and rebuilding America’s arsenal. Von Roon argues that “Roosevelt’s instinct for subtle and breathtaking chicanery on a world scale was never better displayed than in his conduct on the question of the Atlantic convoys.”

He deliberately keeps America out of the war until after Barbarossa, “until [Germany was] embroiled with the tough gigantic hordes of Stalin.” The Russians are his dupes: “The Russian people made sacrifices in blood never matched in all history, to transfer world hegemony from one Anglo-Saxon power to another.”

Finally, after Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt’s chance comes:

“Roosevelt rammed through Congress gigantic war plans and expenditures which a few days earlier would have been utterly inconceivable. The Congress, which in August had extended a mild draft law by a single vote after weeks of debate, now unanimously passed fierce declarations of war, and all Roosevelt’s long-plotted stupendous war programs, in a matter of hours.”

Ultimately, what von Roon cannot grasp is that the United States - and Britain - rightly saw Nazi Germany as a greater threat than even the Soviet Union. Boshevism for von Roon is the ultimate threat. So he cannot understand, and nor can he forgive, the fact that the democracies allied with Stalin against Hitler:

“Why in fact did the Americans and British never grasp that only by letting us win against Russia could the world flood of Bolshevism be stemmed? Churchill at least wanted to land in the Balkans to forestall Stalin in middle Europe. If this was bad strategy, because we were too strong and the terrain too difficult, it was at least alert politics. Roosevelt would have none of it. Since he could not annihilate us, he wanted to help the Bolsheviks to do it. So he sacrified Christian Europe to American monopoly capital for a brief gluttonous feast, at the price of a new dark age now fast falling on the world.”

To that, we are forced to answer in the words of Churchill: “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

Von Roon and the Holocaust

“They started the worst war in mankind’s history and came too close to winning it, and under the cloak of wartime secrecy they committed unheard-of crimes - VH.”

We must give von Roon this much credit: he does not deny the Holocaust. You will search in vain for further credit in this section, for he deserves none.

These sections are amongst the most unpleasant of World Empire Lost to read. The subject matter - genocide - is of course intrinsically horrific, but to read justifications or excuses for the deliberate slaughter of millions is almost worse. I have no wish to give significant airtime to these views, so will present the bare minimum necessary for the reader to get a sense of von Roon’s abhorrent views. I hope that it goes without saying that I do not agree, in any way, with the words of his that I present here.

In keeping with his racial views, von Roon’s writing contains a certain base-level of antisemitism - probably not dissimilar to those of many Germans of his era (and, regrettably, many Poles, French and Britons). He does not appear to actively desire their genocide - but rather represents the antipathy that caused so many in Germany to follow orders, or to stand by and do nothing, as the Jews were sent to their deaths. Von Roon acknowledges that, “the essence of this policy was the elimination of the Jewish race in Europe,” but this, for him, is at worst, “regrettable.” At one point he says, of the worst crime in history, “Tragically, it all depended on the point of view.”

The arguments put forward in World Empire Lost closely reflect those made in other German writings, including Mein Kampf, as well as information contained within the Wannsee Protocol, a surviving Nazi document that contains the minutes of the January 1942 Nazi conference at which plans for the ‘Final Solution’ were developed and agreed.¹³ I will spare the reader all but a small taste of this:

“But the Jews were the backbone of German liberalism. Liberalism had given them the rights and privileges of citizens. Liberalism had turned them loose to use their energy and cleverness in finance, the professions, and the arts. These people who had been kept apart were now to be seen everywhere— prosperous, exotic, holding high places, and indiscreetly displaying their new-won gains. To the Jews, liberalism was their salvation. Therefore, to a dedicated nationalist like Adolf Hitler, the Jews appeared as ultimate enemies…

…The Jews had to be classed as a potential underground, formidable in numbers, cleverness, and means…

…since these people were in any case condemned to death, would not a quick, unexpected, painless end free them from long woes? And would it not simultaneously relieve our forces of a clogging problem, the proportions of which had not been realized in time? Here, in these essentially humane considerations, lay the reason for the gas chambers.”

At one level von Roon clearly recognises the Holocaust was wrong. This can be seen in his frequent protests that “The army had no choice but to cooperate with the regime’s special Jewish measures,” or that “The German army, from the lowest foot soldier to the highest general in Supreme Headquarters, had no knowledge whatever until the war ended and the so-called death camps were uncovered by the victorious armies.” (It should be noted that both of these statements are categorically false).

Despite this, he is unable to unequivocally condemn it, but instead twists himself into various knots in an attempt to say that the Holocaust was - somehow - a “regrettable” mistake, rather than an inexcusable act of genocide. At one point he launches into a bizarre argument that the Holocaust was unnecessary because the Jews weren’t as powerful as Hitler thought:

“The Jews proved unable to save themselves, or to influence anybody else to save them; and self-preservation is the test of a nation’s true power. The Jews beyond Hitler’s reach looked on helplessly while their European blood brothers were going to an obscure but grim fate. Where then was their political stranglehold on the West, that Hitler took as an article of faith? Where was their boundless wealth, when they could not induce or bribe a single country— not even one small South American republic— to open its doors? In 1944, where was their all-penetrating influence, when the secret began to leak out, and they in vain implored the Anglo-Americans to bomb Auschwitz?”

He is on more familiar ground when he argues that the Holocaust, while bad, was nothing special:

“Only Germany suffered the ignominy of having her records unveiled. Only Germany was stripped naked. Even the defeated Japanese were allowed to keep their emperor and their government structure, which ensured suppression of their papers on the sack of Nanking and the Bataan Death March. “Wannsee Protocols” exist in the secret papers of every nation. Human nature is everywhere alike. Let America uncover its files about its extermination of the Red Indian, its robbery of Texas from Mexico, its oppression of the Nisei after Pearl Harbor. Then let us see how the facts compare with the disclosures in the Wannsee Protocol…Alas! Cologne, Dresden, Katyn, and Hiroshima showed that this kind of moral failure in wartime was certainly not confined to Germany.”

Such arguments remain a staple of left-wing activism, from those eager to do down their own nations and to create false equivalences between the West and the rest. It is certainly true that no nation’s past is without blemish - and the extent to which strategic bombing was justified remains a hotly fought subject to this day. I will happily concede that the moral case of Dresden and the Blitz are similar - but any reasonable student of history must acknowledge that the Holocaust stands alone.

As to colonialism, the rights and wrongs of the various European empires are still debated, as well as the overall impact for both good and ill. Some isolated individual actions, such as the Amritsar Massacre, should certainly be unequivocally condemned - as indeed it was, by the British Parliament of the time. I would simply observe that while it is certainly true that India desired its independence from Britain at the time of the Second World War, enough Indians had a positive view of Britain that some 2.5 million of them chose to serve in the British forces, the largest volunteer army in history. If Nazi Germany fielded volunteer armies of 2.5 million Jews or Slavs, I have yet to hear about it.

The most revealing point, perhaps, is when Von Roon discusses the impact of the Holocaust on the German war effort, which he does at disturbing length. Again, only a small sample of this is needed:

“The worst damage was in manpower. Large numbers of healthy German men were diverted from combat roles to the herding of Jews. Round-up squads, camp guards, etc., were recruited from local populations, but even so enough Germans for several divisions may have been fussing with Jews in bureaus and in camps, instead of fighting.

…

The railroading burden was oppressive and continuous. No matter how tightly the trains were packed - and that this was carried to excess is common knowledge - the tying up of rolling stock remained a grave problem. There never were sufficient trains and locomotives for the fighting fronts. Combat divisions sat shivering at rear depots while trains devoted to shuttling the Jews rolled eastward jam-packed and went back empty, cut off from use for any other purpose.”

This, particularly in the sheer volume of space he devotes to the subject is, it seems to me, the best representation of von Roon’s real opinion. He did not particularly wish to kill the Jews - but nor did he care if they were killed. What mattered to him was that “the Nazi policy toward the Jews must be called a costly military blunder.” Whether the Jews lived or died was of relevance only so far as their life or death contributed to Germany’s success.

This conclusion is reinforced by von Roon’s discussion of another Nazi atrocity, the wide-scale expropriation of food (and other matters) from the occupied portions of the Soviet Union. Again we see that the interests of Germany are all that matter, and that the lives of those considered to be ‘untermensch’ - Slavs, Jews and others - simply do not matter.

“The proposals of the Green Folder were, without question, draconic. They meant the death by starvation of tens of millions of Russians. Göring admitted as much, and the documents are spread on the record, so denying this is absurd…

…The plan was to feed the southern Slavs a minimum caloric intake, so that they could keep up production. But Germany’s need for so much of Russia’s produce would naturally create a food shortage on a large scale. A serious wastage of the northern Russian population had to be accepted as a result…

…In the light of these ideas, the argument that we should have treated the Ukrainians and other Slavs nicely, so that they would help us overthrow their Communist rulers, becomes clearly ridiculous. Germany, a nation as poor as it was powerful, could not continue the war without confiscating the food of southern Russia.”

In von Roon’s attitudes, which closely reflect those found in other Nazi documents of the period, we can learn much about how Hitler was able to convince the German people to carry out the atrocities they did.

The War: Von Roon’s Military Analysis

“This author, to my mind, portrays the Germans under Hitler as they were: a remarkably tough and effective fighting nation, not a horde of stupid sadists or comic bunglers, as popular entertainment now tends to caricature them - VH.”

I know a fair bit about the Second World War. I studied it in school, have read numerous books about it, both fiction and non-fiction, and have been to plenty of museums that covered it, including the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. But I still learned a lot from World Empire Lost.

Von Roon has a gift for succinctly conveying the importance of a battle, location or decision. To give just one example, I had been aware that Malta had been awarded a George Cross for its gallant defence - but never been entirely sure why it had needed defending so badly. Von Roon explains crisply its strategic importance to the North Africa campaign:

“Malta’s interdiction was ceaseless, and each tanker, each ammunition ship, that was sunk weakened Rommel. Hitler believed that Luftwaffe bombardment would neutralize Malta, but the British patched their airstrips, flew in more aircraft, slipped in more submarines, fought through in convoys, and kept the garrison supplied.”

World Empire Lost covers the vast breadth of the war in all its theatres, from the Battle of Britain to Midway, from the Battle of El Alamein to the siege of Leningrad. There are some areas he covers in particular detail, including the Eastern Front, the various Desert Campaigns and the War in the Pacific, where in addition to describing the broad strategic picture he describes several individual battles at considerable length. Other campaigns, notably the period following the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Atlantic, are scantier, but still present.

I will not attempt to summarise or review all of this military analysis, or this review would be several times the length it already is. I will instead put a spotlight upon one segment: the Eastern Front, where von Roon’s analysis is perhaps most interesting, and on which most Western popular histories, whether British or American, tend to devote less attention.

Spotlight: The Eastern Front

“The world still wonders, a quarter of a century later, why Adolf Hitler turned east in June 1941, when he had England hanging on the ropes from disastrous defeats in Africa and the Balkans, and from losses to U-boats, and when the United States was impotent to stop the knockout…On this question, it seems to me that General von Roon, from the other side of the hill, sheds a lot of light - VH.”

Von Roon offers a number of military and strategic reasons as to why Hitler invaded Russia when it did, most of which will revolve around a resource familiar to modern-day Americans: oil. In these heady days of the 21st century, it is easy to forget that eighty years ago little Rumania was a major oil producer:

“There was only one filling station available for the German war effort on the European continent, and that was the oil under Rumania. We could get no oil by sea. All of Hitler’s Balkan maneuvers and campaigns of 1940–41 therefore revolved around the Ploesti oil field. The war could not be won in the Balkans, but Germany might have lost it there.”

Von Roon has no trust of Stalin and argues that Hitler believed that Stalin was planning to attack at any moment. Every Russian troop movement was interpreted in the context of a possible invasion: 

“His pact with Stalin was just a truce. He so regarded it, and he had to assume that a ruthless butcher like Stalin so regarded it. The question was, when would Russia move?...In the Balkans, in the summer of 1940, while we were completing our brilliant campaign in France, the Soviet Union moved into Bessarabia, bringing the Red Army to the banks of the Prut, an advance averaging one hundred miles along a broad front toward our oil.”

It is not entirely clear what Stalin’s long-term intentions were: he certainly had no love of Nazi Germany and might well have attacked it at some point. However, the modern historical consensus is that the 1941 build-up was for defensive reasons and that at that point Stalin had no offensive plans - if only because he thought the Red Army was no match for the Wehrmacht.

Von Roon also channels Clausewitz in arguing that, “The attack on Russia, which aimed for control of the central land mass of the earth with its limitless manpower and natural resources, was the true strike at the center of gravity.” As Henry observes in a translator’s note, “Roon’s defense of Barbarossa is unusual; most other German military writers do condemn it as the fatal opening of a two-front war - VH.”

To my mind, while oil and a wish to pre-empt any possible Russian attack may have played a part, von Roon underplays the degree to which carving out lebensraum from Russia was always Hitler’s central objective. As he himself writes elsewhere in the book, “In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote in bombastic street-agitator language what he intended to do upon attaining power; and in the twelve years of his reign he did it. He wrote that the heart of German policy was to seize territory from Russia.”

Von Roon effectively conveys the staggering scale of Operation Barbarossa is staggering. Nearly three million Germans attacked almost four million Russians. By comparison, on D-Day around 150,000 Allied soldiers landed on the Normandy beaches and, even by the end of August, ‘only’ 2 million Allied soldiers were in France. The Second World War was won and lost on the steppes of Russia.

In World Empire Lost we find a terrifying description of just how close the Germans came to taking Moscow:

“Our best information was that we would be marching with about one hundred fifty divisions against perhaps two hundred, with about thirty-two hundred tanks against as many as ten thousand, and with an unknown disadvantage in aircraft…Our hope lay in superior training, leadership, soldiers, and machines, and in the swift decisive exploitation of surprise. After Finland, this seemed a reasonable risk…

…The Luftwaffe caught the enormous frontline Red air force on the ground and wiped it out in a few hours. In the center and in the north our armored pincers advanced by timetable, with the infantry rolling forward in their support. Six days saw us in Minsk and at the Dvina, bagging nearly half a million prisoners and thousands of guns and tanks…

…In the north all our objectives were achieved except the actual taking of Leningrad. The city was laid under siege which lasted nine hundred days, in which it withered into helplessness and almost perished. The Baltic coast was ours, so that we could supply our northern forces by sea. We were in operational touch with our Finnish allies. In the south we invested the Crimea and were racing for the Caucasus oil fields. And in the center, giant armored pincers closed on Moscow from north and south, actually penetrating the suburbs…

…Our advance patrols saw the towers of the Kremlin. World empire at last lay within the German grasp.”

In quoting the paragraphs above I omit considerable details covered by von Roon, including a lengthy discussion over whether the diversion south to destroy the Russian armies in the ‘Kiev pocket’ was sound strategy or not (von Roon is a fan, historians as a whole are divided).

The subsequent campaign is covered in detail, much of it over the very same terrain which is currently being fought over again by Russia, this time in its invasion of Ukraine. To give just a flavour of this, here is a summarised version of his analysis of the most famous of them all: Stalingrad.

“Near Stalingrad, the rivers Don and Volga converge in a very striking way. The two great bends point their V’s at each other over a forty-mile space of dry land. The first phase of Blue called for capture of this strategic land bridge, so as to block attacks from the north on our southern invasion forces; also, to cut the Volga as a supply route of fuel and food to the north. At the V of the Volga, a medium-sized industrial town straggled along the bluffs of the west bank: Stalingrad…

…Our general plan was to thrust two heavy fast-moving pincers along the two arms of the enormous V of the Don, thus trapping and destroying most of the Soviet forces defending south Russia. The first pincer, the Volga Force— jumping off first, since it had the longer distance to go— would march down the upper arm of the Don. The second, the Caucasus Force, would advance along the lower arm. They would meet between the rivers, near Stalingrad. After defeating and mopping up the trapped forces, these two great army groups would divide responsibilities for the second or conquest phase. The Caucasus Force would wheel south, cross the Don, and drive down to the Black Sea, to the Caspian, and through the high passes to the borders of Turkey and Iran. The Volga Force would defend the dangerous flank opened up all along the Don, which would be manned during our advance by three satellite armies: Hungarian, Italian, and Rumanian.”

Von Roon describes Manstein’s successful conquest of the Crimea and the failure of a major Russian counter-attack against Kharkov - both of which strengthened the German chance of success at Stalingrad. At this point he blames Hitler for a series of major strategic decisions which snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

“On July 13, Hitler suddenly decided to divert the entire eastward campaign away from the Stalingrad land bridge, southwest toward Rostov…

 …The huge power thrust captured Rostov and netted some forty thousand prisoners. But precious time had been lost, and the whole Blue plan was in disarray…

…At this critical point Adolf Hitler sprang on our stupefied Headquarters his notorious and catastrophic Directive Number 45, perhaps the worst military orders ever issued…

… In essence, Directive Number 45 consisted of three points: A mere assertion (contrary to known fact) that the first aim of the campaign had been achieved: i.e., that the Red Army in the south had been “largely destroyed.” The Volga Force was to resume the drive toward Stalingrad, with the Fourth Panzer Army rejoining it. The Caucasus Force under List was to proceed southward at once, with additions to its original difficult task, such as securing the entire Black Sea coast…

…The conditions for carrying out our summer campaign in any reasonable form had now melted away. Neither the upper bend of the Don, nor the crucial land bridge, had been secured…Now the two great forces were to separate and operate in different directions with unsecured flanks— leaving a constantly widening gap between them as they pursued diverse missions.”

He goes on to discuss the brutal six-month battle itself (with characteristic form, von Roon focuses on the destruction of German military units, paying no heed to the immense suffering inflicted upon the Russian civilian population), as unit after unit is committed to the fray, until the final Russian counter-attack.

“The capture of Stalingrad became an unbelievably violent obsession. His orders in the ensuing weeks were madness compounded and recompounded. The Sixth Army, which with its mobile striking power had won an unbroken string of victories in Poland, France, and Russia, was fed division by division into the meat grinder of Stalingrad’s ruined streets, where mobile tactics were impossible. Slav snipers mowed down the veterans of the great Sixth in a house-to-house “rat war…

 …The Red Army hurtled across the Don into the Rumanian army, guarding the flank of the Volga Force, northwest of Stalingrad. These unwarlike auxiliaries gave way like cheese to a knife. A similar attack routed the Rumanian flank corps in our Fourth Panzer Army, on the southern flank. As the attack developed into December, the Russians smashed into our lines all along the Don where Italians and Hungarians were protecting the Sixth Army’s rear; and a steel trap closed on three hundred thousand German soldiers, the flower of the Wehrmacht.”

The remainder of the campaign on the Eastern Front is covered in similar detail, particularly the Battle of Kursk and Operation Bagration, the Soviet attack on Belarus.

Worlds of If

“My friends in the Royal Navy stoutly deny that even in June the Germans could have made it across the Channel - VH.”

At numerous points World Empire Lost waxes lyrical about how different choices made by Germany, or its allies, could have resulted in it winning the war. These flights of fancy provide insights into the tactical and strategic decisions of the Axis - as well as just how close the Allies came to losing on numerous occasions.

The least interesting, to my taste, are the purely tactical decisions. What if Hitler had not held back Guderian’s army for three days, allowing the British to escape from Dunkirk? What if Kurita had not turned back at Leyte Gulf? Some of these - perhaps particularly Dunkirk - could, indeed, have been decisive, but all sides make tactical mistakes in war, and the Allies made a number themselves, though von Roon’s argument that Germany made more mistakes because of Hitler’s personal meddling is persuasive.

More interesting are the strategic decisions that could have been taken differently. As we saw in the section above, the question of whether or not it was right for the German armies to turn south, crushing the Russian forces in Kiev but failing to capture Moscow, is a fascinating one - if beyond my expertise to answer. Von Roon also argues persuasively that if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbour, but contented itself with seizing South East Asia from the Europeans while prosecuting its war in China, then America would not have entered the war.

“The obvious course [for Japan] was to move into the East Indies with maximum speed and force, consolidate rapidly, and prepare to defeat any American countermove. The Americans might not have moved at all. Tremendous opposition existed in the United States to sending American boys to die for the pukka sahibs in Asia.

 Even if Roosevelt had sent his Navy, defying half his public, against the entrenched Japanese in East Asia, this fleet would have fought its showdown battle at the end of a long supply line, in enemy waters, within range of Japan’s land-based air force. It would have been another Battle of Tsushima Strait, with air power added. This humiliating slaughter in an unpopular cause might have brought on the impeachment of the none too popular Machiavellian in the White House.”

No Pearl Harbour, no United States in the war, no German declaration of war on the United States, victory for Germany and Japan. It persuaded me.¹⁴

The two ‘what if’s I found most fascinating, however, were these:

1. What if Hitler had tried to invade England in June 1940, immediately after the fall of France?

2. What if Hitler had committed vastly more troops to North Africa - either in 1941 instead of invading Russia, or in 1942, prior to El Alamein?

1. An Early Sealion

World Empire Lost poses the question:

“Under the spur of necessity, despite the total disorganization of defeat, despite fierce Luftwaffe bombardment, they had moved three hundred thousand men across the water.  Why then could not we, the strongest armed force on earth in the full tide of victory, do a ‘Dunkirk in reverse,’ and throw a force of armored divisions across the Channel to an undefended, helpless shore?

            …

Had Hitler seized the first moment in June, using every available vessel afloat in western and northern Europe—there were thousands—to hurl an invasion body across the Channel, the fleet would have been caught by surprise, as it had been in the Norway operation. We would have been across before it could mass to counterattack. The aerial Battle of Britain would have been fought out in the skies over the Channel, under conditions vastly more favorable to the Luftwaffe. Assuredly we would have taken very heavy losses. The attack phase and the supply problem would have cost dearly. Again we would have been staking all on one throw. But in the hindsight of history, what else was there to do?”

Victor Henry, in one of his translator’s notes, argues that Von Roon makes ‘a fair case’:

“My friends in the Royal Navy stoutly deny that even in June the Germans could have made it across the Channel. They would have thrown in every last ship they had, of course, to drown the invaders. It is a moot point, but in my judgment Roon makes out a fair case. The U-boats, which he does not mention, would have wreaked havoc in the narrow Channel against a defensively positioned fleet - VH.”

Beyond the purely material considerations, the momentum was with the Nazis: France had fallen, suddenly, shockingly; the British Expeditionary Force driven into the sea, Germany was triumphant everywhere.¹⁵ Had Hitler pressed the attack, would the British have rallied - or buckled, as France had?

As a Brit, I like to think we would have defeated this and sunk the Nazis in the Channel. But it is hard to be certain of it.

2. The Mediterranean Focus

If the first scenario is one on the knife-edge, the second seems as if it would indisputably have granted Germany victory.

What if Germany had not invaded Russia in 1940, but instead devoted its forces to sweeping across North Africa, capturing the Suez Canal and the oil routes from the Middle East? World Empire Lost argues that, “The way to destroy the British Empire was by closing the Mediterranean and cutting its lifeline to India and Australia.”

This scenario is clearly one that tantalises von Roon: he fantasises in grandiose terms about how it might play out, ending with “Japanese battleships and aircraft carriers sailing into the Mediterranean under the Rising Sun flag, through a Suez Canal flying the swastika!” - a twisted Nazi version of the Americans and Soviets meeting on the Elbe.

But the core concept appears sound. Britain in North Africa in 1941 was hard-pressed. Some 30,000 men and tanks in Rommel’s Africa Korps was enough to reverse their advance against the Italians; meanwhile, Germany committed some 3 million men and vast quantities of tanks and warplanes to Operation Barbarossa. Surely even a small fraction of these would have swept the British away in the Mediterranean?

“Admiral Raeder had first suggested the plan in 1940. It called for the seizure of Gibraltar, a landing in Tunis, and a drive across Libya and Egypt to the Suez Canal and the Middle East, where we could count on an open-arms welcome from the Arabs and the Persians. A glance at a map shows the glitter of the concept. Spain, France, and Turkey, the three major soft spots in our hegemony, would drop into our camp.

With French North Africa in hand, the Greater German Empire would become a hard pyramid, based in the south on Sahara sands from Dakar through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to the Persian Gulf; its apex in Norway under the midnight sun; its western slope the Atlantic Ocean and its fortified coasts; its eastern slope (in 1940) the border with the Soviet Union. Our weak southern ally, Italy, would be safely locked within an Axis lake. The island of Malta, Britain’s flinty little bastion in mid-Mediterranean, would starve and fall.

The riches of Africa would flow in ships to German Europe. We would gain the oil of the Persian Gulf, and the raw materials of Asia. From the bulge of Dakar we would dominate opulent South America. It was the beckoning of the golden age, the dawn of the German world imperium itself.”

Von Roon takes this a step further, by proposing that “Japan would assault the British Empire westward via the Indian Ocean, while we attacked eastward overland along the Mediterranean littoral.” He points out that:

“In March Nagumo finally sailed westward to hit British surface and air forces in the Indian Ocean. The purpose was to support the Japanese army’s advance into Burma. Here at last was a trial run of the Kuroshima strategy, and a huge victory resulted. Nagumo’s dive-bombers sank an aircraft carrier, two heavy cruisers, and a destroyer. He demolished two bases in Ceylon, and much merchant shipping. His Zeroes wrought such havoc among the defending Swordfish, Hurricanes, and Spitfires that Winston Churchill in his memoirs confesses the Royal Air Force was never so outfought over Europe. The surviving British battleships fled to British East Africa.”

Japan certainly could have done this, though it is uncertain why it would have wished to - busy as it was fighting the British in Burma, the Chinese in China and the United States in the Pacific. As he does on more than one occasion, von Roon appears to forget that other nations may be more focused on their own self-interest than that of Germany’s.

But the core argument that Germany by itself could have swept North Africa and the Middle East seems indisputable. Even as late as 1942 this would have been clearly possible. Prior to the Second Battle of El Alamein, the British reinforced their own armies strongly, aided by American convoys sailing round the Cape and up the coast of East Africa. German reinforcements to Rommel, meanwhile, were paltry, as forces were diverted to the Eastern front.

But after the Anglo-American landings in French North Africa, “Hitler and Mussolini rushed whole armies to Tunis by air and sea, gradually building up to almost three hundred thousand men. Such reinforcements to Rommel in July would have carried German arms to the Persian oil fields and to India.”

Overall, as well as being hugely diverting and thought-provoking, these sections largely reinforce my prior conviction that World War II was an incredibly tight thing, which could very easily have gone the other way. Hitler’s obsession with carving out ‘lebensraum’ in Eastern Europe likely saved us all.

World Empire Lost

“Either war is finished, or we are - VH.”

“A proper name for this war might well be “The War of the British Succession,” for the real question that was fought out was this: after the collapse of the British Empire, which would drag with it all European colonialism, what shape was the new world order to take, and under whose rule?”

That is the fundamental thesis of World Empire Lost. That at this turn of world history global domination was up for grabs. Germany, under Hitler’s leadership, made a bold play for it against the odds - and almost succeeded.

“Nations, empires, cultures, all have their season in history, the great Hegel taught us. They come, and they go. Not one is permanent, but in each age one dominates and gives the theme. In this succession of world dominions, we recognize the evolving will of the God of history, the World Spirit. God therefore expresses and reveals himself in the will of those world-historical individuals, like Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, who lead their states to world empire…The whole grandiose drive of the German people under Hitler for world empire was only a pyramiding of gambles.”

In this great struggle, von Roon takes us to the jungles, the oceans, the desert and the Russian steppes. “The battleground had become the surface of a sphere” in a war of unsurpassed breadth and destruction.

In his grandiose style he takes us from Germany’s early triumphs - “On May 10, the English and French were still the victors of Versailles, still masters of the seas and continents. By May 17 France was a beaten, almost helpless nation, and England was hanging on for her life” - through the vast campaigns on land, air and sea that involved millions of combatants - and entangled tens of millions more civilians.

He has no illusion about the odds that faced Germany, writing that at the war’s opening, “England still ruled the world with her global navy, her international money system, her alliances, and her empire on five continents” and that later, after Pearl Harbour, “One step from the pinnacle of world empire on December 4, the German people on December 11 found themselves plunged into a total two-front war, fighting for their lives, menaced from the east and from the west by two industrial giants with five times our population and twenty times our territory.”

Still, at the heart of his thesis is that, despite everything, Hitler would have succeed if it were not for one factor:

“He lost his well-calculated risk through a combination of operational errors and misfortunes, and the historic accident that at this hour he was opposed by a ruthless, spidery genius of the same metal—Franklin Roosevelt.”

He even places a fictitious speech in Roosevelt’s mouth, attributing to him the Nazi desire for world domination:

“My friends, this war is for the mastery of the world. Our aim should be to achieve that mastery ourselves, but with a minimum of blood. Let us encourage others to do our fighting for us. Let us give them all the stuff they need to keep fighting. What do we care? In developing the industries to produce this Lend-Lease stuff, we will be preparing ourselves, industrially and militarily, for world leadership. They will use up all our early models, our discardable stuff, killing Germans for us. Maybe they will do the whole job for us, but that is doubtful. We will have to step in at the end, but mopping up will be easy. We will have gained a world victory with the expenditure of a lot of hardware, which we can turn out faster, and in greater quantities, than all the world put together, without even feeling the pinch. The others will shed the blood, and we will take the rule.”

And as Germany goes down in flames, he continues to see the struggle as one between two men, each of whom - in von Roon’s eyes - embodied the spirit of their nation:

“But essentially what happened in Normandy was that Franklin Roosevelt beat Adolf Hitler, as surely as Wellington beat Napoleon at Waterloo. In Normandy the two men at last clashed in head-on armed shock. Hitler’s mistakes gave Roosevelt the victory; just as at Waterloo it was less Wellington who won than Napoleon who lost.”

Early on, von Roon states that, “In writing this book, I have only one aim: to defend the honor of the German soldier.” Throughout the book, the Wehrmacht can do no wrong. Its leaders were mysteriously ignorant of German atrocities¹⁶ and, when it loses in battle, it is either overwhelmed by insurmountable odds, or betrayed by the foolish decisions of politics. Von Roon appears to think that military prowess can make up for moral failings, saying, “The feats that our nation performed against odds will someday be justly treated in history, when passions die and the stain of certain minor excesses can be seen in perspective.”

Needless to say, at this ‘aim’, World Empire Lost fails utterly.

I cannot do better than to end this review with a quote from von Roon’s conclusion. To the very end, he cannot see the human suffering caused by the Nazi’s reckless bid for ‘world empire’, nor the horror of the atrocities they committed in the process. For von Roon, Hitler’s only sin was that he lost.

“We Germans have been the bellwether people of the twentieth century, with our triumphs and our tragedies. Though we lost our gallant bid for world empire, our great marches to the Atlantic, the Volga, and the Caucasus will shine forever in the chronicles of war.

But one historical fact we can never live down: that at the apogee of our national strength we gambled our destiny, and shot our bolt, for the sake of a common poltroon.”

Epilogue

“Without the Armin von Roons who followed him and fought for him to the last, Adolf Hitler would have lived and died an impotent fanatical loudmouth, instead of becoming the most powerful monster of history, who all but brought down the civilized world - VH.”

World Empire Lost is a fiction.

To be more precise, it is a fictional work of non-fiction. It exists - and at approximately 80,000 words long, is as long as many books one might find in a bookshop. All quotes and translator’s notes produced here are genuine quotations from published material.

General Armin von Roon, however, never existed. World Empire Lost was instead written by the American author Herman Wouk, and spliced into his masterpiece The Winds of War / War and Remembrance¹⁷, an epic¹⁸ duology of the Second World War and the Holocaust. While the bulk of the books follow an American naval family (including Victor Henry, the ‘translator’) and other families they come into contact with, ever few chapters he presents an excerpt from World Empire Lost.

Does this mean that it is valueless? It is, after all, written not by a Nazi war criminal, but by an American Jew. How much insight can we gain from it?

I previously made a comparison to C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. That book is considered valuable by many, despite it being written by a human Christian, rather than being literally written by a devil.¹⁹ But where Lewis focused on spiritual evil, Wouk peered into the heart of a material evil, one of the worst the world has ever seen.

No book can speak for everyone. Yet World Empire Lost is an honest account to portray the war as many senior German military officers saw it, giving due account to both their success in battle and willingness to commit, and be complicit in, horrendous atrocities.

Though a work of fiction, it draws heavily upon and is well aligned with the writings and public statements of real Nazis, testimonials at the Nuremberg trials and documents such as the Wannsee Protocol. Von Roon may not have existed, but Rommel, Guderian, Jodel, Keitel and thousands of others did: senior military men who, whatever they personally thought of Hitler²⁰, fought to the best of their abilities for his regime.

It is all very well to say read the original sources. But which of us, unless we are a professional historian, has or will read Mein Kampf, the Wannsee Protocol or the court records of Nuremberg? Fiction can, and does, shine a light on history.

I would close with the words of the true author, Herman Wouk, writing almost fifty years after he first began work on The Winds of War. He considered the book, and its successor, to be his ‘Main Task’, akin to a religious obligation: “to bring the Holocaust to life in a frame of global war.”²¹ The novels to him were not only an attempt to write a brilliant story - though he succeeded in that - but a commemoration.

He considered World Empire Lost an integral part of that work, both as structure to the narrative, and as a rebuttal to those “who consistently exculpates the Germans, most of all the army, from complicity in [the Holocaust.”²² Though his editor was initially sceptical, he insisted on maintaining the section and, looking back aged one hundred, wrote, “If I had to submit to a court of angels a sample of my stuff, it might well be General Armin von Roon.”²³

They may not be a court of angels, but the readers of Astralcodexten may be considered the next best thing.

---

I came to choose World Empire Lost as my book review entry by accident. I initially began planning to submit The Winds of War, but after rereading the first section of World Empire Lost it struck me that this might make for a far more interesting entry.

Even if I didn’t quite make the final, honourable mention is still a fine outcome - and I hope that those of you reading it here enjoyed it. If you are sharing this²⁴, I’d ask you kindly not to spoil the ‘reveal’ at the end.

And if you’ve found this blog for the first time, whether coming from ACX or elsewhere, do check out some other things I’ve written and subscribe to keep up with my writing (all content is free).

I blog regularly about government, politics, public policy and miscellany. A few popular posts that may also appeal to ACX folk are:

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1. Though obviously not as pleased as I’d have been if I’d won!

2. There were 150 entries, of which 14 were finalists and 6 honourable mention.

3. Thanks to

Neil

for helping me to sharpen the introduction before submitting!

4. Von Roon is not wrong about everything.

5. Reflecting Nazi attitudes, von Roon is peculiarly obsessed with Roosevelt’s disability. No doubt confronting the fact that a man who in Germany would have been sent to the gas chambers was a key instrument of German defeat causes him serious difficulties.

6. Quotations from the translator’s footnotes will be marked by his initials, VH.

7. Herman Wouk, October 2001.

8. The shame of Western nations not to offer sanctuary to the Jews of Europe is indeed a stain upon our conscience. But von Roon appears to forget that it was only because of the Nazis that that sanctuary was required.

9. To be absolutely clear: I do not, and nor should any sane person, believe Roosevelt masterminded World War II to destroy the European empires and Germany and secure American dominance.

10. Other than the fact that the Nazis liked invading people.

11. As Groundsman Willie might put it.

12. It does not seem to occur to von Roon that these nations could have ruled themselves.

13. The BBC have produced an outstanding docudrama of the Wannsee Conference, based closely on the detailed minutes that were kept. I would strongly recommend watching it. To see senior government personnel discuss in calm, logical and bureaucratic tones how to exterminate millions of people, in a manner which - aside from its subject matter - could be any other high level government meeting - is utterly chilling.

14. There is a question as to whether or not the Soviet Union could have defeated Germany without the United States entering the war. My understanding is that this is an open question, with much depending upon (a) whether or not Britain, fighting alone, could keep open the sea lines, and (b) whether Japan, free of threat from America, broke its treaty with Russia. My own feeling is that the first, at least, is unlikely, given how close run a thing the Battle of the Atlantic was - even with American convoys.

15. Anyone who has watched the 2017 film, Darkest Hour, will have a sense of the desperation of these times.

16. This is simply not true.

17. Technically speaking, Wouk breaks von Roon’s books into two, World Empire Lost and World Holocaust, to match his own structure. This felt an unnecessary complication for this review and I have referred to both books as World Empire Lost.

18. The books are an epic in every sense of the word, including Scott’s: they begin in media res, take place in multiple lands, contain a long catalog of objects (various listings of military vessels), feature divine intervention (various characters prayers are answered) and include a journey into hell (Auschwitz). As Ana says, ‘THE TALKING SHIP IS OPTIONAL.’

19. Indeed, whether or not one believes in the existence of literal devils.

20. Which varied.

21. Wouk, Herman. Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author.

22. Wouk, Herman. The Will To Live On: This is Our Heritage.

23. Wouk, Herman. Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author.

24. Which would be great!