The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Read online

  NIALL FERGUSON

  The War of the World

  History’s Age of Hatred

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Introduction

  PART I

  The Great Train Crash

  1 Empires and Races

  2 Orient Express

  3 Fault Lines

  4 The Contagion of War

  5 Graves of Nations

  PART II

  Empire-States

  6 The Plan

  7 Strange Folk

  8 An Incidental Empire

  9 Defending the Indefensible

  10 The Pity of Peace

  PART III

  Killing Space

  11 Blitzkrieg

  12 Through the Looking Glass

  13 Killers and Collaborators

  14 The Gates of Hell

  PART IV

  A Tainted Triumph

  15 The Osmosis of War

  16 Kaputt

  Epilogue: The Descent of the West

  Appendix: The War of the World in Historical Perspective

  Illustrations 1900–1928

  Illustrations 1929–1942

  Illustrations 1943–1953

  Sources and Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  SECTION 1: 1900–1928

  1. ‘Racial Map of Europe’ (1923).

  2. ‘The Yellow Peril’: drawing of 1895 by Hermann Knackfuss.

  3. European soldiers captured at the Battle of Yang-Cun are brought before the Boxer generals.

  4. ‘Bon appetit!’: German cartoon of March 1904.

  5. Pogrom victims and survivors, Odessa 1905.

  6. The Archduke Francis Ferdinand meets Bosnian dignitaries in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914.

  7. Gavrilo Princip and the other members of ‘Young Bosnia’ in court in Sarajevo.

  8. Two soldiers from France’s West African colonies during the First World War.

  9. Scottish prisoners of war, First World War.

  10. Russian cartoon of the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, 1917–18.

  11. An anti-Semitic caricature of Trotsky from the Russian Civil War era.

  12. The waterfront at Danzig (Gdańsk).

  13. The bodies of Armenian children, Turkey 1915.

  14. Rudolf Schlichter, Armenian Horrors, watercolour on paper c. 1920.

  15. Greek refugees throng the docks at Smyrna, fleeing from Turkish troops, September 1922.

  SECTION 2: 1929–1942

  16. Georg Grosz’s Grosstadt (1917).

  17. Poverty in the American Depression.

  18. ‘Look, you boob… !’: George Bernard Shaw on the superiority of Soviet Communism.

  19. Soviet industrialization poster.

  20. Ukrainian collectivization poster.

  21. Georgian poster on self-determination.

  22. Gulag prisoners.

  23. Jacob Abter, one of the members of the Leningrad Society for the Deaf and Dumb executed during the Great Terror.

  24. An ethnic German family takes a break from harvest toil.

  25. Illustration from a children’s book published by the Stürmer Ver-lag in 1935.

  26. Victor Klemperer.

  27. Isaiah Berlin’s diplomatic pass, issued on September 15, 1945.

  28. Hershel and Rivka Elenberg.

  29. Henryka Lappo before deportation from eastern Poland to the Soviet Union.

  30. A Nazi wartime poster blaming atrocities on ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’.

  31. Five Jewish women and girls about to be shot outside Liebau, in Latvia, in December 1941.

  32. Victims of the Rape of Nanking.

  33. A man tends children wounded in a Japanese raid on Shanghai railway station, 1937.

  SECTION 3: 1943–1953

  34. and 35. Marja and Czeslawa Krajewski, murdered in medical experiments at Auschwitz in 1943.

  36. The Axis powers as aliens: American wartime poster.

  37. Tatars in the Red Army.

  38. A German soldier in the wake of the Battle of Kursk in July 1943.

  39. Nazi poster for Dutch consumption.

  40. The destruction of Dresden in February 1945.

  41. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s caricature ‘Mr Moto’.

  42. Phoenix war worker Natalie Nickerson with a Japanese soldier’s skull.

  43. Two American tanks advance under Japanese fire during the Battle for Okinawa, June 1945.

  44. A Japanese naval lieutenant is persuaded to lay down his arms on Okinawa.

  45. A Soviet soldier tries to steal a Berlin woman’s bike.

  46. Soldiers training in Guatemala to fight the Guerrilla Army of the Poor.

  47. Chinese children read from Chairman Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’.

  48. Pol Pot greets Deng Xiaoping in Phnom Penh in 1978.

  49. Milan Lukić in his home town of Višegrad in 1992.

  PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Picture 1; taken from Source Records of the Great War, Vol. VII (1928)

  Pictures 2–6, 10, 12, 14, 37, 48: AKG images, London

  Pictures 7, 13, 15, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  Picture 16: © DACS 2006 (supplied by Bridgeman Art Library)

  Picture 21: The David King Collection

  Pictures 25, 30: Mary Evans Picture Library

  Pictures 26, 38, 49: Empics

  Picture 27: Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust. Copyright © Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust

  Picture 28: Ty Rogers

  Picture 29: Mrs H. Lappo

  Picture 33: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

  Pictures 34, 35: Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial

  Picture 42: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

  Picture 45: Ullstein Bild

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but this has not been possible in all cases. If notified, the publishers will be pleased to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

  List of Maps

  Map 1. The Jewish Pale of Settlement

  Map 2. Austria-Hungary before the First World War

  Map 3. The German diaspora in the 1920s

  Map 4. Political boundaries after the Paris peace treaties, c. 1924

  Map 5. The Asian empires in autumn 1941

  Map 6. Manchuria and Korea

  Map 7. The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1941–45

  Map 8. The Nazi Empire at its maximum extent, autumn 1942

  Map 9. The Pale of Settlement and the Holocaust

  Map 10. Germany partitioned, 1945

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE WAR OF THE WORLD

  ‘Quite stunning’ The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Full of epigrams, witticisms and thought-provoking paradoxes and ironies… supremely readable and thought-provoking’ Andrew Roberts

  ‘This is Ferguson’s best work, by far, since The Pity of War’ Paul Kennedy, New York Review of Books

  ‘Delivered with immense brio and pace… so easy to zip through’ Spectator

  ‘Entertainingly provocative… He is a fine debunker’ Economist

  ‘A great read… One is swept along by the author’s superb clarity of expression and the persuasive verve of his style’ Irish Times

  ‘A gripping read’ Scotland on Sunday

  ‘A thoughtful, often provocative, portrait of the period… an historian who can rattle cosy assumptions’ The Times

  ‘Without doubt, this is Ferguson’s best work to dat
e… one of the most revolutionary reinterpretations of this era’ Tribune

  ‘A sweeping and handsomely controlled narrative in which he balances wide-screen storytelling and close-focus anecdote… Even those who have read widely in twentieth-century history will find fresh, surprising details’ Boston Globe

  ‘Again he shows himself to be a writer of extraordinary energy and versatility’ Norman Stone, Wall Street Journal

  ‘Wielding at once the encyclopedic knowledge of an accomplished scholar and the engaging prose of a master storyteller, Ferguson commendably brings fresh insights to a history by now familiar’ San Francisco Chronicle

  ‘A staggering achievement. Written in clear, lively prose, it asks to be savoured, enjoyed and argued with’ Sunday Morning Post (South China)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Niall Ferguson is one of Britain’s most renowned historians. He is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The bestselling author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire and Colossus, he also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world. Since 2003 he has written and presented three highly successful television documentary series for Channel Four: Empire, American Colossus and, most recently, The War of the World. He, his wife and three children divide their time between the United Kingdom and the United States.

  for

  Felix,

  Freya,

  Lachlan

  and

  Susan

  Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague,

  See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,

  That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

  Romeo and Juliet, V.iii

  What is that sound high in the air

  Murmur of maternal lamentation

  Who are those hooded hordes swarming

  Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

  Ringed by the flat horizon only

  What is the city over the mountains

  Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

  Falling towers

  Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

  Vienna London

  Unreal

  The Waste Land, V

  A Note on Transliteration and Other Linguistic Conventions

  There are at least seven different systems for the transliteration of Mandarin Chinese into Roman characters. Broadly speaking, the English-speaking world switched from one system (Wade-Giles) to another (Hanyu Pinyin) towards the end of the period covered by this book, partly in response to its official adoption by the People’s Republic of China and the International Organization for Standardization. Thus, to take perhaps the most obvious example, Peking became Beijing.

  On the advice of colleagues who specialize in Asian history, I have adopted the Pinyin system, despite the obvious risk of anachronism. The exceptions are those earlier Wade-Giles romanizations (notably Yangtze, Chiang Kai-shek and Nanking) which have become too familiar to readers of English for it to be anything but confusing to replace them. Similar problems arise with the romanization of Russian names. I have tried as far as possible to use the Anglo-American BGN/PCGN system.

  In this context, the significance of the name ‘Manchuria’ is worth a brief comment. It was the contemporary Japanese and European designation for China’s three north-eastern provinces, Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang, and was intended to emphasize the region’s history as the ancestral home of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing. It was not an integral part of pre-Qing China, a point of some importance to Russian and Japanese would-be colonizers.

  Finally, Japanese names are rendered in the way usual in Japan, with the given name second, as in ‘Ferguson Niall’.

  Introduction

  The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar… So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning – the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations… Did they dream they might exterminate us?

  H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

  THE LETHAL CENTURY

  Published on the eve of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) is much more than just a seminal work of science fiction. It is also a kind of Darwinian morality tale, and at the same time a work of singular prescience. In the century after the publication of his book, scenes like the ones Wells imagined became a reality in cities all over the world – not just in London, where Wells set his tale, but in Brest-Litovsk, Belgrade and Berlin; in Smyrna, Shanghai and Seoul.

  Invaders approach the outskirts of a city. The inhabitants are slow to grasp their vulnerability. But the invaders possess lethal weapons: armoured vehicles, flame throwers, poison gas, aircraft. They use these indiscriminately and mercilessly against soldiers and civilians alike. The city’s defences are overrun. As the invaders near the city, panic reigns. People flee their homes in confusion; swarms of refugees clog the roads and railways. The task of massacring them is made easy. People are slaughtered like beasts. Finally, all that remains are smouldering ruins and piles of desiccated corpses.

  All of this destruction and death Wells imagined while pedalling around peaceful Woking and Chertsey on his newly acquired bicycle. Of course (and here was the stroke of genius), he cast Martians as the perpetrators. When such scenes subsequently became a reality, however, those responsible were not Martians but other human beings – even if they often justified the slaughter by labelling their victims as ‘aliens’ or ‘subhumans’. It was not a war between worlds that the twentieth century witnessed, but rather a war of the world.

  The hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in modern history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era. Significantly larger percentages of the world’s population were killed in the two world wars that dominated the century than had been killed in any previous conflict of comparable geopolitical magnitude (see Figure I.1). Although wars between ‘great powers’ were more frequent in earlier centuries, the world wars were unparalleled in their severity (battle deaths per year) and concentration (battle deaths per nation-year). By any measure, the Second World War was the greatest man-made catastrophe of all time. And yet, for all the attention they have attracted from historians, the world wars were only two of many twentieth-century conflicts. Death tolls quite probably passed the million mark in more than a dozen others.* Comparable fatalities were caused by the genocidal or ‘politicidal’ wars waged against civilian populations by the Young Turk regime during the First World War, the Soviet regime from the 1920s until the 1950s and the National Socialist regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945, to say nothing of the tyranny of Pol Pot in Cambodia. There was not a single year before, between or after the world wars that did not see large-scale organized violence in one part of the world or another.

  Figure I.1 Battlefield deaths as percentages of world population

  Why? What made the twentieth century, and particularly the fifty years from 1904 until 1953, so bloody? That this era was exceptionally violent may seem paradoxical. After all, the hundred years after 1900 were a time of unparalleled progress. In real terms, it has been estimated, average per capita global domestic product – an approximate measure of the average individual’s income, allowing for fluctuations in the value of money – increased by little more than 50 per cent between 1500 and 1870. Between 1870 and 1998, however, it increased by a factor of more than six and a half. Expressed differently, the compound annual growth rate was nearly thirteen times higher between 1870 and 1998 than it was between 1500 and 1870. By the end of the twentieth century, thanks to myriad technological advances and improvements in knowledge, human beings on average lived longer and better lives than at any
time in history. In a substantial proportion of the world, men succeeded in avoiding premature death, thanks to improved nutrition and the conquest of infectious diseases. Life expectancy in the United Kingdom in 1990 was seventy-six years, compared with forty-eight in 1900. Infant mortality was one twenty-fifth of what it had been. Men not only lived longer; they grew bigger and taller. Old age was less miserable; the rate of chronic illness among American men in their sixties in the 1990s was roughly a third of what it had been at the start of the century. More and more people were able to flee what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had called ‘the idiocy of rural life’, so that between 1900 and 1980 the percentage of the world’s population living in large cities more than doubled. By working more efficiently, people had more than treble the amount of time available for leisure. Those who spent their free time campaigning for political representation and the redistribution of income achieved considerable success. Barely a fifth of countries could be regarded as democratic in 1900; in the 1990s the proportion rose above half. Governments ceased to provide merely the fundamental public goods of defence and justice; new welfare states evolved that were pledged to eliminate ‘Want… Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’, as the 1944 Beveridge Report put it.

  To explain, in the context of all these advances, the extraordinary violence of the twentieth century, it is not enough simply to say that there were more people living closer together, or more destructive weapons. No doubt it was easier to perpetrate mass murder by dropping high explosives on crowded cities than it had once been to put dispersed rural populations to the sword. But if those were sufficient explanations, the end of the century would have been more violent than the beginning and the middle. In the 1990s the world’s population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out. But there was actually a marked decline in the amount of armed conflict in the last decade of the century. The highest recorded rates of military mobilization and mortality in relation to total population were clearly in the first half of the century, during and immediately after the world wars. Moreover, weaponry today is clearly much more destructive than it was in 1900. But some of the worst violence of the century was perpetrated with the crudest of weapons: rifles, axes, knives and machetes (most obviously in Central Africa in the 1990s, but also in Cambodia in the 1970s). Elias Canetti once tried to imagine a world in which ‘all weapons [were] abolished and in the next war only biting [was] allowed’. Can we be sure there would be no genocides in such a radically disarmed world? To understand why the last hundred years were so destructive of human life, we therefore need to look for the motives behind the murders.