A Global View of World War II

The Greater Second World War (“Greater”) argues to advance W.W. II scholarship by widening both the time frame (beginning in 1931 and running into the mid-1950s) and the geographic frame (placing anti-colonial struggles, labor politics, and post-1945 disorders at the center rather than the periphery). The editors and contributors propose seeing W.W. II as am historical formation: when overlapping regional wars and imperial crises merged into a genuinely global conflict once the United States committed itself to fighting across theaters, which then unraveled into separate conflicts lasting well after 1945.

Greater provides an introduction plus eleven essays, including a final recap of the essays. Rather than retelling familiar campaigns, the essays move through sites and themes that sit at W.W. II’s edges: rising colonial awareness and anti-colonialism, decolonization and re-colonization, British decline in the Pacific, ports and labor unrest, Soviet and U.S. involvement in the colonial arena, the international Tangier metropolis, Allied coalition politics, Brazilian aviation industry, the policing of civilians, and Pan-Asian Muslimism. Greater attempts to describe the time frame’s international order with contributors who are deliberately international and multidisciplinary, providing many interesting and valuable factoid tidbits along the way.

Sadly, the underlying premise of Greater is tainted with ideological myopias, insistently cramming its various-shaped pegs into arbitrary uniform holes. Incessant stories of colonial extraction, labor rebellion, and post-war coercion emphasize an anti-capitalist, anti-imperial interpretive perspective. Now, certainly there are anti-colonial, labor unrest, and violent aspects of the continuing conflicts after the surrender of Germany and Japan. But the perspective that there are such elements involved can just as easily be seen from before the First World War, and indeed in some form nearly always of any large-scale war involving any extensive governance by “outsiders”, throughout most of human history.

Greater veers off into an “anti-capitalism” rant with its highlighting of post-war worker and soldier mutinies as anti-imperial resistance to “neocolonial dependency”, resembling a theory of capitalist empire far more than an objective account of wartime causation, acting like a careless interpreter who deliberately mutes distinctions. If nearly any hierarchy can be read as capitalism-plus-race, then the proposed narrative becomes unfalsifiable. Greater’s narrative is primed to “find” its villain everywhere, not as one contingent historical structure among alternatives, but as the religious master key that explains everything from grand strategy to local violence. In the process, Greater shortchanges other more significant wartime engines: liberal internationalism, social democracy, conservative anti-communism, non-socialist nationalistic self-determination, pragmatic desire for order, and even simple collective exhaustion.

In fact, the cliché that “all politics is local”, is just as applicable to this supposedly global re-imagining of W.W. II. After all, regardless of any issue’s scale, an issue’s component parts can always be broken down into smaller facets. For instance, the European Theatre can be broken down to the Normandy landing, Normandy can be broken down to Omaha beach, a beach can be broken down to a single ridge or pillbox. A pillbox or trench can be broken down to the home regions or towns of the soldiers manning it. It states an obvious banality that colonialism and anti-colonialism play important parts of decision-making for colonial powers and indigenous natives.

Even if one is wrapped in Greater’s apparent distaste against “capitalism”, the wartime economies were often not “capitalist” in the ordinary sense; they were hybrids of rationing, price controls, planning, state ownership, and military allocation. The problem of focusing so narrowly through Greater’s ideological approach is that its few trees obliterate views of the vast forest. Just from the start, Greater’s over-zealous examination through its ideological lens consistently and grossly obscures U.S. and China motivations, which were vastly different from the European powers.

The U.S., unlike the hegemonic Soviet Union, did not generally or continuously forcibly occupy buffer states, at least during Greater’s time frame. The U.S. also had few actual colonial interests, having already promised independence to the Philippines. And while a regional hegemon in its hemisphere, the U.S. had few actual colonizing pretensions in contrast to the Europeans. In fact, Greater admits that the U.S. largely cast a jaundiced eye towards European imperial colonial interests. Even Greater’s timing W.W. II globalization to U.S. involvement is suspect when multiple global empires were already involved prior to U.S. entry; and the U.S. full entry to the European theatre was not from Greater’s intersectional causes, but by Hitler’s unforced declaration of war. At the same time, Greater’s obsession with U.S. Post-War Hegemony risks the recentralization of the narrative back to the usual narrow focus of the U.S. dependent Eurocentric or Pacific-centric battles, exchanging one myopic view for another view arguably just as near-sighted.

China, despite still smarting from having lost great regional influence in the 19th Century, had little interest at that time in territories which were not already dominated by ethnic Chinese, and had more than enough reasons to dislike western imperialism. But out of Greater’s eleven chapters, there is only one China-specific chapter, which mainly deals with Chinese Muslims and Internationalism. Greater’s attempt to redefine W.W. II’s globality without greater examination of China, when China was the most consequential non-European theater, is a distorted ignorance. The war in China was already globally entangled (imperial competition, diaspora financing, foreign advisors and procurement networks, Soviet and Japanese strategic calculation, and later U.S. Lend-Lease and the China–Burma–India logistics chain). If Greater’s thesis is that globality is conferred by U.S. Hegemony, then China is the obvious flaw in that thesis, when China’s W.W. II global significance existed prior to, and independent of, that U.S. “hegemony”.

Furthermore, China does not follow Greater’s supposed “decolonization” theme. Sovereign China had a recognized government prior to W.W. II, with internal conflicts independent of Greater’s supposed intersectional themes, and of far greater strategic consequence than Greater’s discussions of small ports and airlines away from combat zones. Overlooking China seems a deliberate avoidance of stress testing Greater’s primary suppositions.

China is welcomed when it supplies thematic color—Pan-Asianism, minority internationalism, a stage for U.S. deployment debates—but minimized when it would force Greater to question Greater’s preferred narrative. China’s internal politics, state failures and improvisations, Soviet and communist opportunism, and a post-war outcome hardly caused by U.S. imperial reach; are mainly avoided. For example, China under Chiang Kai-shek is mentioned as hampering France’ imperial return to Indo-China, but there is little mention of Chiang’s significant support for Indian independence. China is even excluded from the mention of the 1943 Cairo Conference, unlike the incorrectly named Soviet Union of the Allied “Big Three” which was not even at that conference [p.29] while China was actually a member of the Allied “Big Four”.

Greater also largely ignores the organized communist agitation and Soviet-aligned political warfare while over-emphasizing the preferred shibboleth of “U.S. Hegemony” villainy. Greater’s proposed time frame was saturated with political warfare, infiltration, front organizations, subversions, and intelligence-linked organizing. Strikes and boycotts were well-worn weapons in the Soviet communist agitation arsenal but Greater suggests them as grass roots uprisings. Here again, Greater limits its examination of China. Maoist China’s post-war export of revolution is considered mainly in comparison with Soviet Union and U.S. hegemony, rather than Maoist China’s own push for global status.

Greater, with its analysis committed to its intersectional ideology, forsakes the largest drivers of its chosen time frame, instead choosing to focus on lesser niche currents which plainly existed decades before, and continue to this day, but were comparatively of lesser importance during the specific proposed time frame. Greater’s recurring critical-theory lexicon and anti-imperial emphasis over-states the role of “capitalism” (especially U.S.-led capitalist order) as the source of domination across W.W.II’s expanded timeline when eons-old plain power politics and military force were the greater drivers of W.W.II history.

Greater is intellectually productive and possesses relevance, but perhaps not necessarily as the editors intended. Conclusions from the reported facts can diverge from the usual pat “leftist” narratives. For instance, the protests, strikes, and mutinies of troops and workers eager for peace, can provide additional justification contrary to the critics of quickly using atomic bombs against Japan to end the war rather than by invading Japan’s home islands. The time and geographic extension of W.W. II indicates that the broad changes would have occurred regardless of the war, but with less death and suffering, which underlines the wasteful violent impatience of radicals ever-eager for change. The post-war communities at the mercy of lawless armed perpetrators requiring draconian action may arguably suggest a very real need for such counter-balancing rights as the Second Amendment provided by the U.S. Constitution. Pan-Asianism and Muslimness, supposedly boosted by Japan’s failed Co-Prosperity Sphere, not surprisingly collapses as individual peoples and nations rediscover that their innate self-interests generally overcome any abstract cross-national ideals.

Greater’s best chapters involve the more traditional focus of W.W. II’s histories where presented facts are placed in more objective context without ideologically distorting the importance of events. Accordingly, chapters like Ashley Jackson’s British Empire’s Pacific War, David Motadel’s Soviet and US Involvement in the Colonial World, and Th.W. Bottelier’s Grand Alliance of Nations are perhaps the best in the collection. However, chapters like Pablo del Hierro’s Tangier during the Second World War, Alexandre Fortes’ Civil Aviation and Hemispheric Defense, and Kelly Hammond’s Living with the Ghosts of Pan-Asianism certainly can still be of value and specific interest, even if narrow. If one can tolerate heavy doses of sometimes pretentious leftist academic jargon, Greater does provide an interesting and different focus from standard W.W.II histories.

---///---

Our Reviewer: Ching Wah Chin, a member of NYMAS, has lectured and written widely on East Asian History. His reviews include The Pacific War and Contingent Victory: Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat, Future War and the Defence of Europe, Nations in the Balance: The India-Burma Campaign, December 1943-August 1944, Ring of Fire: A New History of the World at War, 1914, All the World at War, On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War, and China's Spies

Note: The Greater Second World War is also available in e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium