Victor Davis Hanson. The Second World Wars. Basic, 2020.

That is right, the title pluralizes the conflict: The Second World Wars. The author spends little time on that idea, but points out that that there were two conflicts one in Europe and the Mediterranean basin and one in the Indo-Pacific. While the United States and Britain were involved in both places, there was virtually no overlap. The Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Japan as well as Germany, only the Japanese pact was not broken until the very end of the war when Stalin broke it.

Now that we have that out of the way, The Second World Wars is a modern classic. It is not a history of the war but an analysis of what happened. I would recommend it for any student of history, but perhaps more importantly, any political or military leader.

One recurring theme, one which we heard a lot about during the Vietnam War, is that there is a temptation to fight the last war. The American Civil War began with battlefield strategies from the Napoleonic wars, but with rifling, breech-loading, and other new technologies, the Civil War was much bloodier. In Vietnam, the American military was doing saturation bombing and napalm as if it were World War II instead of a guerrilla war.

In the case of World War II, the main strategy of Hitler was logical in the light of World War I. In that war, Russia surrendered to Germany, and France held out in trench lines for four years. Germany never made it much past the Rhine. On the other hand, the blitzkrieg in France in 1939 worked so well, Hitler thought the Soviet Union would be a pushover if France was so easily defeated this time. Indeed, if Hitler had been satisfied with what he gained in Poland, kept the nonaggression pact with Russia, and otherwise stayed out of war and tolerated Jews, he would have likely had a larger and prosperous Reich.

Something similar would have been likely with the Japanese, if they had not felt it necessary to get the United States involved. The Axis powers misunderstood their opponents in large part because of American isolationism, British appeasement, and Soviet collaboration. One interesting detail Hanson notes is that because of the Soviet-Japan nonaggression pact, Japan let many vessels originating in the United States carrying supplies to the Russian Far East to help the Soviet war effort. Although they were technically allies, Japan and Germany did little to help each other. In 1939, before the pact, Japan and the Soviet Union were fighting along the China-Russia border. The Japanese were not doing so well with them, so they were happy to leave Stalin and Zhukov alone.

When Japan launched its main Pacific attacks in late 1941, it had the largest and most modern Pacific fleet. But Japan also was thinking of its last war, the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. In that war, battleships were significant, and there were no such things as warplanes, let alone aircraft carriers. If Japan had devoted more resources to carriers and amphibious training, Hanson hypothesizes things might have been different—at the very least the war might have lasted into 1946.

This is a book for thinkers. Allied landings in North Africa were practices for the Normandy invasion. Yes, Stalin complained that England and America were not doing enough in the West while his army was fighting on the Eastern Front, but who was doing bombing runs over Germany and its industrial power? Who was fighting in Africa and Italy?

As with any war, there are many ironies. If we speak of imperial expansion, Stalin made out the best. He kept the Baltic states and Poland, which were obtained during the nonaggression period with Germany, but then the Red Army obtained much of the rest of Eastern Europe when the U.S.S.R. began fighting Germany. By joining the war against Japan at the end, it also benefited from China, Mongolia, and North Korea going Communist. Between war casualties and the brutal occupation by Axis armies, millions of Soviet and Chinese lives were lost, but more were lost at the hands of the national leaders Stalin and Mao through purges and government sanctioned famines.

One basic truth seems universal: Infantry still wins wars. However, the winning armies on the ground in World War II had very important support from the air and from the navies.

Morale is important but can be overrated or underestimated. The Germans and Japanese both benefited from poor enemy morale in some of their encounters, especially in France and Singapore. However, they also saw Britain as weak and America as decadent and thereby underestimated British resistance and American strength.

There are also some analyses of battle plans, especially as they relate to materiel. While Germany may have had the best tanks, the Soviet Union was able to make many more tanks, and American tanks were supported by both infantry and air. Also both countries had dependable supplies of fuel. The plan to take Sevastopol by Germany worked, but Germany did little with its success. It had trouble linking the Crimea with the rest of the Reich, so it never was able to use it as a foothold to get oil from the Caucasus.

While the atomic bomb truly brought an end to the war, the worst bombing of Japan was the saturation bombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, which remains the deadliest twenty-four hours in the history of warfare. Although kamikaze attacks could be deadly, only about ten percent succeeded. At the beginning of the war, Japan had the best trained pilots, but by 1943 America had superseded them in training, and many of the original Japanese pilots had been killed. By then Japan was having trouble getting oil, mostly because of Allied submarines, so their newer pilots had many fewer hours flight time. While portrayed as honorable, the kamikaze was really a measure of desperation.

Hanson has written extensively on other wars, especially the Peloponnesian War and the Punic Wars. He makes numerous comparisons, things we learn or could learn from them. When Athens attacked Sicily, there was an obvious problem of supply lines and overextending itself. Something similar happened when Germany attacked Russia.

The Second Punic War was a Roman victory, but Carthage sued for peace and remained relatively intact. During the Third Punic War, Rome decided to truly conquer Carthage, and that put an end to any threat from Carthage. There is an obvious parallel to the First and Second World Wars, especially with respect to Germany.

Hanson also mildly objects to the name of First World War. The First World War was a European war like many others. The only reason other parts of the world were involved had to do with empires. Britain, France, Germany, and Turkey all had imperial possessions in other places, so, yes, there was some fighting in Africa and Arabia, and there were soldiers from Down Under and India and North America, but until the United States entered the war, such worldwide participation was from European subjects. With World War II, however, all but about a dozen independent countries in the world got involved. And even some of the neutral countries leaned one way or the other.

There is much more. This review barely touches on the analysis. There is much we can learn. Before any country goes to war, it may be a good thing for at least some of its leaders or advisors to read The Second World Wars. It is about the historical actions of armies and politicians and (and this is paramount) the significance of their actions. As Santayana so famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”