In the 1980s, whilst for liberal intellectuals Holocaust consciousness served to buttress a complacent identification with the “values of the West”, the military intelligentsia were both far less sanguine about a dawning end of history, in which their role seemed far less self-evident, and far more “open-minded” in the use they were willing to make of the history of Nazi Germany. The most striking instance of this kind of militarist cultural critic was the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, who was not then the marginal figure that he was to become in the 2000s. His Fighting Power published in 1982 was at the center of the “military effectiveness” debates that were convulsing the American army in the wake of Vietnam. Why, van Creveld asked, had the German army not only fought better but held together in the face of overwhelming odds, why did it not “run”, why did it not “disintegrate” and why did it not “frag its officers.” Creveld’s answer was simple. The Germans fought well because they were members of a “well integrated well led team whose structure administration and functioning were perceived to be …. Equitable and just.” Their leaders were first rate and despite the totalitarian regime they served were empowered to employ their freedom and initiative wherever possible. By contrast, the social segregation in America’s army was extreme. “American democracy” Creveld opined “fought world war II primarily at the expense of the tired, the poor the huddled masses” “between America’s second rate junior officers “ and their German opposite numbers there simply is no comparison possible.” On the battlefield Nazi Volksgemeinschaft trumped Western class society. If despite these devastating deficiencies, the allies had nevertheless prevailed, the reason was not military but economic. Overwhelming material superiority decided the outcome. Brute Force was the telling title chosen by John Ellis for his powerful summation of “Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War”.
This was a conclusion backed up by economic histories that began to be published at the time, for instance my Wages of Destruction and David Edgerton’s The British War Machine. The Allies waged a “rich man’s war” against a vastly inferior enemy. In the mayhem of the Falaise Gap, as the German army in Normandy collapsed, the Allies were shocked to find the grisly carcasses of thousands of dead horses mingled with abandoned armor and burned-out soft-skinned vehicles. What hope did the half-starved slave economy of Nazi-occupied Europe have of competing with the Allies’ oil-fuelled, globe-spanning war machine?