An Apocalypse of Empires --- As rising powers sought to emulate established colonial nations, the world was consumed by WWII

 

"Scorched Earth

By Paul Thomas Chamberlin

Basic, 656 pages, $35

All of the main actors in World War II were, as Paul Thomas Chamberlin notes in "Scorched Earth," empires of one sort or another.

"For centuries," the author writes, "the ability to project power across vast distances and over foreign peoples had represented a key component of national power.

Empires dominated the international order and remained the central players on the world stage" even after the catastrophe of World War I.

There were the self-described British, French (until 1940 anyway), German and Japanese empires.

The U.S., which also considered itself as anticolonial, was a more complicated case, but it, too, had various overseas possessions and dependencies.

To be sure, World War II was a product of deep ideological fissures among communist, fascist and democratic regimes, but these in turn reflected the deeper causes that lay in the clash between the "have-not" empires of Germany, Italy and Japan and the Anglo-American "haves."

 The Japanese sought to compensate for their lack of foodstuffs and raw materials by establishing an empire on the Asian mainland, in Korea and China, initially in Manchuria. This brought them into conflict with the Americans and ultimately led to the attack on Pearl Harbor, an American outpost in the middle of the Pacific.

For his part, Hitler looked to create a Germany with the critical mass "needed" to balance the Anglo-Saxons by seizing "living space" from the Soviet Union in the east. He was also convinced that "world Jewry" was in league with both Soviet Bolshevism and Anglo-American international capitalism, seeking to isolate Germany just as it had allegedly done before and during World War I.

The title of Mr. Chamberlin's book is well-chosen: The war was characterized by brutal policies. In China, the Japanese behaved with unimaginable brutality, most notoriously during the Rape of Nanjing in 1937. Nazi Germany not only murdered its way across the continent but killed six million Jews in a systematic policy of genocide. The Allies were not guilty of anything remotely comparable, but they likewise waged war to the utmost. The British and Americans leveled German and Japanese cities, intentionally killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The author, a professor at Columbia, keeps the global dimensions of the war in view at all times, particularly the connections between the European and Asian theaters. He notes that German victories in Europe in 1939 and 1940 undermined moderates in Tokyo and encouraged radicals there to go war with the Western powers. Mr. Chamberlin also reminds us that President Roosevelt wrote in January 1941, nearly a full year before Pearl Harbor, that "we must recognize that the hostilities in Europe, in Africa, and in Asia are all parts of a single world conflict."

Mr. Chamberlin takes us to many familiar places such as Guadalcanal, El Alamein, Stalingrad, the shores of Normandy and the battle for Berlin, but we also visit the less well-known. In the spring of 1942, for example, the Japanese attacked the British in the Indian Ocean; Churchill later described this as the "most dangerous moment of the War, and the one which caused me the greatest alarm." The British leader said this because a Japanese seizure of Ceylon, if combined with the German conquest of Egypt, then likely, "would have closed the ring and the future would have been black."

All this is conveyed in accessible, succinct prose that makes the book easy to read, even if the content is sometimes hard to stomach. Mr. Chamberlin's vivid descriptions and quotations resonate. A Chinese witness told his son about a bombing raid during which a group of workers "turned into bloody, fast-flying bits of flesh." Faced with an American oil embargo in the autumn of 1941, one Japanese official feared that his country would be "like a fish in a pond from which the water was gradually being drained away." A Soviet journalist described the retreat before the Germans as a "biblical exodus" in which cows, cattle, people, wagons and trucks formed "the slow movement of a flowing ocean."

It is impossible for a book like this to cover everything, and Mr. Chamberlin does make a few surprising omissions. The guerrilla or "partisan" war of the European resistance against German occupation is rather shortchanged, for example: There is no mention of Tito's activities in Yugoslavia.

The author understandably concentrates on the main Soviet advance toward Berlin, but he might have looked briefly at the events in Greece as the Germans withdrew or at the Kurland pocket in Latvia, which continued to tie up huge numbers of forces until the end of the war.

Conceptually, the book has two weaknesses. First, though Mr. Chamberlin is right to stress the importance of the often underestimated contributions to the Allied cause by the Chinese, h should pay more attention to the events in Europe.

Second, given his emphasis on the colonial aspect of the war, Mr. Chamberlin could have noted that both sides had imperial and "decolonizing" elements. It would have been interesting, for example, to be told about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who opposed the British mandate and supported Nazi antisemitism. There might have been more discussion of the Asian anti-imperialists, such as the Indian Subhas Chandra Bose, who is mentioned only in passing, and the Indonesian Sukarno, who opposed the British and Dutch Empires but collaborated with the Japanese. Finally, Mr. Chamberlin claims to go beyond Richard Overy's excellent 2022 book, "Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945," by looking at the war's colonial aftermath. Yet this is only the subject of a very short treatment at the end of the book.

The author wisely draws no analogies with the world situation today, as we once again face war in Europe and the possibility of conflict in East Asia. Reading of the hard bargain Roosevelt drove with embattled Britain -- exchanging valuable bases for some elderly destroyers -- a reader can empathize with Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as he accepted Donald Trump's proposal to swap minerals for military support. President Trump's assertion that he can "make a deal" with Vladimir Putin seems disconcertingly similar to Roosevelt's statement, after the Tehran Conference, that "I got along fine with Marshal Stalin. . . . I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia."

Closing this book, one looks again at the photograph on the cover, which shows the devastated German city of Cologne, with its ruined buildings and demolished bridges. The eye is drawn, however, to the majestic cathedral that towers, damaged but not destroyed, above the rubble. After all the suffering and bloodshed that "Scorched Earth" chronicles, the image provides a welcome note of beauty, resilience and hope.

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Mr. Simms is the author of "Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, From 1453 to the Present."” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: An Apocalypse of Empires --- As rising powers sought to emulate established colonial nations, the world was consumed by war. Simms, Brendan.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 May 2025: C7.