It really didn’t take that long if you consider the extent of the physical damage done to accomplish the victory. It takes a long time to systematically destroy that many things, then consider the fact that the things were fighting back.
The one, though, leads to the other.
You don’t get a whole nation sending its kids through compulsory “Hitler Youth” training, or pouring a huge amount of its GDP into the army in peacetime and without any particular external threats, unless it has a sense of cultural militarism.
OTOH, a society lacking such a sense is more likely to have to drastically expand its army from civilian life folks with no military or paramilitary training at all - and you get more “… division[s] composed of draftees and 90-day wonders (junior officers trained in 90 days) …”.
In short, it’s a feature built-in to Nazism to take the social effort necessary to create a nation with a higher percentage of trained soldiers - an advantage above and beyond the tactics employed (though even there, having highly trained soldiers allows for different tactics - more reliance on initative etc.).
Of course, having better soldiers did not allow them to actually win …
This is interesting because I had always heard the opposite. When I was in the Army it was taken as gospel that we won the war because our soldiers could take initiative and were afforded flexibility in accomplishing objectives, while Nazis and the Japanese practically couldn’t take a crap without direct orders from Hitler or Tojo.
Not that I entirely believed it, but I figured there was a grain of truth in there.
The Russians never *invaded *Finland. Not in the thirties or the forties. It attacked Finland, but didn’t succeed/choose to invade it.
I am curious as to how Russia attacked Finland without invading it. Did they stand on their side of the border and just shoot across?
The way I understood it is force commanders had to get clearance from the top for any strategic, or major tactical, deviation from the plan however urgent or obvious and it was like pulling teeth to get approval, but once the decision came down one way or the other, the line leaders had flexibility in *how *to execute.
ISTM the regimes in Germany and Japan took advantage of a preexisting martial culture in society, a reverence for the military, a notion of a warrior class; a romantic notion of how exalted it is to be part of a greater cause, of the holiness of the People and Land and of cosmic or divine annointment; and *then *cranked it all up to eleven.
There are elements of truth in this. But as is often the case, it was complicated.
In the Japanese system there was minimal governmental control over the military. The Japanese army and navy acted almost autonomously. It was more a case of the military telling the government what it was going to do rather than the reverse. So Tojo didn’t really rule Japan like Hitler did Germany. Tojo was basically the general who the Japanese military appointed to run the country.
The Emperor had absolute authority but he was more or less a symbol. If Hirohito had pushed the military to go in a direction it didn’t want to go, he would have either been placed in captivity “for his own good” or replaced by a new Emperor. Hirohito was only able to really exert his own power in 1945 when the country was on the verge of collapse and the military had lost much of its prestige.
Within the Japanese armed forces, power was held by officers. Enlisted men were expected to blindly obey orders and show no initiative. But within the officers there was some degree of freedom. There was a tradition that officers could disobey orders if the orders were wrong or dishonorable. So a general that gave unpopular orders might face a mutiny and be killed by his subordinate officers. Because the younger officers tending to be the most radical, this meant the Japanese military tending to go in a radical direction.
In Germany, the complicating factor was that there were essentially two competing systems vying for power and influence. There was the military tradition which had its origins back in the Kingdom of Prussia. This tradition placed the army at the pinnacle of public prestige and said that the army should be allowed to run its own affairs without government interference. But the Prussian military was not mindless. It expected its officers, and even its enlisted men to some degree, to think. The basic principle was that the commander would outline the mission and the people under him were expected to figure out the best way the perform that mission. So it was a system that encouraged initiative and flexibility rather than blind obedience.
But then the Nazis took over. They had a whole different idea about the relations between the government and the military. The Nazis controlled the government. They needed the military but they did not like the idea that the military had any independence. They wanted the German military to be blindly obedient to the Nazi regime. The German military, meanwhile, wanted to maintain its independence as much as possible. This conflict remained a struggle throughout the Nazi era until Germany lost the war and rendered it moot.
Again, the Western Allies werent interested in expansion in the thirties because there was nowhere left to expand. The Allies did not ‘belatedly’ begin to rearm as they were heavily involved in the development of modern military tech like tanks and aircraft throughout the interwar years. The French and German armies were quite similar:
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/research/cmc.pdf
The USA was a quite different animal.
Further investigation shows that the word “invasion” seems to have slightly different meanings in English and my native language. Sorry.
I suspect that looking at per capita GDP gives a false impression. I found another site (in Japanese, so I won’t link it) that uses the same source but gives the overall GDP. It has $169 billion as Japanese GDP in 1938, which compares well to $185 billion for France, $140 billion for Italy, and $220 billion for Germany.
On the question of Japanese defense spending as a % of GDP, this page has a rather staggering graph which claims that Japan reached 85% at the height of the war and about 30% in peacetime.
I didn’t even consider how Japan had 2x the population of many european nations.
I’m surprised a society sustained itself at 85% military spending. Maybe like I was saying earlier a democracy can’t get spending that high because the people will revolt.
Funny then, the Axis came to the exact opposite conclusion - that there was plenty of room to expand … at the expense of the status quo.
What, exactly, was stopping the Western Allies from being of the same mind, and deciding they would like a slice of Germany?
In fact, France did make some moves in this direction, and ‘reoccupied’ the Ruhr when Germany reneged on its payments.
A decade later, it was the German’s turn to ‘militarize’ the Rhineland:
The issue is really quite simple: the French found that they could not afford aggression in Europe, while the Germans found that they could.
Whlie France had some nice tanks, the economic reality of the situation was that France was broke in the 30s and cound not afford much in the way of military aggression. Historians used to think that ‘Hitler could have been stopped’ in 1936 when Germany marched into the Rhineland - more recent studies have shown that this was unlikely.
AS for the British, it is quite simply contrary to known facts to assert that Britian did not belatedly & grudgingly rearm because of the Japanese & German threat in the 1930s
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/UK/UK-Civil-WarProduction/UK-Civil-WarProduction-2.html
Maybe the Japanese, but the Germans were notoriously flexible and initiative-based in ways that even modern-day NATO armies envy. They called it “aufragstaktik” or “mission type tactics”.
Little Nemo’s fifth paragraph alludes to this.
It didn’t. Japan lost the war and would have fallen apart long before it surrendered had it not done so. That level of military expenditure was a last gasp, and could not have been continued without Japanese society collapsing.
I think that was rather uncalled for. The Finns, although almost hopelessly outnumbered held their own against the Red Army.
And to make that happen they had the best non-com corps in the business, which made them awfully good in a fighting retreat as well as an advance.
What was uncalled for? I didn’t see RickJay casting any aspersions.
One of the best short summaries of the grim realities Japan faced is on combinedfleet.com on this page.
What on earth are you talking about?
They absolutely created the German military machine and it was absolutely based on ideology. They entered the war with inferior equipment and built the machines of war from conquered resources which included factories fed by an inexhaustible source of human labor. The people were literally disposable labor. Work them until they die and throw them out. that’s a massive advantage to work with.
The ideology side of it was handled by the the Waffen SS. They used political prison camps as a training ground for this ideology which was ruthless and absolute in it’s execution. They were the front line warriors in the early part of the war and grew in size as it progressed.
What followed was a recipe that repeated itself. Conquer and use free resources as a multiplier to their technology.