How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

**Sarah Paine** (0:00)
It turns out that the possibilities for maritime and continental powers are a little different. Basically, a small subset of countries can defend themselves, primarily at sea, and that opens certain possibilities, and others can't, and that opens and closes certain possibilities. And I'm going to talk at this story from Britain's point of view, the country with the 360, you can't get me moat.
And it's an instructive case for the United States of the possibilities and the perils of having this sort of position. So that is my game plan today. And you can look at the great peninsula of Europe, where Britain is located. And you can see this northern coastline for Britain, where it's uncomfortably close to the continent, and its enemies are sitting there. It's an interesting neighborhood. So here's my plan. I'm going to talk about these continental problems that Britain has been dealing with. If you think about it, Britain was always fighting France, and then in 1871, Germany reunifies, and then the problem's Germany. And I'm going to pick up the story in 1939, when things are really bad for Britain. So I'm going to talk about first these continental problems, and then I'm going to talk about how Britain tried to deal with it. And first, it has to do with getting sea control. And then once you can do that, finding some peripheral theaters where you might be able to fight and deal with the continental problem, and you probably need allies. And so those are the first four topics. Then, so that was then, and now is now. The continental problems now are China and Russia. And to see of what this case study might reveal about the ongoing things. All right, so here's Britain, uncomfortably close to the continent. If it wants to get to Russia, which is his big ally in World War I and World War II, it's either got to go way up north around the Norwegian coastline, and you get up into places like Murmansk and Archangel, or it's got to go way around through this very narrow sea, the Mediterranean, through the choke point of choke points, which is at Dardanelles and the Bosporus, into the Black Sea. And the main port back in the day was Odessa.
And then if you compare French and British access to the high seas, France has got a pretty good coastline that just gets it right into the oceans. But Germany, if it wants to send merchant traffic or naval traffic, it's got to go through these narrow seas. And then it's got to get by Britain, which is its big enemy in the two world wars, which is the dominant naval power. So that's complicated. For Britain, if it wants to get to its empire back in the day, it wants to go through the Suez Canal. That requires the cooperation of Spain, France, Italy. And if it wants to get to Russia, Turkey as well. Well, Turkey didn't cooperate very well in either war. And if you think in World War II, well, fall of France, fascist sympathies of Spain, and then Italy is part of the access. Britain is in real trouble. And what do you do about this? Britain has this big empire that it wants to protect. It's got a massive basing system, more bases than anybody else does in order to protect this empire from this, which is a very resentful Germany, doesn't much like the Versailles settlement of World War I. It's a divided country in that a Polish corridor separates East Prussia, and the Germans start trying to solve this problem. Initially, they're taking Austria, the Sudeten German parts of Czechoslovakia in 38, then they take all of Czechoslovakia in 39, and they've already dealt with the Rhineland, which is supposed to be demilitarized per the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Well, they ignore that, remilitarized in 36 And this is important because there are a lot of industrial resources and factories and things there. It turns out that Hitler's plans require, it's not optional, it requires the resources not only of the Rhineland, but also Czechoslovakia and Poland and Romania, which is going to have the oil for them. So when you get to 39, when Russia and Germany are dividing up Poland between them, this is the part of the history that Russians don't like to talk about, but it's exactly what they were doing. This triggers World War II because the French and the British honor their alliance with the Poles to help deal with this. All right, so in 1940, Britain's in a world of hurt. It faces this massive blue problem, and then there's this green, growing green disaster. It's facing two continental powers, Germany and Russia, that both have these expansive empires they want to create. They want to divide Europe and then the rest of the world. Bad news for Britain. So, but 1941, when Hitler decides he needs Russia too, and then Russia decides, the one that's attacking me is probably the major problem, not the other one. So Stalin is going to swap sides, and he's going to be coordinating with Britain. So that's better from Britain's point of view than having two continental powers trying to deal with it. So now it's down to one. So once the United States has gotten into the war, this is what the world looks like. You have a big cancer in Europe from the British point of view, but it's all surrounded by oceans that Brit can get to, and a lot of allies are neutral states. So Britain has access to those places. And then there's a separate cancer in Asia, where Japan is trying to work its magic. And I say separate because the access never coordinated these two theaters. So this is looking at the world from a maritime perspective. What you're looking at is all the oceanic roots that connect everything. So Britain's problem is how to leverage the miracle of sea transport that basically can access you the whole world, versus in the logistical nightmare of land transport, where you can only drive through countries that will let you drive through. The seas give you mobility, they give you access to theaters, markets, resources, allies, and they also give you sanctuary at home if you're surrounded by them. It makes it harder for people to invade. So Britain's trying to leverage all of that against the armies of the continental armies, by it's going to try to strangle them economically, diplomatically, and militarily. Now, the generation that led World War II in Britain, and not just Britain, but elsewhere, they were the conscripts of World War I, which was supposed to end all wars, and they knew full well as in the midst of World War II, that it did not remotely achieve that promise, and so they learned a whole series of lessons, and I'm going to do a comparison of what was done in World War I versus World War II, and they are the greatest generation, not their children who claimed the title. Lesson number one is don't go beyond the culminating point of attack. What's that? The terminology comes from Clausewitz, Karl von Clausewitz, who is a Western guru on conventional land warfare, which means is if you're attacking in a battle, if you go too far, you will weaken yourself, because the enemy will counterattack, send you further backwards than you would have otherwise. In the case of World War I, you're sending young men over trenches into on-going machine gun fire. What do you suppose is going to happen to them? And this profligate waste of life in these assaults out of trenches, maybe you took a little territory in the first two weeks, but after that nothing. These offenses will go on for months and months, racking up hundreds of thousands of deaths. No more doing that in World War II. And you can look the death figures for World War I and II. So, in World War I, the British Army gets the multi-million man army that they had coveted, they deployed on the main front from start to finish, and they chalk up twice as many deaths as they did in World War II, when they have a peripheral strategy. In World War II, they do make the mistake is they land the big army on the continent opening move, but it doesn't do well. And then they reassess and they get that army off the continent immediately. This is what the Dunkirk evacuation is, where the French are covering the British as they're de-camping from the continent, saving the British army. And this is why France has such large casualties. It is doing this, even though France is in the war that long. So it's going to be a long wait before the British get back on the continent again. Long wait also for the United States to get in the war. There's no more going beyond the culminating point of attack. All right, the way diplomacy is run is also completely different. In World War I, there were exactly two conferences trying to coordinate things among the Entente powers. And they're the December 1915 and November 1916 Chantilly conferences, and all they are are the military heads. Well, the Russian Romanov dynasty is overthrown in early 1917 It is too late. What happened in World War I is the Germans focused on the Western Front in 1914, Eastern Front in 1915, back to the Western Front in 1916 Well, in World War II, the idea is you want to squeeze them simultaneously from all fronts so they can't divert people back and forth. And if you look at the coordination, it begins even before the United States is in the war with the ABC staff talks and then the Atlantic conference, which yields the Atlantic Charter, which is talking about what war objectives are, unconditional surrender of Germany, and also what the post-war situation is going to look like. And there's coordination not only among military leaders, but civil and military leaders as well. There's a combined command of US and British forces. We have offices in each other's capitals, but we're also coordinating with the Russians, so that you're setting up not only also war termination, and what post-war institutions are going to be like to hold the peace. It's a completely different event from World War I, when Russia falls out of the Entente because there are bread rights in St. Petersburg, and Russia could not supply its troops with adequate armaments. Well, that's not going to happen in World War II. Russia comes with a really large army. Germany has another large army. You've got to have a big army to deal with Germany's army. So in World War I, there is no leniency. No one would have thought of giving that much stuff to each other. It's like everybody first, and it's like, okay, everybody last doing that one. The railways had not been completed in World War I. The Trans-Siberian doesn't get completed until 1916, and the Murmansk Railway, you can see Murmansk up there, isn't completed until early 1917 The Romanov dynasty is gone, it's too late. In World War II, three quarters of Lenin's aid would go over those completed railway systems. Now, to the British credit, they did try to break the blockade on Russia. The way to get into Russia in those days and hook in with the railway system would be to get into the Black Sea and Odessa, because Russia had all the men, but they didn't have all the war material to fight. So this is where the Gallipoli campaign comes in. You could argue about whether you think it is good strategy or not, but it was miserably executed. So first of all, it wasn't a joint operation. What's joint? Joint means you're coordinating your different military services, in this case, army and navy. So what goes on? The British Navy tries to run the Dardanelles for two months. That does not work well. Do you suppose the Ottomans might think something was up? Yeah. When you get up there on the Dardanelles, all the high point, it's a very steep place. So the Ottomans are all busy sorting that all out, getting troops in place. So two months later, when the British, New Zealand, Australian, and French troops all land on a given day, the Ottomans are there with a welcome party essentially, and that invasion stalemates in three days. But they keep at it for eight months, taking 190,000 casualties, 55,000 of whom are dead men, totally miserably executed. And it comes with collateral damage. As the British are trying to run the Dardanelles with their Navy, this is when the Ottomans are terrified of their Christian subjects, Armenians, and they're starting to round them up. They're pulling them out of the army, and then days before the landing, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians began, and between 1915 and 1923, 1.5 million Armenians are killed. That's a lot of collateral damage. All right. The Normandy landings are a completely different event in World War II. This is another contested landing of trying to get armies in. First of all, the buildup of war material goes on for years to get all the landing vessels and the equipment, and the forces all ready to go in Britain. Then the disinformation campaign kept the Germans completely disinformed. They were expecting the landing to be at the Pas de Calais, which is the shortest place and it's way off in Normandy. That worked. Everybody lands on a day and they're up and over, and into places inland. Another lesson learned. The Royal Navy did not think that convoy duty was the manly thing to do. They would convoy troop transports, but they wouldn't deal with the Merchant Marine until 1918 Well, the Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of that stuff. So the Navy is not thinking about the economic dimensions of warfare. They're just focused on all the military things in World War I. In World War II, the British would be convoying even before they got in the war. Another difference between the World War II and World War I. At the end of World War I, if you look at the disposition of German troops, they're abroad. They're occupying Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of France. Nobody's in Germany. Yes, the Germans had really lousy meals during the war. But German civilians did not feel the full brunt of what their government had done. And therefore, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt felt that it was really critical to have boots on the ground in Berlin to let the Germans know exactly what had happened to them and let them feel the war that they had inflicted on others in order to end it. Even so, the Allies win this thing, and they wreck the continental powers, but they almost wreck themselves in the process. It's a Pyrrhic victory for France and Britain. It really weakens them. So World War II is going to be a different event. So that's the being in this continental situation, the lessons learned from the last time around, and now for what the British did in World War II to deal with the continental problem. The opening move of a maritime power in a really high stakes war like this is typically blockade. What you want to do is cut your enemy off from the oceans and force it to cannibalize its own resources and those of occupied areas. And because of the geographic position of a maritime power, you can quite often do this to a continental power on narrow seas. And Britons were well aware that Germany is a trading country. Most of the trade goes by sea, and it's also on these narrow seas. So geographically and economically, it's really vulnerable to blockade. And I get it, Germany gets alternate resources.