1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe

incredibly rich detail. It's a gripping narrative that flows very very well, and I polished it off even though it's several hundred pages. In fact at the back it's five hundred and ninety two pages. I still finished it in only a few hours because it's that quick of an excellent engaging read. So I highly recommend it, and I'm sure after you listen to the interview you'll be even

more engaged and want to pick up your copy right away. So, without further ado, after a few quick messages, here here's my interview with Peter Fritchie and his book nineteen forty two. All right, welcome, back. Well, as I mentioned moments ago, I'm sitting down here with Peter Fritchie and we are talking about his most recent book, which is one that I'm sure is going to be of interest to a lot of people listening to this, which is nineteen forty

two when War TI engulf the globe. I know we can't do a World War two episode here without everyone being intensely interested. So everyone's going to love this book. I can guarantee you of that, as I mentioned already in the introduction. Now, I want to start out, mister Fritchie by asking you a question about the introduction, because in the introduction you write, and I'm going to make a direct quotation here, quote, this is what the war did. It handed you over to war, from one war to another.

I think that's a particularly apt and succinct way of talking about the impact of World War Two, and I was hoping you could start by explaining to the audience first what exactly mean by that, And second, I'll ask the question I always do, which is why you chose to write this book in the first place, because I think that's relevant.

Union in nineteen forty one. These were all triumphant assaults. But the invasion of the Soviet Union, of course, turned very bad, very long, and so one winner turned into another. The war kept going. When soldiers returned home. There was the bombing campaign that really intensified in nineteen forty two. At war's end, there were refugees on the road. So from his microscopic position in Germany, there was just wherever he went, there was a war. Of course, after nineteen

forty five in Germany. These Germans are hardly the victims, the great victims of World War Two, but again this was a difficult time for German civilians. The winner forty six forty seven, with food shortages, people living in your house, and then the division of Germany so his sense was that there were all these different kinds of wars. He himself had not been an enthusiastic confederate of the regime. He didn't like the Hitler youth when he was drafted

into that. He didn't like being an anti aircraft gunner, and he didn't like the army. He deserted the army in March nineteen forty five and went underground with a farmer that was his own private war walked across Germany to find his parents. So he thought there were many different kinds of warn He always said, I was handed handed from one board to the other, and that was

his impression. And he remained very opposed to war, very opposed to conscription, even civilian conscription when it was talked about in the United States. And I think it's an app way to think about nineteen forty two because we have the expansion of the war with the entry of the United States in the war against Japan and Germany. But you also have insurrectionist wars against Japanese occupation, even against German occupation, even against British occupation of India. So

you have a lot of different kinds. You could call them anti colonial or anti imperialist wars that are bubbling up onto the surface during the what we think of as the conventional geopolitical campaign between the Allied and the Axes, and this made territories around the world actually second fronts. The second front is usually what the Allies were supposed to do to help Russia by invading Europe and to relieve the Soviet Union from the against the Germans by

creating a second front against Germany. But there were second fronts in all the belligerent countries, as labor organized, as suppressed minorities were persecuted and then organized and mobilized, and then people mobilized against the pressors, whether it's British rule in Cologne in India, or Dutch rule in Indonesia, or Japanese rule in the Philippines or Malaysia. So war begat war, and it moved from foreign soil to domes stick scenes, and so it was one more after the other, one

more begat another. It was a terribly long war. War hit civilians with the bombing campaigns, So for many people I didn't think so much about who began what. But the war was an endless, never ending struggle, and nineteen forty two, there was no end. No one knew when the end was going to come. And for much of the year nineteen forty two, it looked like Germany and Japan were winning, which in fact mobilized even more campaigns against Allied misrule or British rule in India and even White

rule in the Southern states of the United States. Yeah.

listeners of the show will know that. Very recently. Of course, we just had celebrations for victory in Europe day, you know, previously make a couple of weeks ago, but Russia held their own separate you know, and the war, you know, is treated differently depending upon whose perspective you are. And then if you want to talk about, well, and you know, is it the same if you you know, do you celebrate similarly in Ukraine and so on? And so forth,

and everyone has a different perspective on it. But one of the questions I wanted to ask you next is really about the idea of this global war, and I think it's it is. I was really trying to find a comparison in my mind and I couldn't, And maybe you can tell me that there is one. But it really seems like World War two is the global war that we've had, and that we really haven't had anything

like it before or since. And so if you could explain it, what ways, was World War two truly global by nineteen forty two and is there a different historical comparison or is it quite frankly just unique.

And the only exception to that is that the Soviet Union in Japan until the very very very end in nineteen forty five were not belligerents against each other, but otherwise geopolitically it was very The entire globe had divided except for South America nineteen forty two. But the global

war was also deeper. People thought about the ideological stakes of the war between the new boys on the block, the fascists who wanted to rearrange the balance of world power, and the Allies, who stood for the status quo in some ways, for freedom and sovereignty. And so there was the idea of liberty and freedom, and no particular side had a monopoly on it, and the Allied Supreme Command couldn't determine its meeting. So even within the Allied here

you have all sorts of people. And the best example are the Indians and India who mobilize against British colonial rule. They see themselves as part of the Allies for the most part, but are also fighting the British, and so they're all sorts of wars, often in the name of the declared Allied war aims, which is sovereignty and liberty and the freedom to choose your government and your rulers

that divide each of the geopolitical sides. Of course, the Germans and the Japanese also had to contend with underground movements against the military occupations that they had imposed. So World War two sinks very deep ideologically, and just one way to think about it is to think about the billions of bottles of coke that were drunk by people around the world as the American soul just came in. The constant music, the swing music that was heard everywhere.

Tip that really characterizes how popular and how deep the war was. But people didn't agree. There was no single viewpoint on the war, and somebody in Nigeria or South Africa, or in occupied Poland saw the war differently than people in the United States, and African Americans saw it different than differently than White Americans. So everyone had their own vision,

their own interpretation of freedom and liberty. In fact, white Southerners thought they were fighting for states rights and thought that the war for Jim Crow was pretty much the same one as the war to liberate Poland from the Germans. So people had vastly different interpretations and that deepened the war in that sense. It global the war, which probably involved half the population of the globe, so about one billion people, more than ten percent of whom were in uniform.

right to Poland. And white Southerners felt that the federal government should not impose its laws and mores on us white Southern folk ways, and that the way we do things here, the way that the states had defined and organized their liberty, that was exactly the sort of thing that polls were also fighting for, or that any other

oppressed people were under military occupation were fighting for. And more or less, this was the view of the white South, which the solid South is a term that comes from the nineteen thirties and forties and the maintenance of racial segregation. And Jim Crow was very high on the political agenda, which means the agenda of the Democratic Party and Democratic primaries turned on that race issue, and so there was

you can call it cognitive dissonance. But for many white Southerners, the war against Hitler was also a war four states rights.

be from people fighting over dominant forces. We're trying to enforce a way of life on that group of people that they don't necessarily agree with, and that's what makes it so similar. But I want to go back to this question then again of historical parallels, and let's just go back to World War One, because that's obviously the closest parallel that we had. You know, I think World War One is argued as a global conflict. You know,

Japan takes part, Germany has some colonial possessions. The United States brings the Americas in in some way, shape or form. I mean, can we argue in the context of World War Two that World War One is global or do they does the comparison just not fit?

Soviet Union, throughout the Southeast Pacific than the Philippines. In that sense, World War two, just geopolitically militarily is more is more global and less centered on Europe. But it's also more global because it involved people in a much more direct way in which they saw themselves not simply as victims of war, but as protagonists of a new kind of world, a new kind of order, a new

kind of liberty. The example might be better the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the nineteenth century, which had I mean, there was major conflict and struggle in North America, on South America, especially in the Caribbean Haitian independence stands for a great deal there as well as in India, and the ideas of the French Revolution circled the globe and were contested were interpreted

on their own. But World War Two is broader, deadlier, and is deeper in terms of touching more people and involving them ideologically in all sorts of contested and varied ways. But people did think in terms of the goals of the Allies and the Axis, interpreting the ideas of liberty and freedom in their in their own ways. The idea of self rule gets at self rule for the majority, or is it self rule in the sense that all men and women are equal and minority rights are respected.

So there's a lot of there's a lot of contests on exactly what self rule means. But the idea of self rule impassion people in a tremendous way. That makes World War Two different than than World War One. But I would I would say sure, it's it's These are of course very similar, and in ideological age where ideas matter and ideas are deadly, they're there are parallels between, of course, between World War two and World War One, and between World War two and the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars.

The big difference, maybe to get at World War One versus World War two, is the vast majority of people who are killed in World War One are male uniformed soldiers about eighty to eighty five percent, and the vast majority of people killed in World War Two are civilians seventy percent.

If there's somebody listening and thinking that, do you think they're right or do you think that that's true? But maybe it needs a little nuance.

the Germans. The Germans had a vision of a complete new racial order in which they would undo the land escape and the peoples on it in order to impose their own totally artificial racial hierarchy. They had plans that saw the elimination of almost all people in Eastern Europe and in Western Russia, and grand ideas that German colonists would replace them to the tune of tens of millions, even one hundred million German colonists between the Black Sea

and the and the Baltic Sea. These are extraordinary and audacious ideological visions that made the Germans extremely deadly and are completely different from what we see in World War One and the Napoleonic era. And this is what drove German arms. Was not fear of It wasn't a defensive war and anyway wasn't even to right the wrongs of Versailles.

It was a much much more ambitious, radical reordering not only the political geopolitical landscape, but of what would happen to people under German rule and what was their role, And the role was usually to be slaves or to be killed, very radical difference. And it was the Japanese and the Germans who killed the vast majority of those seventy civilians. The seventy percent of the dead of World War Two who are civilians, those are German and Japanese casualties.

Those are the killed by Germans and Japanese on the whole.

But let's talk a little bit about the United States then, because I want to get a sense of what American perspectives were like about the war prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and how they changed. And specifically, what I'm thinking about is this isolationist sentiment. You know, it's often boiled down in simplistic terms that the United States is effectively isolationist going into World War Two and the only thing that coaxes it out is the attack on

Pearl Harbor. And I don't know, I always struggle with that and trying to decide to what level that assertion is accurate. I wanted to get your take on it. Is that a true statement speaking of the United States as purely isolationist? And really it's only Pearl Harbor and only it would have been an attack on the United States that ever really could have pulled the United States.

And I know we're talking a little bit in hypothetical terms here, but I want to get a sense of what the mood was in this country going into nineteen forty two.

necessarily shared by the majority of the American people. Pearl Harbor, a Japanese attack sneak attack as it was called, on the United States, as well as the German declaration of war that followed, made it very easy for Roosevelt, and it made also the terms of unconditional surrender much easier. That the Japanese were not to be negotiated with. But I think if you look a little bit deeper, America is deeply divided, and the divisions exist within people, within

within an individual or within a community. People hated the Nazis. They didn't have sympathy for the Nazis. That's a very small minority in the United States. But they didn't want to get involved in another war like World War One, and they didn't want to get involved in other people's trouble. And they had just gotten out of the depression. So nineteen forty is a very good year, not least of

course because of the because of the war industries. But there's prosperity finally and no war, and that is that's what Americans wanted. On the other hand, so Americans hated Hitler, but they also didn't want to start a war or enter a war in order to get rid of Hitler. And so both of these somewhat contradictory thoughts existed side by side. Both of them commanded majorities, and in a way this not was cut by Pearl Harbor and the

German declaration of war. The opposition to the war was also more or less people agreed that there should be a draft, there should be selective service. That all kicked in in the fall of nineteen forty and the idea was to train a generation of young men for a year and have them be prepared for whatever global crises happened. But what happened in the summer of nineteen forty one is that the one year term for those soldiers already

drafted was extended. It was extended for what was thought to be another six months, but nobody really knew, and so this really sparked a lot of isolationist campaigning in the spring and summer of nineteen forty one, simply that the draft had now been extended theoretically without extension, without a deadline, and that this cohort of American men were there sort of for the duration, and that the next ones would also be drafted for much longer periods of time.

So spring and summer nineteen forty one season expansion of the anti war movement, and it's then joined by celebrities like Lindbergh, So they have quite a bit of airtime and they get quite a bit of media presence. They fill stadiums throughout the summer and fall of nineteen forty one. So there is this impatience and struggle against what seems to be America's imminent entry into the war without the drama of a huge incident that was then provided by

the Japanese with Pearl Harbor. So the country is very divided. But once Pearl Harbor happens on the seventh of Sunday, the seventh of December, and the German declaration of war four days later, there's a near universal shift in opinion that this war has to be fought and those enemies have to be defeated.

democracy claims and so on and so forth. Can we talk about that administration as something where there's a legitimate debate taking place or were they more focused on trying to be engaged, you know, maybe almost growing upstream against part of the American public.

to other to the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Uh, And he was able to put America on more of an emergency war footing, was able to get the draft expanded, and was able to declare that the American zone of interest was much greater geographically than it had been. But he couldn't have done it without the backing of the American people, which finally then then came to him. So

there's a debate between Congress and the executive. The way Roosevelt and the Roosevelt administration saw, which is a you know, there were many Republicans in the administration, was that America was not in itself threatened and we weren't going to have a German or Japanese occupation of American soil, but the rest of the globe would become hostile to America.

America would become an island, an island, as they put it, a free trade principles and free government principles, but that the rest of the planet would be dominated by militaristic regimes, and that was not a planet that America wanted to live in, and that the security of its friends and allies,

Great Britain to begin with, would have been eliminated. That was not the that was not in the American interest as far as and that was the long range view of the Roosevelt administration, and that's what their argument was for engaging in the in international affairs and accepting global responsibilities.

But that's theoretical and abstract. And actually committing hundreds of thousands of troops to training and to oversee services quite another and just twenty three twenty four years after World War One, which in its height for Americans was almost as deadly as the Civil War. The summer of nineteen eighteen was something that the American public had trouble with.

into supporting a war effort against Germany? Or does the German declaration of war just simply take care of it and then he doesn't have to worry about it from that point.

and the like. But then by the end of the week the German declaration of war takes care of it. There is very little remnant of isolationist opinion after Pearl Harbor. What you do see is less of a willingness to go all out against Germany, and the idea was to defeat. And as far as ordinary citizens were concerned, they wanted to slam one on the Japanese and they wanted to hit Japan back hard, and that meant going logically, going at Japan first. According to the plans of the White House,

it was Germany first, Japan second. Germany represented a global threat, Japan represented a regional threat, and so it was more important to get Germany taken care of in their view than Japan. So it was going to be one more followed by another. In fact, though we expended enormous resources in a co consecutive war against both powers, and it

wasn't Germany first Japan second. Japan was the concentrated less resources but ever increasing resources, especially naval ones from the get go, from spring summer nineteen forty two, and the Americans were fully behind unconditional surrender for Japan. There was a less unanimity on that issue with regard to Germany.

And in that sense you could say there is a hangover of the isolationist sentiment that that Japan was the true threat as far as the American public was concerned, and Germany a lesser one.

So what are some of the big things that sort of immediately change from an outlook if you just sort of back up and you look at it from a big perspective.

to nine months, American industrial power will overwhelm them. So the first six months in America is establishing that war footing and that industrial base and reconverting civilian industrial manufacturer

into military manufacturer. Nineteen forty is the biggest day, is the biggest year of selling cars in America since nineteen twenty nine, and all of that domestic production is transformed into military production tanks, jeeps, bombers, and the last civilian car rolls off the assembly line in February nineteen forty two.

And that's the change. That's the change that Americans see, the switching of gears from civilian to war economy in almost all sectors of industrial manufacture, which then prompts rather broad, slow moving migration to the war industries. About huge percentage of Americans moved twenty percent move across state lines, many of them in nineteen forty two. So it's the creation of an industrial footing that would be the first thing that Americans saw as the start of the war on

the West Coast. They also saw the internment of Japanese American citizens and Japanese neighbors, so hundreds of thousands of Japanese lost, lost their homes and were put into camps. By late spring nineteen forty two. The first action naval engagement is in late spring nineteen forty two, and the Americans do well, especially at Midway, which is kind of a miracle, and the Japanese, the Japanese aircraft carriers that

had led the attack on Pearl Harbor are destroyed. And then there's a long drawn out battle on the Solomon Islands, on the tiny island of Guadalcanal, beginning in August nineteen forty two. That's the first real land combat, followed up very quickly by the Anglo American invasion of North Africa November nineteen forty two. So by the end of the year you have all sorts of new fronts that the Allies have opened up, but for the first six months

not at all. And you saw the expansion in fact of the Japanese Empire, and you saw a very concerted German offensive in the spring of nineteen forty two, threatening the very existence of the Soviet Union, and the great fear in mid nineteen forty two in that summer was that the Japanese would link up with the Germans in the Middle East. Japanese coming in over the Indian Ocean side and the jet and the Germans by land across Libya, Egypt and from from Iraq and the North and the

Middle East. That was the big worry in the summer of nineteen forty two. Did not necessarily it all looked like the Allies we're gonna We're going to pull this one out. So the first thing that American saw was preparation, was mobilization, was vigilance, and then the first battlefronts really begin to open up in the summer of nineteen forty two.

The British convinced them that it was not going to be a forward attack on France in forty two or even nineteen forty three, and that more was to be gained through an invasion of North Africa, followed up by a controversial choice among the Allied commanders to go into

Sicily and Italy, which was a long campaign. So a lot was done improvised in nineteen forty two, as capabilities were tested and found wanting, as the industrial footstep had to be prepared in a far bigger way than anyone anticipated.

Through November nineteen October November nineteen forty two, you still have huge losses of Allied shipping, and only a few months after that does American shipbuilding really produce more than is lost, and then produce much more than is lost so that's late forty two forty three, So all these plans have to be slowed down, they have to become

more modest. Plus there's the there is the commitment to fight Japan throughout the beginning of the conflict forty two forty three, So the plans become more modest, they become more long term, and that's also then reflected in changes in promotion and leadership at the top. So it takes a while for the Americans to get there, to get their game going, but by the end of nineteen forty two they've done so well.

But I always want to ask the final question, which is is there anything else that you really really want people to know about the book or about the content of the book before we sign off.

of rights, whether it's of labor or minorities. You had to deal with the huge numbers of refugees, and so war seemed like an endless nightmare from which people felt that they would not emerge, And that to me seems much more relevant to the present day when we think what's going to happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty forty years around the globe, as human communities figure themselves out politically in terms of populism and nationalism, also in

terms of climate change, in terms of migration patterns and movements. My fear is not World War World War III in terms of a nuclear bomb, although that atomic warfare, of course remains a threat. But what we also have to remember is the huge chaos and the dissonance behind the good war, behind the Allied struggle, and the sense of endlessness. One war after another, more and more refugees more and more civilians killed, more and more families broken apart. That's

the world that people saw in nineteen forty two. They did not see nineteen forty five. And the soldiers kiss on times where and the end they saw endlessness would never end. They didn't think about the end of the world. They thought about the endlessness, endlessness of the war. And in that sense, nineteen forty two I think speaks to twenty forty two. What might be coming on the planet in this day.

be that element in American society. But you know, it's worth bearing that in mind as we face the challenges of today, to remember the horrors that we've gone through in the past. But as I mentioned, an excellent book, I'm sure it's going to do very very well. And I really hope that everybody who's listening to this goes out right now and picks up a copy. As I'm going to remind you, you can click the link in the show notes and get one today if you would

like to have it. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and I really hope that everything goes great. We can't wait for the next book. Mister Fritchie, it's been a pleasure.