;)
Another example of the poverty of historical explanation: Enigma
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 09:11PM No matter what, we have to believe we know why things happened. Some people believe in vast impersonal historical imperatives, others in sinister conspiracies, yet others in divine providence.
A couple of months ago, Greg Cochrane, in his interesting and crabby blog West Hunter, brought up an example of the poverty of historical explanation: for a couple of decades after the Second World War, historians wrote accounts of what had happened in that war, and why, without any knowledge of a significant influence on how events turned out, the breaking of the Enigma codes. But no one (as far as I know) said "actually, the defeat of the Germans, and the US victory at Midway, and a whole bunch of other things, seem unbelievably lucky. Is there something we don't know about them? Were there, maybe, some spies who have not yet come to light? Or some other explanation?"
I do remember a good friend saying, after the publication of Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret, the first big public explanation of the breaking of the codes, and the effect that had on the war: "No one understood anything about it!"
Now, maybe, we do. Though the Soviet victory in that war, which really decided things, still makes no sense at all to me. No code breaking for them, no secret weapons, no across-the-ocean safe haven pumping out bombers and cruisers, nothing but beatings, starvation, mass slaughter, burning villages...and victory. Utterly incomprehensible, and utterly fascinating.
Reader Comments (1)
Defeating Germany has never been a mystery to me. I have an old atlas from 1938 which has a whole section of boring economic maps -- things like chromium production and mohair. In the 1930s -- with a third of the country out of work, mind -- the US produced as much steel as Germany and the UK combined, as much oil as every other major power combined, and an order of magnitude more cars and trucks than everyone else combined.
Add to that Russia's 3:1 population advantage over Germany and Stalin's willingness to trade 2 Russians for a German in battle, and there's just no way Germany could have won that war. (Well, there was a way: if Hitler had made an armistice and "peaceful coexistence" preferable to fighting. But Hitler made sure that wasn't going to happen because of his delight in Schrecklichkeit.)
The surprise under-performer to me has always been Japan. At their peak they controlled a staggering resource base and managed to get no use out of it. They started the war in order to gain access to Indonesian oil. They got Indonesia almost bloodlessly and had a fairly complaisant population there, and they still suffered crippling oil shortages throughout the war!