There used to be a general understanding that in wars with dictatorships, democracies were at a disadvantage — because they were slow to mobilize, vulnerable to dissent from the home front, wary of casualties, and so forth. Lately, though, a new conventional wisdom has emerged, epitomized by a recent Gregg Easterbrook column, in which he writes:
When I ponder the twentieth century, one of the things that strikes me is that democracies turned out to be much better at fielding armies than dictatorships. In World War II, freedom beat dictatorship by a decisive margin in combat, even though dictatorship began the conflict with a significant advantage. Think about the situation in the summer of 1940, when England was the sole nation left actively resisting tyranny in all of Europe, while the United States was barely better than demilitarized; at that point, dictatorship outgunned democracy by a big margin, and was dangerously close to winning. But from the summer of 1942 on — El Alamein for the British and Midway for the United States — every battle between freedom and tyranny ended in victory for freedom.
My thoughts on Easterbrook’s argument are here (suffice it so say, he glosses over the not-insignificant, and probably even dispositive, contributions made by the Soviet tyranny to the war effort). But Easterbrook is hardly alone — Victor Davis Hanson, among others, has spent much of his career making a similar argument, and the whole “Greatest-Generation” hoopla, from Spielberg and Hanks to the DC memorial, was thick with the notion of democracy wiping the floor with totalitarianism on the field of battle.
NOW, A CORRECTIVE: It’s instructive, therefore, to consider just how tough it was for the Western Allies to defeat Nazi Germany, even in 1944 when everything seemed to be going the Allies’ way. Max Hasting’s new book out the 1944-45 slog, called Armageddon, is reviewed in this Sunday’s Times, and this passage struck me as worth highlighting:
. . . the generals’ failure to knock Germany out of the war in late 1944 reflected the kind of armies they led as much as their own deficiencies as leaders. The British and American armies were composed of citizen soldiers, who were usually prepared to do their duty but were also eager to survive. ”These were,” Hastings writes, ”citizens of democracies, imbued since birth with all the inhibitions and decencies of their societies.” Such peacetime virtues are not easily transformed into military effectiveness. James Gavin, whose airborne division was among the finest units in any army, filled his diary with harsh comments about the average soldier’s military quality. ”If our infantry would fight,” he wrote in January 1945, ”this war would be over by now. . . . Everybody wants to live to a ripe old age.” When Winston Churchill complained to Montgomery about the British Army’s lack of initiative, Montgomery replied by recalling the carnage on the Western Front during World War I: ”It was you, Prime Minister, who told me that we must not suffer casualties on the scale of the Somme.”
By contrast, Armaggedon points out, the Soviets were prodigal with the lives of their soldiers — and ended up in a much-better postwar position because of it. (Paul Fussell’s recent The Boy’s Crusade offers a similarly demythologized view of the European front in the 1944-45 period, with the added advantage that Fussell was one of the American boys in question.)
Note that I’m not questioning America’s military superiority today, or the role that democracy plays in facilitating the kind of capitalism that breeds a superior military-industrial-technological complex. But I’m deeply skeptical of the notion that there’s something in the democratic “citizen-soldier” that makes him ideally conditioned to take on the mindless lemmings of a dictator-commanded army. Just as a for instance — if democratic India fought fascist China today, who do you think would win? (Or did we already run that experiment?)
— Ross
The Dish 