A tank man came home and could not stay

In the opening of *The War in the West*, James Holland writes that the Second World War killed more than sixty million people from over sixty countries. Entire cities were laid waste, borders were redrawn, and millions more were displaced. People living through later wars in the Middle East, parts of Africa, the Balkans, Afghanistan, or even the United States may justifiably feel that their own years were the most traumatic in living memory. Globally, he tells Lex Fridman, World War II remains the single biggest catastrophe of modern history. In human drama, it is unrivaled.

What makes it so, Holland says, is that it was truly global. It was fought in deserts and in the Arctic, across oceans and in the air, in jungle, on hills and beaches, on the Russian steppe and in Ukraine. Wherever there is war there is incredible human drama, and that is what draws him. He still asks himself how he would have coped at twenty: army, air force, or a Royal Navy destroyer, and how he would have stood the separation. He has interviewed men who were away for four years.

One of them was Sam Bradshaw, a tank man from Liverpool. Bradshaw went away for four years, was badly wounded in North Africa, then shot in the neck in Italy. When he finally came home, his mother had turned gray, the sister who had been thirteen was a young woman, and his old school had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. He did not recognize the place. Then he joined up again, switched units, went back to Europe, and was among the first British troops into Bergen-Belsen. He felt, Holland says, that the gulf of time had severed him from the normalities of life in a cruel way he could not yet confront.

Asked for Bradshaw's most intense story, Holland does not reach for a tank engagement. He remembers the post. Mail was supposed to arrive regularly and did not. You might get nothing, then five letters in a day. In Bradshaw's squadron there was a man whose wife wrote about their daughter getting to school and winning a swimming contest. The day-to-day banal life, Holland says, was "absolute catnip" to the whole troop. They waited for those letters the way people wait for a soap opera.

Then the Dear John letter came. She had found someone else; it was over. Bradshaw could see his friend was in a very bad way and thought he would do something stupid. He told him it was terrible, that he still had his mates, that perhaps things could be patched up after the war, and that two years apart was a long time from her side too. Two days later, in the next engagement, the man was killed. Bradshaw said he just knew that was going to happen. Holland has never forgotten it.

The story is the war in miniature. What held a man together was not a speech about the nation. It was the sense that home was still going on without him, and that he still belonged to it. Cut that thread and the front becomes unsurvivable. Holland adds that most of the fighting, for the most part, was done by ordinary everyday people doing extraordinary things. Short oral histories on YouTube, he says, usually scratch the surface: veterans repeating what they later read in books, with no time for the questions that get you to the nuts and bolts.

Fridman notes that Britain, France, and the Soviet Union faced the prospect of being enslaved, and that Nazi plans to repopulate the east with Germanic people were stated in the open. Holland says they were also going to starve millions of Soviet civilians. The Hunger Plan was not an SS brainstorm. It was drawn up by the economic division of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German combined general staff. General Georg Thomas and Herbert Backe, the minister for food, sat down with a practical problem: German farming was inefficient, and there was not enough food.

Lebensraum was the answer they reached. They would go in and take the grain. The Soviet Union had urbanized heavily since 1917, and city populations lived on food they would no longer get. Thomas's phrase, Holland says, was "umpteen millions." The tone is casual, a staff paper, not a racial sermon. A considerable share of the war's death toll was calculated that way. Above the ledger sat Hitler's worldview: a global Jewish-Bolshevik plot, a master race of northern European Aryans, a stab in the back in 1918, and an existential task that this generation had to finish or be crushed.

Hitler, Holland says, was a black-and-white, them-or-us person. "It's a Thousand Year Reich or it's Armageddon." There is no middle ground. That crystal-clear message is why he came to the fore: every speech started in darkness and ended in a rabble-rousing crescendo of hope. Apps can now translate those speeches, and by today's standards they sound like nonsense. You have to put yourself in the shoes of listeners in 1922, 1923, or 1933. Historians who write that Germany might have won if Hitler had armed Jewish scientists or partnered with Ukrainians, Holland says, are missing the entire point. This was an ideological war. Those counterfactuals were never going to happen.

Ideology also bracketed every military decision, which opened Germany to trouble. Holland stresses three levels of war that historians too often flatten: the strategic (war aims), the tactical (the man in the foxhole or the Spitfire), and the operational — factories, shipping, supply chains, the management of the war. Nations fight differently because of geography. Britain in 1939 had comfortably the world's largest navy; the United States had the second-largest navy and an army of about 189,000, the nineteenth largest in the world, sandwiched between Portugal and Uruguay. Germany had an army of three and a half million. Large armies, Holland argues, are inherently inefficient. The British and later American principle was steel, not flesh.

Barbarossa was so vast that the operational level decided it. The "Nazi war machine" is a misnomer: only the spearhead was mechanized. Seventeen Panzer divisions out of roughly a hundred in the initial attack were the combined-arms motorized tip, less than twenty percent of the force, and they would be attrited by combat and by distance. The Germans went in with some 2,000 different types of vehicle. After Smolensk fell on 15 July 1941, 16th Panzer Division had sixteen tanks left out of 180. Soviet railways used a wider loading gauge, so every yard of captured track had to be shifted a couple of inches for German locomotives, which also needed water and coal more often. They had not planned for this.

Holland does not think a drive straight to Moscow would have finished the Soviet Union. The Red Army had the men; Stalin's refusal to pull back across the Dnieper at Kiev put another staggering 700,000 into the bag. The purges had executed or imprisoned 22,500 officers, including three of five marshals, and the Winter War against Finland had been a humiliation Hitler misread. He had wanted to knock out Britain first, avoid a two-front war, and invade the Soviet Union in 1943 or 1944. Failure in 1940, plus belief in his own genius after Poland and France, pulled the timetable forward. The concept for France, Holland says, was von Manstein's and the execution Guderian's, not Hitler's. Even that victory was "50% brilliance of the Germans and 50% French failure."

Hitler invaded Poland on the assumption that Britain and France would not declare war. He was wrong about the declaration and right that they would do almost nothing with it. Fridman presses the point: when Germany went into Poland, France could have gone straight at the open back door. Holland agrees they absolutely could have. The Saar "offensive" was a reconnaissance in force: they crossed, picked their noses for a few days, and trundled back. It was embarrassing. Germany had nothing left in the west.

France had been traumatized by a war fought on its own industrial heartland, and it lost three times as many killed as Britain. There was no stomach to do that again, which made the country risk averse — and, ironically, took a far greater risk. The 1930s were a blur of coalition governments that could agree on almost nothing; it is amazing the Maginot Line was built at all. Belgium's neutrality closed the obvious fix. France should have said it would not come to the rescue and fortified the northern border. Psychological damage from the last war in that same country stopped them. The German blow then landed at the hinge where the Maginot Line ended, around Sedan.

The high command was too old and too static in its thinking. Weygand, Gamelin, and General Georges were well into their sixties; Georges, the youngest army commander, was sixty. An army commander, Holland says, should be in his late forties or early fifties. There was not a single radio in the Château de Vincennes, headquarters of General Maurice Gamelin. France was the most automotive society in Europe, second in the world after the United States, with eight people per motor vehicle against forty-seven in Germany and 106 in Italy, and a superb railway network. Messages still went by dispatch rider. Gamelin sent one at six in the morning; by noon he had not come back; another went out; the answer arrived at nine at night, by which time the Germans had advanced another fifteen miles. That lag repeated at every level. They were rabbits in headlights.

If anyone in the regime was a genius, Holland says, it was Joseph Goebbels. Germany in 1939 was behind the times in mechanization and on top of the world in communications. Seventy percent of households had radios, a density unmatched in Europe and only just beaten by the United States. For the rest, loudspeakers went into stairwells, squares, cafes, and bars. The Nazi state controlled radio, film, and newspapers. The mix was not all ranting: light entertainment, comic shows, Wagner, Richard Strauss. The subliminal message never changed. We are the best. The Jewish-Bolshevik plot is the existential threat. We will be the greatest nation ever, and Hitler is a genius. Most people, Holland says, still believe what they are told repeatedly.

The Deutscher Kleinempfänger, the little German receiver, was nine inches by four by four, made of Bakelite, and super cheap. Until then a radio was a walnut-lacquered middle-class object you showed the neighbors. Suddenly everyone could have one, which meant everyone received the same message. Holland compares the jolt to the arrival of the iPod. The Hitler Youth did the rest: sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are the least risk averse, the most open to suggestion, and they got cool uniforms and a dagger. Hitler took the chancellorship in January 1933 with 33 percent of the vote, down from 37 percent the previous July. Conservative politicians thought they would manipulate him. Hindenburg died the following summer; the presidency vanished; the Enabling Act dissolved other parties. A totalitarian state arrived just like that. Fridman draws the lesson: do not let an extremist into government and assume you can control him.

History does not repeat itself, Holland says, because time evolves, but patterns of human behavior do. After economic crisis comes political upheaval, always, because people are worse off and the current system looks broken. He puts 2008 and then COVID in that sequence, and says that whether one is pro-Trump or anti-Trump, the offer is something completely different: the old ways do not work, and he will say what he thinks without the sheen of diplomacy. If a country already feels broken, a disruptor will find a market. Versailles created Hitler, Holland has written; the Wall Street crash and the Depression brought him to power; the propaganda machine brought everyone else on board. The message was simple because it was us and them, Frontgemeinschaft and Volksgemeinschaft, good and evil, with no translation that quite captures those bonds.

Through the 1930s Hitler pushed to see what he could get away with, while Britain and France reeled from the Depression and had no stomach to enforce Versailles. He remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936; Erhard Milch even shuffled the same row of Messerschmitt 109s between airfields to cow the head of the French air force. Anschluss, the Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia were nearly bloodless, which frustrated a man spoiling for a wartime triumph. Chamberlain, Holland argues, did not simply trust him. Britain had no treaty obligation to Czechoslovakia; 92 percent of the British public opposed war in 1938; Chamberlain had backed the navy, the air force, and the world's first fully coordinated air defense system. Holland is not sure going to war in 1938 would have saved the Czechs. He does think Chamberlain was naive to ambush Hitler with a piece of paper promising the two countries would never fight.

When German troops took the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Chamberlain drew a line and guaranteed Poland. That decision was heeded by almost every senior German commander, including Göring, who thought war with Britain a catastrophe. It was not heeded by Hitler, who was convinced France and Britain would still appease him after Poland. He called his commanders to the Berghof in civilian clothes just after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and told them the invasion was in two days. They were stunned. Poland became the proving ground. Overrun in eighteen days, it was a dark success that ended, Holland notes, in ruins in May 1945. Asked on 30 April whether he still backed 1 September 1939, Hitler would probably have said yes and blamed the Prussian generals.

The more grievous mistake, Holland thinks, was not Munich. In the summer of 1939 the Soviet Union asked Britain and France to come and negotiate. The delegation was third-tier; Admiral Drax had no authority; the whole thing was a joke. The sticking point was Soviet transit through Poland, which London and Paris sniffed as a trap — the Red Army would march in and stay, which it unquestionably would have done. It might also have stopped the world war. Fridman says Chamberlain should have got on a plane. Holland agrees that an in-person meeting could have changed the trajectory of history. Humans want to see the cut of someone's jib. It is much easier to dehumanize people on a screen or through someone else's report. "It's the world's great tragedy that it's only a few people that want to go to war and the vast majority want to live happily contented lives." Neither Stalin nor Hitler believed the pact except as cynical realpolitik for now. From 1933, Holland says, a German–Soviet conflict was inevitable. The agreement simply untied Hitler's hands for Poland.

Churchill returned to the Admiralty when war was declared, a towering backbencher with a record of being right about dictators and wrong about a long list of other things. Chamberlain's government fell after the Norway fiasco; Lord Halifax, the obvious successor, physically blanched at the job. Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, the same day Germany launched Case Yellow, as a man many still saw as a hothead. Fridman raises Darryl Cooper's claim that Churchill was the "chief villain" of the war, in the good-faith reading that he forced Hitler to escalate a Polish war into a global one. Holland says no. The Polish guarantee was Chamberlain's, made while Churchill was out of government. Hitler was always going to invade the Soviet Union unless the Soviets moved first, and no one asked him to attack the Low Countries, Norway, Denmark, or Britain.

Britain in 1938–39 is easy to forget. A third of the map was pink. It had the largest navy and 33 percent of the world's merchant shipping, with access to enough Greek, Norwegian, and Canadian tonnage to exceed 80 percent. It had been stockpiling bauxite, copper, and tungsten, and locking up rubber contracts at over the asking price. The gold standard was still tied to the pound. From that height, refusing to defend Poland after a public guarantee would have been a collapse of prestige and a green light to dictators. Holland rejects the symmetry some people draw between the Holocaust and Allied bombing. "The moment Hitler stopped the war, the bombing would stop." If the war stopped in Hitler's favor, the killing would continue and be accelerated.

By 1943 the moral picture blurs, Holland admits: destroying cities and killing civilians is easier to keep clean in the North African desert than in densely populated Europe or the Far East. The job of political leaders, he says, is to defend their own people first. Western Allied war-making tried to minimize the deaths of their own young men with firepower and technology — steel, not flesh. No more than 14 to 15 percent of an Allied army was infantry; about 45 percent were service troops. Strategic bombing was meant to make it easier for the men jumping from a landing craft. Cooper's real target, Fridman suggests, is the postwar cartoon of Churchill used to justify later interventions. Holland agrees that oversimplification is a mistake. The Allies made plenty of errors; overall he thinks they made the right calls. Decapitate a strong leader without a plan, as in Iraq, and a vacuum fills with worse. Post-1945 rehabilitation of Italy, Japan, and West Germany, by contrast, turned unprecedented destruction into thriving democracies. Those lessons of 1918 had been learned.

At sea in 1939 the dominant powers were Britain and the United States. Italy's navy was its most modern service but had no carriers and no radar. In the air the Luftwaffe was the largest force in the world, and Japanese naval and army pilots were elite of the elite, arriving at front-line squadrons with at least 500 hours in the logbook against 150 to 170 for the RAF or Luftwaffe. There were not that many of them. France had similar numbers of aircraft on paper, spread by region so they could never mass. The Luftwaffe, as aggressor, could pulverize an airfield at a time of its choosing. French crews stooged around hoping to bump into someone. The RAF was built the other way: Bomber, Fighter, Training, and Coastal Command, and the world's first fully coordinated air defense system — radar, Observer Corps, control rooms, and IFF.

In those rooms a tote board showed which squadrons were airborne; croupiers moved plots across a map of southern England. Radar gave a rough picture; overlapping observers counted aircraft and estimated height with a pantograph; a single filter room pushed updates back to the sector stations. Controllers could vector pilots to a bomber formation so that when the Luftwaffe arrived, the fighters were already up and the bombs hit grass. Of 138 RAF airfields in Britain, only Manston on the Kent coast was knocked out for more than 48 hours in the summer of 1940, and it was abandoned. On Eagle Day, 13 August, the British could see them coming. The Germans had no equivalent home defense. They had not imagined needing one.

The legend of "the Few" as the last line against Nazi hordes, Holland says, is rubbish. They were the first line. The second was the Royal Navy, and a German invasion fleet of Rhine barges — two out of three unmotorized — had no chance of crossing the Channel. It is often forgotten that while the Luftwaffe bombed Britain, the RAF was bombing the fighter fields of the Pas-de-Calais, so every German squadron of twelve (often fewer) had to leave two aircraft behind. In July 1940 Britain built 496 new Hurricanes and Spitfires; Germany built 240 single-engine fighters, its best ratio of the year. By the end of October the Luftwaffe's single-engine fighter force was under 200, down from about 750 in early July; Fighter Command had risen from about 650 to well over 750. Britain produced 132,500 aircraft in the war; America produced 315,000. The Luftwaffe's legend is the spearhead of Blitzkrieg, abused until it broke. By 1944 an Allied fighter pilot arrived with 350 hours; a German with about 90. In the first two months of 1944 the Luftwaffe lost some 2,400 aircraft in the air and about 3,400 in accidents. World War II, more than any other conflict, was a war of numbers.

If the war was a battle of factories, Holland says, the test is efficiency. The Sherman does not get the respect it deserves. Its 75 mm gun sent a shell at about 2,000 feet per second; the German 88 did 3,000. On paper a 58-ton Tiger meeting a Sherman should have been a walkover. At about 5:30 p.m. on Monday, 26 June 1944, a Sherman came around a corner of the Rue Massieux in Fontenay-le-Pesnel in Normandy, met a Tiger, and won. The Sherman commander was experienced and had an armor-piercing round already in the breech. He said one word: fire. The shot hit the gun mantlet, spalled, and wounded the Tiger driver. The Tiger commander ducked into the turret and went blind. In the first thirty seconds the Sherman put ten rounds onto the Tiger before it fired once. The crew surrendered.

"You didn't need to destroy the Tiger tank, you just need to stop it operating." Experience counted, training counted, and so did the Sherman's smaller, faster-loading gun, its stabilizing gyro, and an override switch that let the commander start the turret before the gunner reacted. The hardest fact is production: 1,347 Tigers against 49,000 Shermans, thirty-six to one, plus 492 even larger King Tigers Germany could barely fuel. Holland puts the Tiger on both his top-five and bottom-five lists. It was terrifying, which mattered to the GI in the lane. It was also too big for the European loading gauge, needed special tracks for rail, chewed fuel, and demanded mechanics in a country with one motor vehicle per forty-seven people. Almost every young American could drive a stick; a Sherman had a clutch and a throttle where you expected them. Not everyone could drive a Tiger. German loaders sat on the right of the gun, which is ergonomically backwards for a right-handed crew taught never to be left-handed. Holland has never found an explanation.

On 4 or 5 December 1941, just before the Red Army counterattacked outside Moscow, Georg Thomas — the same man behind the Hunger Plan — told a weapons meeting they had to "stop making such complete and aesthetic weapons." They had been building over-engineered, aesthetically pleasing machines, and they only half managed to stop. The soldier facing a squeaking, clanking monster does not care about maintenance or railways. People running a war, and historians afterwards, have to. Fridman asks whether Kursk or Stalingrad is more interesting. Holland goes to Stalingrad, but only after dating the real strategic break earlier.

Barbarossa did not destroy the Red Army in three months. By early December 1941, Holland argues, Germany was not going to win. On 15 June it had one enemy, Britain and its empire; by 16 December it had three, including the USSR and the United States. Wonder weapons would not close that gap. The Soviet Union was still in a terrible way: colossal factories, grain, and coal overrun intact, steel production down 80 percent in 1941 and 1942, kept alive by staggering Arctic and Alaskan supply. Even so it raised 80 new divisions in the second half of 1941 — more than Britain fielded in the entire war. Germany was winning itself to death in encirclements like Kiev, capturing some 700,000 men while bleeding men and machines it could not replace. As victory slipped, Hitler's personal handling increased. He had been a lance corporal, never staff-trained, and he stifled the freedom at the front that had made the German army effective.

In 1942 he chose oil fields over Moscow. Holland calls it insane. The Soviets would not hand over intact wells; Germany lacked refineries, pipelines, rail capacity, and tankers to move Caucasian oil to the Reich. No one, in the detailed German record of that spring, asked "and then what?" Case Blue was distracted by Crimea, then split when Stalingrad appeared on the Volga. Hitler fired von Bock for saying the split was nuts. Street fighting, Holland says, is the worst kind of fighting; home advantage is colossal; Gaza is flattened because you cannot see to shoot. American trucks let Zhukov plan the pincer. Russians will hate him for saying so, but it was not the street fighting that destroyed Sixth Army. It was the subsequent encirclement, sealed in November 1942, with surrender in early February 1943. Most German strength had been on a wild goose chase that never got near Baku and took not a drop of oil. From that moment the Wehrmacht was going backwards.

At the same time North Africa was collapsing because Hitler insisted on pouring in reinforcements. Equipment lost there, Holland says, exceeded Stalingrad. Tunisia was not a greater psychological blow, but the two fronts have to be read together, and this was the Americans' first ground clash with Axis forces, which they lost badly. The Allies became masters of the North African shore on 13 May 1943. Between November 1942 and May 1943 the Luftwaffe lost 2,700 aircraft over North Africa; between June and October 1943, including Kursk, it lost 702 on the Eastern Front and 3,704 over the Mediterranean. Do not assign strategic importance only by boots on the ground, Holland warns: Guadalcanal was game-changing with tiny numbers. Most German blood was lost in the east; that does not make the east more important than the west, or the reverse. Balance is the method.

The Nazi response to Stalingrad was not to admit they were finished. It was to double down. In the third week of February 1943 Goebbels asked the Sportpalast whether it was ready for total war. The audience, Holland says, was depressed; they realized they would reap what they had sown. They knew what had been happening in the east. Cheap cameras had gone to the front; film came home; families saw Jews beaten, partisans executed, villages torched. "Do they really know? Yeah, they do." Auschwitz was inside the new Reich, a German name, a model town people moved into. Half of the six million were killed by bullets; Himmler wanted a more "humane" method — humane for the shooters. Zyklon B burst the capillaries in the lungs and could take twenty to twenty-five minutes. People stood naked, realized it was not a shower, and had minutes of pain and panic to understand they were going to die. What Holland cannot reconcile is the speed of the flip: Beethoven, Goethe, great engineers, and a democracy a decade earlier, then unspeakable inhumanity. Fridman calls it walking Solzhenitsyn's line between good and evil.

At the Arcadia Conference after Pearl Harbor, the policy was to get American troops to Britain and across the Channel as soon as possible. Neither ally was ready in 1942 or really in 1943; June 1940, when France fell, had been ground zero for both. Molotov demanded a second front; the Americans promised 1942 and could not deliver. Churchill proposed Northwest Africa instead: experience against Axis troops, a pincer with the army already in Egypt, opportunistic rather than a straight line to Berlin. Roosevelt agreed. After Tunisia, Sicily, and the Trident Conference in Washington, the Americans said no more faffing around: May 1944, a Channel crossing. That is when Operation Overlord got its name. A prerequisite was air superiority over a wide swathe of northwest Europe, because the race after landing would be who could build up faster, and the Germans were already on the continent. Bridges over the Seine and Loire, marshalling yards, the Reichsbahn — the glue of the German war machine — had to be wrecked by low-level bombers, which meant no Focke-Wulfs overhead.

American daylight bombers were being decimated beyond fighter range. On 17 August 1943, the Schweinfurt–Regensburg raid sent 324 heavies; 60 were shot down and some 130 badly damaged. The solution was the P-51 Mustang, commissioned by the British in May 1940 and built from sketches in 117 days, transformed when a Rolls-Royce Merlin replaced the Allison. With drop tanks it could fly more than 1,400 miles — Warsaw and back. By April 1944 the Allies had cleared the air; by the end of May the closest German fighter seen was 500 miles from the beachhead. Typhoons, Tempests, and adapted Thunderbolts wrecked about 90 percent of coastal radar. D-Day, Holland says, was the zenith of coalition warfare: not even formal allies, just partners who parked differences until the job was done. The numbers still stun him: 6,939 vessels, 1,213 of them warships, 4,127 assault craft, 12,500 aircraft, 155,000 men landed or dropped in twenty-four hours. All three service commanders were British; two-thirds of the aircraft and of the men landed were British and Dominion. Canadians punched above their weight; the U.S. Navy was mostly in the Pacific. The minesweeping was the largest of the war — some 242 sweepers opening lanes — and not a single ship was lost to a mine. There were no computers and no GPS. Once the bridgehead was secure, with Bagration about to explode in the east, it was game over.

Fridman takes him to the bunker. Holland thinks *Downfall* is very accurate, except that Goebbels took cyanide rather than shooting himself. Bruno Ganz nailed Hitler. There are millions of Hitler's words and many translated conferences; you can get inside his head more clearly than Stalin's. In those last days Hitler said his reputation would not be good at first, but he hoped that in a few years people would realize the good he had been trying to bring. Fridman says they are all the same: they always believe they are doing good. The lesson Holland takes from the war is what happens when you allow such individuals great power. Financial crisis will bring political unrest; you have to see the writing on the wall. Complacency is a dirty word. Freedoms in the West are not necessarily permanent. He does not expect another war on that scale, but pictures from the opening days in Ukraine — knocked-out tanks, bloated bodies — look, in black and white, like the road out of Falaise in 1944. Life is fragile and peace is fragile. You take them for granted at your peril. What gives him hope is that the vast majority of people want to live peacefully, without hate, and that the human brain's capacity to answer new problems is infinite. Most of the fighting, he said at the start, was ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Often what held them was a letter about a girl who won a swimming race.