The Turning Point of World War II
I was reading An Army at Dawn, the first volume of Rick Atkinson’s brilliant Liberation
Trilogy, when I noticed that Dwight Eisenhower, the American commander, Charles
DeGaulle, and Harold Macmillan were all in North
Africa at the same time working on the same project; the defeat of Nazi
Germany.
Twenty-five
hundred miles north-east from the allied Algiers headquarters as the crow flies,
the Battle of Stalingrad was happening simultaneously. One of the Army Generals at Stalingrad was
Nikita Khrushchev.
In other
words, these two battle fronts: North Africa and Stalingrad from November 1942 –
May 1943 produced the four men who would be the leaders of their own countries
at the same time, from January, 1959 when De Gaulle returned to power in
France, until January 21, 1961, when Eisenhower left the Oval Office to John F.
Kennedy. And these four countries: the
United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union ran the world in those
years. Macmillan was the only one who
was not a general, although he was an officer.
In other
words, the Operation Torch to Stalingrad front was the pivotal point of World
War II. Before Torch and Stalingrad, the allies were losing the war. These two battles were the turning point. This realization led me to read first the War Diaries 1939-1945 of Harold
Macmillan and then his memoir of the interwar years, The Winds of Change. Neither
of these books is easy reading, although they are both extremely well-written.
Harold
Macmillan is probably underrated by history because of the ignominious way his regime
came to an end, in the Profumo scandal; and the fact
that Britain was being eclipsed by the United States and Russia as a global
power during his administration.
However, the Winds of Change is
the best book ever written for understanding the roots of World War II.
Macmillan, the scion of the
eponymous publishing house, was a wounded combat veteran of World War I and
served in the House of Commons almost continuously from 1924 to 1964. Britain was the one global power between the
two world wars, given that the United States refused to join the League of
Nations and was mired in isolationist sentiment.
So Britain, given its empire, was
the only country with a global political perspective on international affairs. Harold Macmillan was the consummate insider. The one further fact that makes Macmillan’s
memoirs unimpeachable, is that his mother was an
American. She was born in Spencer,
Indiana and set out on her own at the age of 19 after the death of her first
husband. So, Macmillan apportions blame
fairly, having a sympathetic perspective on America as well as Britain. Winds
of Change is a great and important book, and although it is fifty years
old, it has frighteningly contemporary relevance.