On 9 May the Russians celebrated the 70th anniversary of their victory over Germany. Their leaders increasingly present it as a solo performance virtually unassisted by the Western Allies, indeed a gift that allowed the West to preserve its independence. This was very much the attitude during the Soviet era, and what now seems to have been a brief reversion to reality has long since ended. This year the ceremony was not attended by Western leaders; the only important foreign guest was Chinese President Xi Jinping. Presumably the Chinese intend to parallel the Russian rewrite of history with one of their own, in which they were the primary factor in Japan’s defeat.
Russian triumphalism avoids the unfortunate reality that war broke out in 1939 because the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, limiting the risk he took by invading Poland. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s explanation of the pact emerged: He wanted a war, which he thought would bring communists to power throughout Europe. He doubted that the Western Allies would fight, but he knew Hitler would. He therefore dealt with Hitler, his theory being that Germany and the West would wear each other down, leaving him to pick up the pieces. The success of the German blitzkrieg in the West in 1940 was therefore rather chilling to Stalin. The Soviets explained the pact as an attempt to buy time to rearm, but in 1939 the Soviet Union was the most heavily armed country in Europe, as the entire point of Stalin’s industrialization over the previous decade had been to build a strong military machine.
Seven-decade-old history still matters, both to our own understanding of global strategy (and our place in the balance of power) and to our evaluation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s future strategy. There is no question that the Russians lost more people and suffered more than other countries during World War II. The Red Army killed many more Germans than Western forces did. But evaluating wartime performance must amount to more than counting who killed the most people. The Germans killed many more Russians than the Russians killed Germans, but it was the Russians who ended the war in Berlin, not the Germans in Moscow.
Sea Power’s Vital Role
Perhaps the West—and Western sea power—had something to do with that outcome. From a maritime perspective, the single key reality of World War II was that Western navies, particularly the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy, maintained control of most of the world’s oceans. Control meant that, for example, when the British were forced out of continental Europe they retained access to global resources much exceeding those the Germans commanded. The Germans were denied key raw materials and major sources of oil. Once they were on the offensive, the Allies’ command of the sea made the entire European coastline vulnerable to attack. The Germans could never concentrate their own forces to defend any one area. Allied access made various deception schemes, such as a purported plan to invade Norway, credible. Because the Germans could not concentrate forces, an Allied army, whose size was limited by what could cross the English Channel, could outnumber the Germans in Normandy. That army in turn managed to strike deep into Germany in the time the Soviets needed to meet it in 1945, enhanced by reinforcements projected across the Atlantic and the Channel.
Western sea power also made it possible to provide the Soviet Union with crucial supplies, without which it probably could not have carried on the war. For a few years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russian military historians wrote as much, acknowledging the importance of Lend-Lease and other Allied supply efforts and the sacrifices made at sea to bring them to Soviet ports. Such arguments are no longer welcome in a far more chauvinistic Russia.
It is easy to lose sight of the role of the global ocean in winning World War II or, indeed, any other major conflict. Sea power is generally exercised relatively quietly. Land warfare is filled with great memorable battles, but success in the maritime domain may be achieved by blocking an enemy’s access to the sea, or by intercepting a few of his ships or submarines or even, as in much of World War II, simply by frustrating his attacks. For example, much of the Allied success at sea in 1939-41 was achieved using intelligence that made it possible for most convoys simply to evade German U-boats. The crisis of the Battle of the Atlantic came when there were so many U-boats underway that evasion was relatively unlikely. The crisis passed when the Germans lost the ability to vector their U-boats to attack convoys (because Allied codes had changed) and also because escorts strengthened to the point that attacks against convoys generally failed. But this story was drawn out, and it pales in drama against a vast land battle such as, say, Kursk.
It is far too easy to forget how important winning the fight to command the world’s ocean was. I once heard a British historian, who felt that the Russians had won the war by killing the most Germans, say that the British had contributed little; they had maintained command of the Atlantic, but surely that was nothing compared to those titanic battles in the east. But those big battles probably would not have been fought, or at least won, without that minor matter of sea control.
Russian triumphalism denies this reality. If we deny it, too, we give up a vital current capability. It is sea power that makes it possible for us to deploy troops across the world, whether to fight terrorists or to protect our allies against more conventional threats. Certainly we can fly troops anywhere, but without the heavy materiel that must go by sea, the troops have nothing to fight with. This reality is easily overlooked, particularly when, as now, the U.S. military is under heavy budgetary pressure.
That brings us back to Putin, who is also facing severe budget issues, particularly due to the low price of oil. It is often forgotten that nuclear weapons are by far the least expensive form of military power. Once the infrastructure to produce them is in place, additional bombs or warheads are relatively easy to make. There was a reason that the Eisenhower administration, which was deeply concerned with the cost of defense, saw nuclear weapons as a way out of its financial hole. To President Eisenhower, this was reasonable. If major conflict looked like an inevitable one-way trip to a nuclear holocaust, no one would be foolish enough to try it.
President Eisenhower saw no point in maintaining large ground forces in Europe to face the massive Soviet army. A congressional delegation once asked him whether he would not want to have ten more army divisions in Europe. He asked what difference they would make against the 150 with which the Soviets were credited. He knew that the United States could build an army the size of the Soviet Union’s, but he also knew that its cost would be horrifically destructive to our economy. Better to face reality: War in Europe could not remain non-nuclear. U.S. allies had much the same attitude. For a generation the U.S. Army saw matters differently, and it successfully sold the idea that NATO could and should develop a robust non-nuclear defense of Europe, so that there would be a chance to stop a war before it became a holocaust. Fortunately no one ever found out whether Eisenhower was right.
A No-Win Scenario
Eisenhower’s central belief was that no one could win a nuclear war: Nuclear deterrence was inherently robust enough to keep any problem in Europe from boiling over. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, considerable evidence of Soviet official thinking has become available. It seems clear that the Soviet leadership shared Eisenhower’s view. Military adventures were not worthwhile. That did not stop them from approving aggressive war plans, including nuclear attacks, to be implemented in the event that they felt they had to fight. However, on a day-to-day basis, the civilian leadership was well aware that its first duty was to avoid a nuclear war. It is by no means clear that the Cuban Missile Crisis was an exception; Khrushchev seems to have seen the missiles in Cuba as a deterrent of his own, since his intercontinental ballistic-missile program had stalled.
The Soviets certainly invested in civil defense, and many Americans thought that they imagined that they could win a nuclear war by protecting key elements of their population. The investment is probably better seen as a preparation against the possibility that, against all logic, the West would attack the Soviet Union. Post-collapse opinion polls show that the majority of Soviet citizens got the message: No one would win a nuclear war. They could see through the propaganda.
Putin seems to be trying to reverse this situation. Because the Soviet Union was so heavily militarized, many Russians are well aware of military issues. They know that the Russian army has shrunk to a limited but far more professional force, and that Putin has emphasized strategic nuclear weapons over improved conventional weapons. Under economic stress, this emphasis is likely to increase, because nuclear weapons are so much less expensive than conventional forces.
Putin appears determined to mask economic disaster at home by promoting nationalist successes in the “near abroad,” as Russians call former Soviet states, now nominally or actually independent. The most striking examples have been the attacks on Georgia and now on Ukraine. The question for Russians interested in military affairs is whether the West will ever strike back; for example, whether the war in Ukraine will become less one-sided. Putin’s answer has been to rattle his nuclear weapons. He has blamed his economic downturn on a combination of Western interference and sanctions. The reality—that the root causes are gross corruption and the falling price of oil—has not found much traction in Russia.
This is where nuclear weapons and Putin’s propaganda machine come into play. Any Russian nervous about eventual disaster in Ukraine or elsewhere in the “near abroad” (the Baltic states certainly come to mind) is told that Russia has an effective backstop in the form of nuclear weapons no one else can match. Older Russians may be aware that unmatchable nuclear weapons are a contradiction in terms and that all they promise is mass destruction, but apparently a majority of younger Russians think that Russia can defeat the West in a nuclear war. That does not mean that Putin is planning mutual nuclear suicide with the West, but it does considerably stiffen Russian public support for his adventurism. It also tells us that deterrence is still very important; it is not yet time to pledge nuclear disarmament.