In some ways I was glad to see a front page article in the Reader on the Second World War [March 7]. In other ways I wasn’t.
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The first thing that caused me to blink a few times was the claim that “World War II came to America like an epidemic from overseas” and the accompanying paragraphs, which describe the American entry into the war as “war fever” and contrast it with the months of debate that occurred before the gulf war. In the first place, there were years of debate about entering the war, and many people claimed we had nothing to fear from the troubles in Europe and Asia. They were proven rather spectacularly wrong when we were directly attacked: there had been skirmishes in the North Atlantic with U-boats, but Pearl Harbor was an open assault on the United States of America. The gulf war was a murkier case; the decision to respond to Japan’s attack, and the Nazi declaration of war shortly thereafter, was a no-brainer. The decision had been made for us, unlike the gulf war. Mr. Sandlin may want to read William L. O’Neill’s excellent A Democracy at War for background on the American debate on entry into the war, or check out any good book on the Roosevelt administration.
Other than that, I felt it was an interesting article and I was pleased to see an attempt to keep a more realistic picture of the worst tragedy–and also, paradoxically, the greatest triumph–in human history before the public. Would that these attempts were more common.
What happened at the Battle of Kursk was this: after the Germans tried and failed for eight days to break through the Soviet lines, Hitler ordered the attack abandoned. For those keeping score at home, that does count as a Soviet victory. But the Red Army took horrendous casualties and it lost more than half the tanks it had brought to the battle. In the immediate aftermath, it was too exhausted to exploit any advantage it might have gained from the German failure. This is what I meant when I called it a draw: the word may have been misleading, but I was trying to emphasize the disparity between the enormous size of the battle and the inconclusiveness of the result. “The main significance of Kursk,” John Keegan wrote in The Second World War, “was that it deprived Germany of the means to seize the initiative in the future and so, by default, transferred it to the Soviet Union.” This still sounds to me like a tepid kind of victory to have attained, at the end of the single largest battle ever fought.
