The Second World War ended eight decades ago this summer. But its specter looms large today. The war ended empires, upended the global order, and changed the course of the 20th century. Eighty years later, it still has much to teach us.
World War II is passing into memory. This is the last major anniversary of the conflict’s end that veterans will live to see. Many are in their late 90s, and most are long dead. Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and a host of other bestselling books, movies, and TV series are now the primary means of transmitting knowledge about what unfolded eight decades ago. But this change, inevitable as it is, couldn’t be happening at a worse time.
Clouds of war are once again gathering in the Pacific. And this time, the United States faces a far more formidable foe: China. President Xi Jinping has called for the Chinese military to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027. In March 2024, the departing head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. John Aquilino, warned that Beijing was on track to achieve this objective.
Xi considers himself to be China’s “man of destiny.” The China that he controls is leagues more powerful than the Middle Kingdom of his forefathers. The Defense Department rightly views Beijing to be America’s sole pacing challenge. China’s industrial, economic, and military capabilities dwarf previous foes, including Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union.
Xi has vowed to “reunify” Taiwan, and there is little doubt that he views himself as the man to carry out a dream long held by Chinese Communist Party leaders. It would be a lasting legacy, enshrining himself as the most important ruler in modern Chinese history and solidifying Chinese hegemony in a region that will soon account for the majority of the world’s GDP. Who controls the Pacific will be able to have a say in the fate of nations far from Taiwan’s shores.
China is putting its money and military forces where its mouth is.
On Jan. 30, the Financial Times revealed that “China’s military is building a massive complex in Western Beijing that U.S. intelligence believes will serve as a wartime command center far larger than the Pentagon.” Once completed, the facility will be the largest military command center in the world — 10 times the size of the Pentagon.
The Naval News disclosed the construction of D-Day-style landing barges at the Guangzhou Shipyard in southern China. The Chinese military is testing the barges, which naval analyst HI Sutton said have “unusually long road bridges extending from their bows,” making them “particularly relevant to any future landing forces on Taiwanese islands.”
According to leaked U.S. naval estimates, China already has 232 times America’s shipbuilding capacity. A Hudson Institute report warned that China has “built hundreds of hardened shelters in the past decade or so to protect its air force on the ground in the Western Pacific.” Timothy Walton and Tom Shugart observed that “China now has 134 air bases within 1,000 nautical miles of the Taiwan Strait — airfields that boast more than 650 hardened aircraft shelters and almost 2,000 unhardened individual aircraft shelters.”
Since 2020, the Chinese military has added more than 400 fighter aircraft and 20 major warships while doubling its ballistic and cruise missiles. By some estimates, China’s defense budget has increased by 16% in recent years, and that has taken place amid rising economic challenges, clearly signaling Xi’s priorities.
Beijing is engaged in the largest military buildup in modern history. China is constructing underground hospitals and stockpiling key resources, including grain and foodstuffs. The Middle Kingdom has shored up alliances with Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other American foes. This is the behavior of a nation girding itself for war. Any other interpretation is woefully naïve or dangerously optimistic.
A conflict with China would be cataclysmic. In recent decades, the U.S. has solely fought wars with third-rate armies such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, guerrillas such as the Vietcong, and terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and the Taliban. To be sure, such conflicts present their own challenges and difficulties. But these are not military behemoths possessing nuclear weapons and acting as the “factory of the world.” Indeed, this latter fact gives China significant leverage — and not only over the U.S. but over Washington’s allies. China’s industrial might puts it in a league of its own.
American supply chains were never as intermingled with previous opponents in the way that they are now with China. Beijing, with its dominance over pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, could shut down U.S. hospitals and cripple entire industries.
“War,” the historian Thucydides observed, “is a harsh teacher.” And World War II offers some bitter lessons. With the U.S. staring at the likelihood of a great power war, it is worth revisiting what that conflict has to teach us.
By some estimates, 60 million people died in World War II. An average of 27,000 people died each day between the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and the surrender of Japan on Sept. 2, 1945. If one dates the war as beginning earlier, as some historians do, that number rises considerably. Many of the dead were civilians. On just one day, March 10, 1945, no fewer than 100,000 people died in Tokyo during a firebombing raid, “the deadliest single day in military history,” Victor Davis Hanson noted in his superb 2017 book The Second World Wars.
The chief lesson of World War II is clear: You ignore or underestimate your enemy’s ideology at your own peril. As Stanisław Jerzy Lec famously observed: “In a war of ideas, it is people who get killed.” Ideologies — Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism — were at the roots of the conflict’s causes, leading to both its beginning and its fateful conclusion.
From the war’s onset, the Axis lacked the ability to win. This doesn’t mean that the Allied victory was inevitable. It wasn’t. There are no inevitabilities in history. But it does mean that the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy chose to embark upon a war that, in all likelihood, they couldn’t win. Adolf Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the decision of the European fascist powers to declare war on America after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor were disastrous. These moves ensured that the Axis was vastly outmanned and outgunned by the U.S., the Soviet Union, China, and the United Kingdom and its colonial possessions, including India, among others. This odd coalition would’ve been unthinkable in the previous years. And it was sparked by strategic miscalculations of the Axis powers — miscalculations born from hubris and intoxicating ideologies.
Hitler was sure he could win because he believed his enemies to be inferior. “It seems an unimaginably stupid thing to have done in retrospect,” the historian Andrew Roberts observed of Hitler’s decision to declare war on the U.S. It was a “suicidally hubristic act less than six months after attacking the Soviet Union.” America, Roberts points out, “was an uninvadable land mass of gigantic productive capacity and her intervention in 1917 had sealed Germany’s fate in the Great War.” But for an ideologue such as Hitler, it made perfect sense. America was to be pitied, not feared. In 1940, he asserted that “The entry of the United States into the war” would be “of no consequence at all for Germany.” Hitler’s ideology convinced him that America’s diversity made the country intrinsically weak. It also led him to invade the Soviet Union and expend considerable resources, including during fateful months, to perpetrate the Holocaust. Even in the war’s final weeks, with the Allies at his doorstep, the trains kept rolling to Auschwitz and other death camps.
The Nazis’ belief system was strategically disastrous in other respects, too. Brilliant Jewish scientists fled Nazi Germany, and the Allies made use of their talents, including in key weapons development programs. The sheer barbarism of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany ensured that they would be treated not as liberators but as despised conquerors in the many areas that they seized.
Similarly, Imperial Japan’s fanaticism led to Pearl Harbor. Japan could have been content with its already vast holdings in the Pacific — holdings that it very well could have kept had its ruling clique not believed that it could attack the U.S. in a fateful and crippling blow and then negotiate a peace on its own terms. After all, the Japanese had similar luck against Russia during the Russo-Japanese War nearly four decades earlier. A clear head would have observed the obvious: the U.S. was not Tsarist Russia. It was a huge gamble, and it failed spectacularly.
This is a key, and troubling, lesson for those worried about a war with China: Ideology matters, and it matters a great deal. The ambitions of dictators should be taken seriously. It might not be rational for China to risk a war with the U.S. by invading Taiwan, but our definition of what is rational is very different from that held by a nation controlled by the CCP and drunk on its rapid rise.
As Hanson observes, “Most wars since antiquity can be defined as the result of flawed prewar assessments of relative military and economic strength as well as strategic objectives. Prewar Nazi Germany had no accurate idea of how powerful were Great Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union, and the latter had no inkling of the full scope of Hitler’s military ambitions. It took a world war to educate them all.”
The Axis powers lacked the ability to destroy their enemy’s war-making capacity, an essential component to winning a great power war. The Allied powers could, and did, rain hell down on Germany, Japan, and Italy, devastating their industrial capabilities and hindering their ability to wage war. By contrast, the Axis was unable to do the same, certainly not to the same degree, and certainly not in the conflict’s key phases. The U.S. could hit Berlin and Tokyo, but those same powers couldn’t hit Washington — they lacked both the staging ground and the technology to carry out such attacks. Yet their strategic decisions failed to take these facts into account. Notably, China does not lack the capacity to hit the American homeland, possessing a variety of means, in a variety of domains, to do so.
And therein lies another salient lesson from World War II: industrial power wins wars. With the vast forces arrayed against them, Germany, Japan, and Italy faced long odds. Hitler foolishly believed that “an American intervention by mass deliveries of planes and war materials will not change the outcome of the war.” President Franklin Roosevelt knew otherwise, telling the American public that “powerful enemies must be outfought and outproduced.” Roosevelt famously exhorted the U.S. to become the “arsenal of democracy” and, in a January 1942 speech to Congress, called for the country to be able to produce 45,000 aircraft and 45,000 tanks within a year. Many observers thought such ambitions impossible, but the U.S. not only met its production quotas, it vastly exceeded them. In 1944 alone, the U.S. produced 100,000 planes.
American production was central to victory. But defense industrial bases are not built overnight. Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy” speech was in 1940, and by some estimates, the U.S. began to slowly, if imperfectly, build up for war as early as 1938 — three years before Pearl Harbor and six years before Allied troops stormed Fortress Europe. Of equal importance: Roosevelt’s New Deal, for all of its flaws and bad economic policies, gave future war planners an industrial base, a workforce, and the administrative experience to prepare for what lay ahead.
By contrast, the industrial base of the U.S. is now a shadow of its former self. Ditto for the DIB, which has been hollowed out for years, the victim of both too many regulations and the consolidation of contractors that occurred in the wake of the Cold War’s end. One February 2022 Pentagon report singled out the 1990s as a time in which “the defense sector consolidated substantially,” transitioning from 51 to five aerospace and defense contractors.
The number of suppliers in major weapons systems categories has “declined substantially,” the Pentagon study noted. Will Somerindyke, the chairman of Regulus Global and CEO of Union, companies working to address America’s DIB problems, told me that “the big difference between 80 years ago versus now is we have offshored a significant amount” of our capabilities. Reindustrialization and remodernization are key to competing with China, he warned, as it will be impossible to “get to their scale.” It will also be essential to “scale and modernize what is relevant on the battlefield” — and not just munitions, but also raw material. “Friendshoring,” sourcing certain items and manufacturing from like-minded allies, is vital, Somerindyke said.
Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has warned that the DIB “is not prepared for the security environment that now exists.” It is on a “peacetime footing.” The time to change this was yesterday, and it must be done with extreme urgency. After all, you go to war with the defense industrial base that you have, not the one you want.
The U.S. had time to build up its arsenal in World War II — time afforded by the strategic mistakes of the Axis and the nature of war in the prenuclear age. Such luxuries no longer exist in the era of advanced precision targeting, cyber and space warfare, and artificial intelligence.
Modern wars are largely wars of attrition. The current morass in Ukraine is but the latest in a long line of examples. Time and again, armies have believed that “the boys would be home by Christmas” and that campaigns would be short-lived. And time and again, they have been proven wrong. This was true for the first American war of the industrial age, the Civil War, and it was true for World War II. Key Allied war planners expected the conflict to be nearly over by the winter of 1944-45, only to be met with the surprise attack and ferocious fighting at the Battle of the Bulge. War has a timeline of its own.
America’s industrial capacity dwarfed Japan’s, yet it still took nearly four years of brutal fighting in the Indo-Pacific, and the use of nuclear weapons twice over, to end a fight with an opponent whose economic power paled in comparison to our own. War goes on longer than is predicted, taking more lives and more material than is initially anticipated. War is often a trudge. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s crusade in Europe has been criticized as unimaginative, but like Gen. Ulysses Grant before him, he knew that the numbers were in his favor. Quantity has a quality of its own.
Gen. Omar Bradley, one of WWII’s great military commanders, allegedly said that “amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics.” This was true then and will certainly be true in the event of a conflict with China. Further, WWII also tells us that conflict in the Indo-Pacific severely taxes logistics. In the war’s early phases, Allied forces encountered numerous logistical challenges. And this was against an opponent, Japan, which was already spread thin, with millions of its troops occupying China and elsewhere in the region. There is little reason to think that Beijing will make similarly poor strategic choices.
Of course, the best way to fight a war is to prevent one in the first place. Winston Churchill famously called World War II “the avoidable war.” He believed that the cataclysm that unfolded was the result of a loss of deterrence and a crisis of faith in the West. And here, too, there are omens for our present era. The war was a long time coming, but too many pretended otherwise. Those who didn’t were often dismissed as warmongers when in fact they were Cassandras.
Indeed, as early as 1913, former President Teddy Roosevelt warned his cousin, incoming Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin Roosevelt, that Japan was a rising power destined for conflict with the West, noting that an attack “may come, and if it does it will come suddenly.” Strikingly prescient contingency plans, such as War Plan Orange, birthed in 1911 and adopted in 1924, eventually envisioned the Japanese quickly advancing through the Philippines, with the U.S. being forced to retreat and marshal its forces. Yet, when Franklin Roosevelt was told of Pearl Harbor, key presidential aides such as Harry Hopkins expressed disbelief, believing that Japan “would not and could not attack Hawaii,” the historian Ian Toll noted in Pacific Crucible. Hitler and his compatriots had their fantasies, but the Allies had their own delusions, too. Those in America who did expect war anticipated that it would unfold at a later date.
To a great extent, the failure to predict war, like most intelligence failures, was a failure of imagination. And it was fed by the West’s inability to maintain a favorable balance of power in both Europe and Asia. Here, too, there are ill omens for a conflict with China. The U.S. no longer dominates the Indo-Pacific, and both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Iranian proxies attacking Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, are evidence of America’s collapsed deterrence.
US DECISION TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS ENDED WORLD WAR II
Yet men, material, and munitions are not enough. Willpower matters too. When Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940, Allied forces had both more men and more tanks. But France had been riven with internal rivalries and political chaos since World War I. The late stage of the Third Republic was characterized by a lack of social cohesion and an absence of national unity. France collapsed in a matter of weeks. Nations that believe themselves to be on the march advance, and those that believe themselves to be in decline retreat.
World War II need not be a harbinger. Rather, the anniversary of its end should serve as a reminder of the costs of great power war. Let us hope that we never have to pay them again. But let’s do so knowing that hope itself isn’t a strategy. On that much, history is clear.
Sean Durns is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.