Burning Hamburg 1943 – the first culmination of liberal militarism
adamtooze.substack.com
adamtooze.substack.com
What other options were there for the Allies?
By 1943 the Germans had mostly successfully moved their production to small workshops, which were often in cities. This is also in the long shadow the Blitz cast, which inflicted not dissimilar damage to London.
If London was a valid Military Target in 1940, then Hamburg was certainly one in 1943.
To quote from wikipedia about sessions learned by the British the Blitz "From 1943 to the end of the war, he [Harris] and other proponents of the area offensive represented it [the bomber offensive] less as an attack on morale than as an assault on the housing, utilities, communications, and other services that supported the war production effort."
They do get one thing correct however - the horrors of the Nuclear Bomb are not that unique, many many more were killed, in Europe and Pacific theaters by firebombing (I'll point folks at the firebombing of Tokyo as a starting point) as the than were killed by nuclear bombs.
Both Germany and Japan violated the normal, commonly understood rules of war - we responded, in ways that, could be argued to have an ethical shadow - and while I dont consider these acts unethical (including the nuclear bomb), they're not ethically clean - they're a gray area that can only be justified in context.
We have this mental narrative of war that its this clean thing, either black or white, just or unjust - and thats not reality, war it dirty, even when its just and good - for a good reason, it means much death and killing, it leaves indelible stains on those who fight, and those who survive for the rest of their lives. To present otherwise is foolish and lying to ourselves.
We know that what actually ended the war was invading the territory that was held, not strategic bombing. Not that it really matters, since the German state was so thoroughly interrogated for the war that they aren't going to complain, but the Allied bombing campaign bears much similarity to the Vietnam bombing campaign in that it was killing stuff for the stake of killing stuff with little tactical or strategic advantage.
Would those civilians have died anyhow had the germans had the military materiel to hold each city longer, which would have required fighting block by block - Imagine the Battle of Berlin but on a continental scale.
Probably just as long. The reason the American forces had such an easy time advancing into France once they had landed is because most of the German forces were on the Eastern front, where the USSR had to do the extremely bloody fighting all the way to Berlin anyway.
Had the Germany retained said industrial capacity, wouldn't the USSR have to fight even bloodier fighting for longer? How do we know whether they would prevail or loose eventually in this alternative history scenario?
Could you elaborate on how you logically arrive at such a conclusion?
The bombings did little to disrupt said industry. Though there were deaths and damage, it was repaired and the machines kept working. Actual severe disruptions to the German war economy occurred when they lost access to raw materials, such as the Romanian oil fields. There are studies to this effect, but it is more obviously visible by how the German armies kept shooting until they were eliminated by other shooting armies.
Strategic bombing also failed to eliminate the Chinese/North Koreans, the Vietcong, the Taliban...
What makes you think they wouldn't have been able to continue shooting for much longer?
> eliminate the Chinese/North Koreans
Wasn't North Korea pretty much entirely defeated by the time China interfered (and Chinese territory wasn't bombed)?
> Vietnam
The strategic bombing campaign in North Vietnam wasn't that successful and also quite costly and US couldn't follow it up with a ground invasion.
So if that equipment was to be sent to Russia investing those resources into (supposedly) less effective bombers might have been the more pragmatic long-term option (at the horrible cost of additional Russian lives).
It's not that obvious to me. Of course they kept shooting. It's hard to imagine a scale of destruction necessary to bring an industralized country's economy to a full halt.
Still, deaths mean decreased workforce which is already strained by the military draft.
While, of course, they repaired what they could, (re)building a factory to its full potential takes years and substansial workforce.
As to Vietnam/Afganistan, withholding moral judgment on their invasion in the first place, from what very little I know about these historical events, the US operations accomplished their military goals there. They later withdrew not due to Vietcong/Taliban's efforts, but as a result of internal political/societal processes in the US itself.
This imagines a strain on the workforce that never really existed. Industrial countries can and have staffed factories and repair crews with women and the infirm.
>As to Vietnam/Afganistan, withholding moral judgment on their invasion in the first place, from what very little I know about these historical events, the US operations accomplished their military goals there.
Part of their military goals were destruction of the enemy force via sustained bombing campaigns. These goals were never achieved and instead abandoned.
Point taken. Thank you for engaging in the conversation.
> The idea that universally useful conclusions can be drawn is what is incorrect.
You're bringing up an interesting point. I'd like to deeply learn history someday, when I retire, maybe...
nobody knows when a war will end. You're making the argument that attrition works
They did not.
> They later withdrew not due to Vietcong/Taliban’s efforts, but as a result of internal political/societal processes in the US itself.
They withdrew because they failed to achieve their military objectives, and the support for continuing to bear the cost of the war without having done so and without confidence that would change in the near future eroded.
If they had achieved their military objective, then they would have left sooner (or transitioned to a non-combat footing), having won the war.
How did you come to this conclusion?
I don't know whether it could be justified or not but I don't see how one can just outright say the strategic bombing did not significantly damage German infrastructure, manufacturing capacity, morale and also require Germany to invest a lot of resources and manpower into their airforce and ground defenses.
1) It rallied civilian morale to side with the government. People were aggrieved that they were being bombed, and it stiffened their resistance and motivated them to work harder towards the war effort.
2) Despite strategic bombing targeting factories and industrial infrastructure, they only caused superficial damage. The damaged factories were quickly brought back online, and the newly motivated workers significantly increased their output. In some books they cited increases of output in bombed German factories of above 100% towards the end of the war.
3) Strategic bombers are extremely costly to produce and operate. Casualties on strategic bombing missions in the beginning were incredibly high, with some air wings suffering ~50% personnel loss during an air campaign. All of this loss resulted in no changed on the battlefield, and negligible or even counter-productive effects on enemy industrial production.
In summary, strategic bombing of civilian targets and cities was a colossal waste of time, resources, and manpower. All of those things could have been redirected elsewhere to help end the war earlier.
https://malwarwickonbooks.com/strategic-bombing-in-wwii/
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While we're on the topic, one place where strategic bombing was successful is targeting Romanian and German oil refineries. The loss in German oil production directly lead to the war ending earlier, and the hamstringing of German logistics and consequently military operations.
https://www.maxwell.af.mil/News/Display/Article/1887774/wwii...
As Rommel would say: amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.
This experience makes me think that even though strategic bombing was wasteful in WW2, it still has a place in modern military doctrine. A large strategic bombing fleet can act as a deterrent, and a way to quickly subdue less sophisticated opponents by bombing all their critical infrastructure back into the stone age.
It should also be noted however that large scale American strategic bombing during the Vietnam conflict was largely unsuccessful.
The final assault on Berlin cost 80,000 Russian lives and 100,000 German.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#:~:t....
Against Germany, I agree with you. Against Japan, not so much.
If he gives up too easily, he might lose fights he actually had a chance of winning.
Or perhaps he does it to satisfy a sense of honor he and his community hold. That it is better to die fighting than to live running.
Perhaps he thinks that the more viciously he fights, the less energy his foe will have to destroy his home and his family when the fighting ends.
Or perhaps he does it because he is being paid to fight to the end.
But if the goal of fighting is to win, then it seems like the heavy bomber has done little to aid that goal.
This isn’t a niche opinion. In the exact same documentary series as I first mentioned (World At War,) a Nazi military official argues that the Allied bombings were successful because they forced the Nazis to split their forces along two separate fronts. They were unable to divert their ammunition, air support, etc to Russia because of the bombings.
>In the exact same documentary series as I first mentioned (World At War,) a Nazi military official argues that the Allied bombings were successful because they forced the Nazis to split their forces along two separate fronts. They were unable to divert their ammunition, air support, etc to Russia because of the bombings.
It seems like this general forgot that the remaining Nazi forces were not solely defending against strategic bombings, but waging an active war in North Africa, and then Italy.
Nazi ideology was not based in reality, which is why they started a war that they would inevitably lose. Hitler was playing map painting in a video game, not analyzing reality.
It's easy to imagine an alternative WWII scenario where the local communist parties took over Germany and fought with the USSR. Stalin actually decided not to support the KPD during the pre war period, seeing them as a bigger threat than Hitler. Even if you think Communism is great, there can only be one Communism to rule them all..
This does not make sense. Did you mean SPD (instead of KPD)?
Comintern politics were confused, but I think they changed to a popular front strategy after Hitler's "coronation" (which they should have done many years earlier).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_front#Comintern_policy...
And no, London was no legitimate military target during the Blitz neither...
It's worth noting that Britain bombed German civilians before Germany bombed British civilians.
See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/15/second-world-w...
In other words: what really sets the Allied bombings apart is learning from the strategic errors that the Germans made (destroying entire industrial bases, not trying to smear small amounts of damage across the target's entire economy), not some uniquely "liberal" world view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strateg...
Bombing of North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia is missing.
The terrible scale of Bombing of North Korea is not well known:
My comment addresses this: the German aerial strategy didn't obtain its stated goals (demoralization and destruction of the British industrial base), and the Allied aerial counteroffensive arguably learned from that.
For all of its excesses (and they were gross, violent excesses), the Allied aerial offensive was strategically sound: the German industrial base collapsed not because it was entirely flattened by bombings, but because of strategic attacks on its foundations (primarily oil[1]).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II
Funny so, that you fight against reports from the RAF and USAAF confirming that strategic bombing didn't have the intended effect for all the previous years of the war. That attitude is getting a trend online so, first it was Wehraboos glamorizing German tanks and mechanized warfare, now it is people doing the same thing with allied bombing and bombers. Both are wrong by the way.
Looking at where they were born may make sense. Oppenheimer was born in the United States in New York City. He had probably never faced a real threat of invasion and destruction.
However, von Neumann and Teller were both born in Hungary and had seen first hand that there is evil in the world, and the world is a dangerous place, and the way to protect ourselves from that danger is being more powerful than your enemies.
There is no good war. All war involves killing. In the grand scheme of morality, killing 18 year old conscripts is also pretty bad.
That the UK and US relied on high-tech is not that odd. It is odd that the author contrasts that with Germany. They too did fight a high tech war (U boats, enigma, tanks, V1 and V2), but they couldn't achieve their goals with just tech. You don't get Lebensraum by bombing your neighbours. You need an actual occupation force. The UK was very much on the defensive, and had to resort to blockades and bombing to stay afoot.
Or is the point "to destabilise liberal complacency", whatever that may mean?
So, yeah. What's the point being made here? It sure feels like some weird axe is being ground, but it's done so badly that I can't even be sure what the axe is.
There's a sort of concerted effort to destroy the meaning of the word, or it's been co-opted by political organizations and bent to an extent that it's become meaningless.
To those on the "right" - the word "liberal" is almost a curse word, it doesn't mean liberal values (which many of them share) it means some fuzzy combination of "woke, democrat, evil, america hating".
To progressives, it's an increasingly inconvenient word as it becomes more difficult to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously supporting authoritarian positions (censorship, consolidated power, militarism, embrace of public/private blurring, health dictates) while attempting to retain the mantle of liberalism that powered the "left" for the past fifty years.
So it's easier for everyone to just attack the word, this article is a great example of that.
It leaves us "classic liberals" stranded on a sinking island surrounded by sharks.
I don't understand this point. Classic liberalism is a set of ideas that gave birth to many forms of government - are you trying to make an analogy? If so, it doesn't track very well for me.
> it has been overtaken and is being replaced already
I may be reading into your tone incorrectly - do you view this as a good thing?
The government in America based on classic liberal ideas - to be specific, is being overtaken and replaced.
>I may be reading into your tone incorrectly - do you view this as a good thing?
It's not a good thing. But one also has to see why that form of government was overtaken the way it was. It becomes hard not to view classical liberals with a certain amount of contempt when they just advocate a return to a form of government that proved very fragile under pressure.
Seems to have done pretty well [1], all things considered.
I see authoritarianism as an entropy state. It takes active energy to resist.
I agree that the US needs to put more energy into this.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-wor...
If being a democracy with elections is all that matters, yes. Putin's Russia fits that bill.
By bombing Hamburg or Dresden and deliberately targeting civilians?
Even France, Belgium or the Netherlands were bombed.
They even bombed their own troops during Operation Overlord!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Bezuidenhout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium_in_World_War_II#cite_r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Normandy
https://www.wiki-rennes.fr/Bombardements_des_9_et_12_juin_19...
The irony of this failure is that the US civil war was the first true economy-vs-economy conflict, with mechanized rail changing the scope and nature of conflict (while actual combat was still with napoleonic-class cannon, cavalry charge and the like). European powers mostly ignored this conflict, and so it took a while for them to understand what WWI was really about. Then the US took this lesson to heart, and didn't recognize that the only alternative for their adversaries was asymmetrical combat...a full circle as that was the approach the US had taken in its own war of liberation from a superpower.
The other, even more meaningful point about industrialized warfare is that it has its own Taylorist logic. For the European theatre, they built an enormous machine that assembled planes, filled them with fuel and tons of bombs, and then daily launched them eastward from the UK. Long after this machine could materially affect the course of the war it was still operating at full tilt, with the allies seemingly unable to switch it off. In small (pop < 50K ppl today) cities of Germany you can find plaques in the Marktplätze indicating that the city had been flattened, bombed for the first time, in late April 1945. The machine had been flattening cities in order of importance, and had run down the list to the point where they'd run out of anything worth bombing.
It's hard to argue that any of those bombings were individually "unethical" (assuming you can accept carpet bombing cities at all) because they were bureaucratic decisions with no real room for individual judgement any more. That is a critical lesson both for wartime and for peacetime. We don't really mind if a company makes a worthless product -- it merely goes out of business. But at the state/strategic level it can be tragic.
All the German cities could have been spared if they had simply stopped murdering everyone and stealing everything. That they chose to continue isn't the fault of the victims who were desperately trying to conclude the war to avoid the sensless deaths.
There are moral grey areas in war but trying to find them in the desperate attempts to slow down and stop the NAZI genocide machine, by the victims of that machine who were still being killed by the millions, is a bit insulting. I would love to be able to put these great military minds in charge of the allies in 1940 and see how well they stick to their moral sensibilities as they become directly responsible for more and more deaths.
But there are 2 important points to consider: 1) The allies did not care about the Nazi genocide until after the war had begun in earnest. In the US, whatever anti-anti-semitism Roosevelt felt, it was clearly less important to him than losing the anti-semite vote by stridently coming out in opposition to the Holocaust already in motion (or even permitting the refugees from the Holocaust to come to the US). Stopping the Holocaust or the Japanese crimes against humanity was, for the most part, a consequence of accomplishing their other strategic goals, not a strategic goal unto itself.
2) The terms of the treaty of Versailles was unambiguously a major cause of Hitler's rise to power and the start of WW2. England's and (especially) France's desire to punish Germany led to a lot of terms that punished the people of Germany, but largely left the decision-makers relatively unscathed.
The Wannsee Conference was January 1942, all the allies were quite fully at war with the axis powers. I'm not aware of any further steps they could have taken aside from total war and industrial incineration of cities (which, as OP's article bemoans, they 110% committed to.)
>Stopping the Holocaust or the Japanese crimes against humanity was, for the most part, a consequence of accomplishing their other strategic goals, not a strategic goal unto itself.
Not true. Ending the Holocaust was a war aim and plans were considered for operations specifically to disrupt it, but nothing was ever proposed that would be as effective as simply winning the war.
I don't have a hard time imagining the Wannsee Conference as stemming from a post-mortem (pardon the pun) of the Babi Yar massacre in particular, as the Nazis came to terms with the overall cost of doing a genocide manually.
There were a LOT of things the Allies chose not do (consider the Evians Conference, for instance) well before hostilities broke out.
I don't disagree that once fighting broke out, there was nothing to be done. But there was plenty to be done way back in 1933 when the first concentration camp was opened.
I'm also not denying that after the Wannsee conference, the efficiency of the Holocaust really picked up [1]. I'm saying that it's a mistake to believe that anybody in control was at all on the fence about what to do with all these undesirables, until they held a conference and said "why don't we just kill everybody?". They'd been trying for years, and it turns out that just shooting 17 million people is a lot harder than it sounds.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Holocaust
1. https://theconversation.com/quantifying-the-holocaust-measur...
No, it's not curious at all. It was established to exterminate Soviet and Polish POWs, only after Wannsee was it involved in mass extermination of Jews and other "undesirables", because that was the point of the conference. It didn't come out of thin air, there were certainly signs that something like this was going to happen, but it didn't actually happen until it actually did. This is all completely uncontroversial and a matter of historical record.
The point of the Holocaust is its exceptional nature, and the Nazi treatment of Jews prior to Wannsee was not "exceptional" by the standards of the time. The atrocities of the USSR and the late Ottoman empire had established the European benchmark. In 1937, in the Dominican Republic, tens of thousands of civilians were massacred by the government[0] and nobody did anything about it, despite the fact that it would have been orders of magnitude easier than winning WW2, because it was not considered exceptional. You can tell this is true because no one remembers it. What separates the Holocaust, what makes it exceptional, is the scale. And it is Wannsee where that begins.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsley_massacre?wprov=sfla1
Just about every serious critique of the treaty of Versailles makes it clear that the way the war ended set up Germany and Austria for the populism of the Nazis.
The other important thing to consider is that while it's true that there was nothing the Allies could do militarily until quite late in the war, there was plenty they could've done, but didn't, either because of fears of communism, fears of lost business opportunities, or fears of encouraging more Jewish/Polish/Slavic/Romani/etc immigrants. Look at what happened with the M.S. St. Louis, or what role IBM played in the late stages of the Holocaust.
What I'm trying to make clear is that while it takes a genocidal regime to do a genocide, it also takes the apathy of the rest world, when the rest of the world still has the means to do something. A lot of narratives around how the Nazis came to power hinge on this idea that only the dedicated ideological core of the regime was responsible for what happened, and that simply isn't so.
And had been for at least 300 years at that time. Germany did know the 30 year war. It was a bit of a sore point. And it is obvious that you can't fight a war without industrial support. Economical warfare was also at least 300 years old back then. Neither is even mentioned in the article. It is also a much wider and more abstract point than the bombing of Hamburg. The article mixes ethical, moral, economical, technical, strategic and political ideas and ideology until the point is utterly lost.
> Long after this machine could materially affect the course of the war
That's very much a hindsight argument that may sound rational, but omits a lot of considerations. The Germans kept fighting until the bitter end; why didn't they stop if they could no longer affect the outcome of the war? There apparently was a reason to keep going. Even after the capitulation, German troops made casualties. Pure revenge, paving the way for the troops, and stopping the approaching Soviet army may also have influenced UK/US policy, as did perhaps the idea that Germany really had to be prevented from rebuilding its army, a painful lesson from WW1.
> the allies seemingly unable to switch it off
They did stop bombing once Germany had capitulated though, so they did have that capacity. It was not an autonomous process.
Let's say you're Obama and you need to authorize a drone strike. There's an 85% chance the target is a terrorist. The target is surrounded by children. One of the children is a US citizen. Do you authorize the strike?
There's no proper answer here. It's morally grey. It was undoubtedly important to destroy the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese. I hope no one on HN would question that. But that doesn't mean the allies were morally absolved from their own violence.
The allies have 2 options. Option 1, firebomb and nuke Japan. Option 2, invade and slaughter millions, sacrificing your own military in the process and ceding north Japan to the Soviets. Are you morally justified to go with option 1? Maybe. Are we better off today for picking option 1? Probably. But trolly problems don't have good and bad, they have bad and worse.
Therefore, the choice to go to war is only sane if not going to war would be an even bigger tragedy. It's not hard to argue that Hitler taking over Europe (and beyond) would be worse.
When viewed in this light, Russia going into Ukraine, the US going into Iraq twice, the US going into Vietnam, etc. all look like pretty bad decisions. But we keep falling into this complacency that the next war will be an easy one or a clean one. It will not, that is not what war is.
Stalin agitated ceaselessly for the Allies to open a second front in France, even back to 1942, to draw off German troops. The Allies weren't ready, but the bombing did at least tie up a lot of German planes and anti-aircraft that otherwise would have been used against the USSR. It had a political value, in other words.
Whether it really did disrupt German logistics for the Eastern front is debatable, but it showed Stalin that at least the Allies were doing something. Even if the German civilian suffering was for naught, I don't think Stalin saw it that way.
I think this author is correctly identifying the attitude shift, but they don’t seem to understand that the attitude they’re describing was actually correct at the time. They’re passing judgment on it because they’ve seen it used for evil in recent years, but it’s like a bit of old useless programming: it was probably added in for a reason, and that reason was probably a pretty good one at the time even if it’s now a nuisance or even outright problematic in the current era.
The Allies didn’t want to go into war, but were forced to by Hitler. Hitler’s actions were a bit like the tragedy of the commons: if you break the precedent then the precedent is broken and we all suffer together. The Nazis were bombing London every night. What are you gonna do? “When they go low we go high?” I mean, cmon…
I think there was also a lag between when the Nazis committed any given strategic blunder, and when the real consequences of that blunder came due.
Hitler's obsession with Stalingrad in particular, bailing out Mussolini's adventurism, the constant and maddening obsession with complexity in their war materiel, etc
Its also not that the Allies were more technologically advanced per se, its that they had a much better understanding of design for manufacturing. The Sherman tank and the T-34 were, in most every respect, inferior tanks to the Tiger. But in the time it took to build that 1 tiger, American factories churned out 6 Shermans. Soviet factories churned out 6 T-34s. The entire German offensive strategy hinged on blitzkrieg, and their economy was barely able to sustain that, let alone a besieged economy with limited resources, supporting increasingly bogged-down and defensive campaigns.
A lot of hay is made out of the Nazi superweapons, but not many people reflect on the fact that only about 50,000 Kubelwagens were ever produced, while the US shipped that many Jeeps to the Soviets, then built another 550,000 for themselves. Because of all of this, Germany basically lost the war when they failed to hold any of their objectives on the Ostfront, it just took years for the whole train to come to a stop. I think a similar analysis can be applied to Japan regarding their failure to end the Pacific carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor (I recall reading that as Japanese industrial capability failed through the war, A6M "Zero" fighters had to be moved by horses because Japan could not afford the cars necessary to move them around at the factory).
As you can see, most of them were convinced that it wasn’t possible in the current time frame and seem to be thinking the nuke was more along the lines of decades away rather than years away. They also argue that there was no possible way they could’ve developed the bomb because they didn’t have even close to enough funding.
One hundred!
I'll concede that the mainline fighters of the Allies were superior to the mainline fighters of the Nazis, but my claim is that manufacturing at scale is a technological advantage all by itself. If the Me262 is worth 3 P-51s, then one way to defeat it is to build 3 times as many P-51s (which the US did).
I do wonder, maybe the reason strategic bombing of Nazi industry was ineffective was because Nazi industry (apparently) relied so heavily on manual labor. If that is true, the destruction of a factory would be less the destruction of expensive, complicated machinery, and more the destruction of a place to sit down.
Looking through stats in the below link, the relentless increase in industrial output of the US is incredible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_W...
Where does Russia fit in this? And even if you make an exception for Russia, the allies had plenty of warts. British rule in Ireland and India for example.
Treating the Second World War in isolation is also a mistake. The First World War was not finished when the shooting stopped. The resentment, restrictions and reparations were directly responsible for what came next.
Edit: as far as Russia is concerned it seems to me that they won their front through sheer endurance in the face of the most horrifying trauma. I’d say they were more into hard power than the US and UK so… yea maybe I should be more specific when I talk about the Allies.
This is nazi propaganda straight out of the book. It's being repeated a lot so maybe you don't know.
"The first WW was not finished" is an allusion to the dolchstoss legend. The allusion to war reparations being a cause for resentment was a common talking point for the Nazi party, but in reality Germany barely paid reparations.
I don’t entirely follow the line of reasoning though, how do you explain The Marshal Plan? Was working with the losers a nazi (and Japanese Empire) support scheme? It worked far better than the things tried at the end of The First World War.
What would have prevented the Second World War? If Nazis didn’t rise to power, something bad was still on the cards.
As in, how do I justify that it happened? or why did it happen if it wasn't "for peace"?
First off, Germany did receive significant help after WW1, especially from the US. That came in the form of war reparations relief (through the Dawes plan), direct financial help and investments. That help stopped as the Young plan fizzled, due to the 1929 crisis. However, it is worth noting that this help was enough to offset the cost of reparations for Germany.
As for the benefits of the Marshall plan, it was not entirely benevolent: the US had to convert their war economy back to peacetime, and that was an incredibly hard task. From a peacetime point of view, army men were functionally jobless, the production system was completely unfit for peacetime, and with out some public help/oversight, the US would likely have suffered the worst economic crisis of its history (see postwar inflation). Helping WW2's losers was a humane thing to do, but it was also in the US' best economic interest to get a foothold in new markets.
> It worked far better than the things tried at the end of The First World War.
It wasn't the single outcome of the war, though. In any aspect but the economic one, WW2's peace plan was incredibly hard on Germany. Way harder than what the UK or the US would ever have allowed in the Versailles treaty.
> What would have prevented the Second World War?
It's hard to do what-if history. A peace plan similar to WW2's (or to WW1's plan for Austria-Hungary, for that matter) would likely have prevented Germany from rising again, but neither the US nor the UK were willing to implement that. Short of that, it's hard to predict what would have happened. Many of the issues with Germany were unrelated to economic problems, and some of them happened before any economic policy could have had an effect. For instance, Germany's student associations voted to ban students that weren't "pure-race" German as early as 1919..
If the victims of communism includes the nazi soldiers killed during WW2, it seems like the victims of capitalism number should probably include the civilians burned alive en-masse during firebombing campaigns in Germany and Japan.
If the victims of communism number includes the holodomor, surely it should also include the people starved as a result of famines caused by export subsidies (and the collapse of imports as prices surge, leaving their former customers with no domestic production and a famine).
If the victims of communism include NK or Russian gulags, surely it includes the political prisoners held in US slave labor camps for trivial offenses by the state, and then exploited for the manufacturing profits of the companies that own them as chattel property.
If the victims of communism include whatever murderous dictator of the day, then surely the victims of capitalism include those of Pol Pot, Indonesia, and Malaysia today.
I say this not because communism is so great but because most people can’t even acknowledge that such a “victims of capitalism” number even exists. But it does, you just haven’t been propagandized to think it’s a number of matters like the “victims of communism” number.
People will literally cry over dead nazis killed during the act of invading and annexing another country as long as they can make a political point against the right person for killing them. And that is used to push back against the entire concept, we can't have public healthcare because "that's socialism" and you know what happens in socialism right? Gulags and dictators.
We don’t even have a slur for capitalism-tankies, because we havent been propagandized that it’s a bad thing we should be disdainful of. I guess it’s just “neoliberal”? Or “air strike/dronestrike liberal” depending on the era? But the firebombing and atomic weapon campaigns were shocking large compared to even air striking a single wedding. We burned millions of people alive inside their own homes, mummified and suffocated them from the inferno. “Firebombing liberals” or “bombies” doesn’t have the ring but it’s so much more apt for the kinds of behavior that are justified and excused in those communities (like tankies). But maybe “firebombing humanitarian” is a little more on-point, capture the “we had to kill the people to save them” vive?
Or maybe the term is just tankie, whether it’s actual tanks or air bombing?
Either way we certainly don't treat the abuses of this system as being something implicit to the system - Pol Pot, Suharto, or other murderous, abusive authoritarians aren't an indictment of capitalism as a concept and a system of organization, it just happens sometimes. But North Korea condemns communism forever, that's why the US can't give you healthcare.
But the reality is that capitalist-tankieism is absurdly widespread. Again, this is not the way we are socialized to regard western history, but the firebombing campaigns were acts of terrorism and mass-murder against a civilian population, killing them en-masse for military ends such that the war effort would no longer be sustainable. Total war is a crime against humanity and an atrocity, and would be properly labeled as such if the other guy did it. You can't just firebomb millions of civilians... unless you are the right political system.