SPENGLER Napoleon's march on Russia: Do
dictators always fail? By
Spengler
Two hundred years ago on Sunday,
Napoleon crossed the Memel River into Russian
territory with 600,000 men, the biggest army ever
assembled. Only 16,000 came back to the Memel on
the following December 16 after a terrible
retreat, joined later by a few thousand
stragglers. A million soldiers on both sides
perished during those six months, a slaughter
hitherto unimagined, along with up to half a
million Russian civilians left to starve by the
foraging of two enormous armies.
The
anniversary of Napoleon's march into Russia should
be an occasion for democracies to take stock of
their own vulnerability. Perhaps the most
disturbing thing about the affair is that so many
followed Napoleon into Russia in the first place,
and that even more followed him after the Russian
catastrophe. The young men
of Europe fought for him
until there weren't enough young men left to
fight. What is it that motivates a generation to
commit collective suicide in the service of a
malicious leader?
There is an important
parallel to the case of Hitler, and a vital
consideration for America's strategic position
today. Americans relish the memory of democratic
armies fighting for their homes and the principle
of freedom. But they should not forget that some
of the world's most effective and courageous
soldiers fought for the hope of advancement in an
evil cause, and that the ultimate victory of the
democracies was in part a matter luck or
providence, as the case may be. Luck is good to
have, but bad to rely on.
Directly or
indirectly, Napoleon controlled the whole European
continent from the Spanish-Portuguese border to
Poland, from Naples to Copenhagen. The malcontents
of Europe flocked to his banner, with (as Napoleon
said) field-marshal's batons in their rucksacks.
Frenchmen comprised only half of the Grande Armee
that marched to Russia. Many foreign units fought
with notable heroism.
Why did Napoleon
risk it all on Russia, for strategic objectives
that historians are still hard put to identify?
The best answer is that Napoleon was the creature
of his army as much as the army was his creation.
The Corsican lieutenant became Emperor of Europe
by dissolving the bands that held traditional
society together and reaching directly into its
depths, summoning the ambition and energies of
millions whom the old regime had left in
humiliation. To maintain his power, Napoleon had
to use it, and the Russian campaign was the only
available channel for the uncontrollable forces
that the Emperor had unleashed.
It all had
been done a century and half before, when the
Bohemian nobleman Albrecht von Wallenstein raised
60,000 volunteers for the Austrian Empire during
the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, an army of
adventurers and freebooters whose foraging caused
widespread starvation, and whose power threatened
the existence of civil society itself. Imperial
agents assassinated Wallenstein in 1634 after the
general tried to negotiate a separate peace with
the Protestant enemies of the empire (see Europe's
tragedy and Europe's tragedian, Asia Times
Online, November 17, 2009). In 1812, Napoleon came
a great deal closer to remaking the world.
One of the stranger things about the
aftermath of the Russian campaign is how much
popularity Napoleon retained despite his
catastrophic blunder. By 1813 the Emperor
commanded another 350,000 troops. His erstwhile
satellites formed a coalition against him and
crushed him in the Battle of Leipzig, and in 1814
Napoleon was exiled to Elba. Yet by 1815 he was
back on French soil to cries of "Vive L'Empereur!"
and had raised yet another 200,000 soldiers.
Wellington and Blucher finally beat him at
Waterloo.
After Waterloo there probably
weren't enough adult Frenchmen left to form
another Napoleonic army. The wars had cost France
between 1.4-1.7 military deaths as well as a very
large number of civilians, out of a total
population of 29 million. We don't have precise
data, but a rule of thumb for pre-industrial
societies is that men aged 17 to 49 comprised
about one-fifth of the population. The total
military manpower pool of Napoleonic France was
less than six million men, so civilian and
military casualties together exceeded 30% of the
total - a staggering number. The exsanguinated
French still were not done with their delusions of
empire, though. Two generations later they bled
once again for Napoleon's nephew.
Thirty
percent is an important benchmark for total
casualties. Exactly the same proportion of
military-age men of the American South died in the
Civil War. Once casualties approach a third of the
notional manpower pool, armies implode. Like the
Confederacy of 1865, France was bled dry by 1815
after absorbing losses on this staggering scale.
It takes sustained heroism and resilience to
slaughter a whole generation, and this heroism
feeds on the hopes and dreams of ambitious young
men. Napoleon offered his recruits the opportunity
to rise above the ruins of Europe's old
aristocratic order. The men of the South fought -
as Professor Robert May argued persuasively in his
1973 study The Southern Dream of a Caribbean
Empire - for the chance to get land and
slaves, even if only a tenth of them already owned
slaves when the war erupted.
There was
something distinctly Napoleonic about southern
ambitions. If the Corsican artillery officer could
become the emperor of Europe, then every corporal
could entertain dreams of a field commission and
entry into Napoleon's nobility. The poor
Scots-Irish farmers who fought for the Confederacy
hoped to join the pseudo-aristocracy of
slaveholders. And for these ambitions, both fought
with nearly suicidal tenacity.
Germany
provides another case in point. In his new World
War II history The Storm of War, Andrew
Roberts examines German thinking more closely than
Anglo-Saxon historians are accustomed to do. The
Germans not only fought heroically for Hitler, but
efficiently: it took three Allied soldiers on the
Western front to kill two Germans, and three
Russians to kill one German on the Eastern Front.
The efficiency of the French army during the
Napoleonic Wars was comparable; except for the
half-million casualties sustained due to cold and
starvation in Russia, French battle casualties
were roughly half of the killed-in-action numbers
for the anti-French coalition.
By the
normal logic of things, Napoleon and Hitler should
have won. They enjoyed the fanatical loyalty of
the best armies of their times. They foundered on
their own megalomania. Andrew Roberts offers the
unpleasant observation that Germany lost the war
only because Hitler made a series of gigantic
blunders, without each of which the Axis likely
would have triumphed. The most obvious and
most-discussed is Hitler's order to hold back form
annihilating the trapped British army at Dunkirk.
If Hitler had repudiated Japan's attack on
Pearl Harbor, Roberts observes, America never
would have entered the war in Europe:
Hitler
should have studiously ignored all provocations
from Franklin Roosevelt, especially in the
Atlantic, in the knowledge that the president did
not have the political power to declare war
against a Germany that was professing friendship
and sympathy towards the United States. In the
absence of a declaration of war against America
under Pearl Harbor, something Hitler was under no
treaty obligation to furnish, it would have been
well-nigh impossible for Roosevelt to have
committed the United States to invading North
Africa in 1941. With Britain effectively
neutralized and America fully committed in the
Pacific fighting Japan, only then should Operation
Barbarossa have been put into effect, with Germany
fighting on one front rather than the
traditionally suicidal two.
Hitler wasn't
insane to attack Russia, in Robert's cold
reckoning, just insane to allow America into the
war. He could have conquered Russia, Roberts
calculates, as long as the United States remained
on the sidelines. Roberts catalogues dozens of
other Nazi errors (bombing British cities rather
than RAF [Royal Air Force] airfields during the
Battle of Britain, delaying the V-2 rocket
program, building battleships rather than
submarines prior to the outbreak of the war, and
so forth). By documenting the extent of Hitler's
mistakes, Roberts instructs the West in humility.
Not just our own cleverness and heroism, but our
enemy's stupidity, brought victory in World War
II.
Democracies do not necessarily field
the most efficient or enthusiastic armies. The
French under Napoleon and the Germans under Hitler
were the best soldiers of their day. Democracies
have one important advantage, namely the capacity
to correct errors. Democracies do not necessarily
make better decisions than dictatorships in each
case, but they are less like to perpetuate errors.
It is easy to replace an elected leader who goes
mad; not so a charismatic tyrant. This makes the
ultimate victory of democracies more probable, but
hardly inevitable. It may be likely that a
charismatic tyrant will make decisive errors, but
it is far from assured that such error will be
made soon enough to make it possible to defeat the
tyrant at the right moment. I like to think that
providence was at work during the Second World
War, but that sort of question is above my pay
grade.
The victory of democracy is
anything but inevitable. If democracies become
complacent and weak, enthusiastic followers of
tyrannies yet may overwhelm them. The supposedly
inevitable collapse of China is a recurrent theme
in the American conservative narrative. Success is
unimaginable for a country that is ruled by a
Communist Party and often violates human rights.
Yet China today bubbles with energy and
enthusiasm. Never in history have so many people
had so much opportunity; tens of millions of young
Chinese whose grandparents lived poorly and
accepted what fate dealt out to them now have a
chance to make their own destiny. Nothing like the
present generation of young university-educated
Chinese has ever burst onto the world, and we
barely can imagine its full capacities.
It
is true that dictatorships sometimes fail of their
own errors. But the more we examine the
dictatorships that have failed, the less we should
assume that this failure was preordained by fate.
To assume that China will fail because it is not a
democracy is complacency stretched to the extreme
of folly. China, to be sure, is neither Napoleonic
France nor Nazi Germany. It has no need to invade
anyone. But unless America and its allies maintain
an unchallengeable technological edge, China well
may surpass us, and the world will be a worse
place.
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