I’ve looking at the fringes of World War II for past few months. I’ve also been exploring logistics aspects of the war. Here are a few of the books I’ve tapped into:

 

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The Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India by: Lawrence James

Good general introduction to the period of British rule in India. James devotes three chapters to India during World War II, including pretty good coverage of the Congress Party’s “Quit India” campaign and its impact on the British war effort.

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Sunrise at Abadan: The British and Soviet Invasion of Iran, 1941 by: Richard A Stewart

Good source for Iranian politics, military potential, and invasion routes. Looks at the way the original shah attempted and failed to keep some degree of autonomy in the early part of World War II. During the years of the Hitler/Stalin pact, Iran was threatened by the Soviets, and the British positioned troops to defend Iran against Soviet attack. Ironically those British troops later undertook a joint invasion of Iran with the Soviets in order to insure that Lend-Lease routes remained open.

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Oil & War: How the Deadly Struggle For Fuel In WWII Meant Victory or Defeat by: Robert Goralski and Russell W. Freeburg

This book was published in 1987, but I have yet to see anything newer with this kind of in-depth information about oil supplies of the combatants. Some interesting tidbits:

• When World War II began, the Germans could meet their wartime aviation fuel needs from stockpiles and domestic production for 4.8 months. They had enough diesel fuel and production for 3.2 months. They had enough industrial fuel oil for 2.6 months. Germany could only fight short wars.
• The Germans started their invasion of the Soviet Union with a 60 day supply of oil, using very optimistic assumptions. Operations were continually hampered by lack of oil.
• The Italian surface fleet spent most of the war in port mainly because it didn’t have enough fuel to go out and do battle. That was true to a lesser extent of the German surface fleet for the last half of the war.

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Nationalist China at War: Military Defeats and Political Collapse, 1937-45 by: His-Sheng Ch’i

Interesting book on how the nationalist Chinese fought their war. It looks into the role of German military advisers in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. It also looks at the tensions between the Nationalist groups around Chiang, and the various Nationalist-aligned warlords. Chiang tried to build a strong central army and disband the bulk of the Chinese warlord armies, but he was never strong enough to make that happen. He could defeat any single warlord, but if he became too aggressive he would face a coalition of the major warlords, and he was not strong enough to defeat all of them at once.

The tension between centralizing forces and warlords continued throughout the war with Japan. Chiang’s willingness to send his best units to fight in Shanghai initially gave him a lot of moral authority that translated into cooperation from the warlords. His actual power faded as he was pushed out of the center of his power, and the German-trained elite of his army was lost. As time went on, warlords were able to gain more and more real power, partly because trying to rein them in could and sometimes did cause them to defect to the Japanese puppet government. Chiang had to work very hard to even gain control of the province around his wartime capital.

Nationalist Chinese troop dispositions increasingly had to take into account maintaining the balance of power between central government troops and warlord troops. The Japanese offensive in 1944 hurt Chiang badly by targeting central government troops.

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Conflict Over Convoys: Anglo-American logistics diplomacy in the Second World War by: Kevin Smith

Availability of shipping determined what the US and Britain could do during much of World War II. That gave the US an increasingly dominant role in the alliance because it provided a larger and larger percentage of the shipping. There were never enough ships to go around, at least not until late 1943/early 1944, so shipping allocations determined which plans could be pursued and which ones were simply not possible.

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Arms For Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War by: Gerald Howson

The Spanish Republicans (Socialists and Communists supported by the Soviet Union) had control of the Spanish treasury, one of the largest gold stocks in Europe. They tried to use that money to buy guns, and got ripped off by practically everybody. The Poles sold the Spanish a bunch of old non-standard junk at outrageous prices. The Soviets did the same thing on an even larger scale, but also used the war to try out their latest tanks and planes on the Spanish Republic’s dime. They also ended up with most of the Spanish Republic’s gold supply after some shadowy transactions.

Italy nearly bankrupted itself sending arms to the rightwing/fascist Spanish Nationalists without getting much return on that investment. Germany also helped the Nationalists, but insisted on payment in strategic minerals up front and used the conflict to test out tactics that later gave the Germans a major advantage in the first part of World War II.