Sarah Paine – How Hitler almost starved Britain

Summary

In this lecture-format episode of the Dwarkesh Podcast, historian Sarah Paine delivers a masterclass on how Britain’s maritime strategy defeated Nazi Germany in World War II, and then applies the same geopolitical framework to the modern era. Paine argues that geography is destiny in warfare: maritime powers like Britain (and today, the United States) possess inherent advantages over continental powers like Germany, Russia, and China because they can blockade trade, conduct peripheral operations, and leverage global alliances to strangle enemies economically while avoiding catastrophic land battles.

Paine walks through the entire arc of the Battle of the Atlantic — from Germany’s U-boat campaigns and “Happy Times” of devastating Allied shipping losses, to the Allied technological and organizational breakthroughs (Enigma codebreaking, radar, hedgehog depth charges, auxiliary aircraft carriers) that turned the tide by May 1943. She contrasts the catastrophic lessons of World War I (where Britain committed to the main continental front and suffered devastating casualties) with World War II’s more sophisticated approach of blockade, Lend-Lease to Russia, and sequential peripheral campaigns in North Africa, Italy, and eventually Normandy — each building on the last.

The lecture then pivots to the present day, applying the maritime-continental framework to Russia and China. Paine argues that both are geographically imprisoned by narrow seas that become “kill zones” in wartime, that Putin’s naval capabilities are essentially nil (his one aircraft carrier has been in dry dock for years), and that China’s position in the South China Sea is far more precarious than Beijing would like to admit. She concludes with a pointed warning: destroying alliance systems is how maritime powers lose their decisive advantage, and the current erosion of US alliances is strategically dangerous.

Highlights

”Britain — the country with the 360-degree moat”

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“It turns out that the possibilities for maritime powers are fundamentally different. Basically, a small subset of countries can do things that open certain possibilities. Others can’t. I’m going to talk about this story through the country with the 360-degree ‘you can’t get me’ moat.” — Sarah Paine, 0:50

”Germany should have bought U-boats, not pocket battleships”

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“Germany, surrounded by narrow seas, ought to think about submarines. If you look at why the war turned out the way it did, it’s that Germany bought the wrong navy. Arguably, Germany bought the wrong navy twice. It should have bought a lot of U-boats and started earlier.” — Sarah Paine, 28:40

”The Battle of the Atlantic turns in May 1943”

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“The kill rate is so high that in May of 1943, Donitz loses 25% of all deployed U-boats in a single month. That’s a massive percentage of what they have. He pulls them out of the North Atlantic because it’s become a death trap.” — Sarah Paine, 26:08

”Putin’s sad naval story”

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“Putin’s got one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov. Long time to be in the shop. It sank the dry dock that Russia has to repair it, and then there’s been all sorts of charges of corruption. It’s not getting repaired anytime fast.” — Sarah Paine, 53:00

”If we blow our alliance system, it’s not going to go well”

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“If we blow our alliance system, we’re going to be in a position where things don’t go well. Particularly if we think we’re going to go it alone against China and think that’ll go well for us. It won’t.” — Sarah Paine, 1:18:00

”The thing worse than fighting with allies”

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“Churchill, the great wit, talked about the thing worse than fighting with allies, and that’s fighting without them. You need these complementary capabilities to gang up on your continental problem.” — Sarah Paine, 44:00

Key Points

• Maritime vs. continental powers (0:50) - Geography determines strategic possibilities; maritime powers with 360-degree moats (Britain, US) have fundamentally different options than continental powers (Germany, Russia, China)
• Britain’s geographic predicament in WWII (2:39) - Britain had to reach Russia via Arctic convoys to Murmansk/Archangel or through the Mediterranean and the Dardanelles — both dangerous routes
• Germany’s pre-war expansion (4:28) - Hitler systematically seized Austria, Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, and the Rhineland, gaining industrial resources and oil access before the war began
• Lessons learned from WWI (7:26) - WWII leaders were WWI conscripts who learned to avoid the culminating point of attack, avoid the main continental front, and coordinate with allies far better
• Allied coordination superiority (10:23) - WWII saw ABC staff talks, Atlantic Charter, combined commands, and offices in each other’s capitals — dramatically better than WWI’s two failed coordination conferences
• Blockade as the opening move (16:08) - The first move of a maritime power is to cut the enemy off from global resources; Germany was geographically and economically vulnerable to this
• The U-boat wolfpack era (19:36) - Admiral Donitz used wolfpack tactics, attacking convoys at night with multiple submarines; combined with captured British codes, this devastated shipping
• Enigma codebreaking (20:22) - The British captured Enigma machines and could read German codes within 36 hours, enabling evasive routing that may have saved 2 million tons of shipping
• Hitler’s Second Happy Time (21:54) - After the US entered the war, Admiral King initially refused convoying, letting U-boats devastate East Coast shipping silhouetted against city lights
• Technology wins the Atlantic (25:28) - Allied centimetric radar (which Germans never had), hedgehog depth charges, auxiliary aircraft carriers, and destroyer escorts turned U-boats into a death trap
• American industrial production (27:20) - US Navy hulls tripled in 1943; merchant ship construction went up four times; new ship construction far outpaced losses by mid-1943
• Peripheral theater strategy (31:00) - Sequential campaigns in North Africa, Italy, and the air campaign over Germany weakened the Axis and made Normandy possible, where only 58 Axis divisions faced the Allies versus the main Eastern Front
• Lend-Lease to Russia (38:03) - The US provided vehicles, rolling stock, locomotives, and canned food (Spam) that prevented Russia from having a logistical collapse, unlike in WWI
• Russia and China today — geographic prisons (48:53) - Both countries are surrounded by narrow seas that become kill zones in wartime; nature naturally contains them
• Putin’s naval limitations (53:00) - Russia’s one aircraft carrier sank its own dry dock; the Black Sea, Baltic, and Arctic routes are all constrained or now NATO-controlled
• China’s South China Sea problem (58:08) - Many of China’s neighbors have alternate coastlines giving them high-seas access, and narrow seas can be closed by mines and aircraft
• Bismarck’s limited wars vs. Hitler’s total war (1:15:53) - Bismarck fought limited wars with manageable objectives (Denmark, Austria, France) and left opposing governments intact; Hitler pursued unlimited war requiring total destruction
• Trade sanctions as modern blockade (1:22:40) - Modern economic warfare isn’t traditional blockade but trade sanctions; even knocking 2% off China’s growth annually would be devastating given the comparison with North Korea
• Dictators doubling down (1:20:00) - Dictators cannot reassess like democracies can through elections; they always double down on bad decisions, which is a universal pattern

Mentions

Companies

• ASML - Referenced in context of lithography equipment and manufacturing

Products & Technologies

• Enigma machine (20:22) - German encryption device; British captured machines and code books to read U-boat communications
• Hedgehog depth charges (25:28) - American forward-throwing anti-submarine weapon that could hit anything underneath the ship
• Centimetric radar (25:28) - Allied radar technology that Germans never replicated; could see through fog
• Auxiliary aircraft carriers (26:00) - Small carriers that closed the Greenland air gap, providing air cover for the entire convoy journey
• Wolfpack tactics (19:36) - Donitz’s U-boat strategy of concentrating multiple submarines on a single convoy for night attacks

People

• Sarah Paine (0:50) - Historian and lecturer, author of books on maritime strategy and war
• Adolf Hitler (4:28) - Pursued unlimited war goals that required total continental domination
• Winston Churchill (44:00) - Quoted on the difficulty but necessity of fighting with allies
• Karl Donitz (19:36) - German admiral who championed U-boat warfare and wolfpack tactics
• Admiral Ernest King (22:08) - US Navy chief who initially refused convoying, leading to massive shipping losses
• Franklin Roosevelt (15:25) - Insisted on marching to Berlin so Germans would understand the consequences of their actions
• Otto von Bismarck (1:15:53) - Prussian leader who fought limited wars with manageable objectives, contrasted with Hitler
• Carl von Clausewitz (7:55) - Referenced as “the Western guru on conventional land warfare” and his concept of the culminating point of attack
• Vladimir Putin (53:00) - Analyzed as a continental power leader with severely limited naval options
• Xi Jinping (58:08) - Faces 13 land borders and 7 sea borders, many with contested relationships
• Aleksandr Dugin (55:28) - Putin’s intellectual muse who advocates dividing the world into separate spheres of civilization
• Alfred Thayer Mahan (1:02:48) - Most famous person associated with the US Naval War College; outlined prerequisites for sea power
• Lord Halifax (1:01:21) - Advocated for suing for peace with Germany in 1940-1941 after the fall of France
• Daniel Yergin (1:18:48) - Author of a major history of oil, discussed in context of Germany’s petroleum deficit

Surprising Quotes

“The British army suffered more deaths in World War I on the main front from 1915 to 1917 than they did in the entirety of World War II. That’s the lesson of the continental commitment.” — 8:48

“The Gallipoli campaign — whether a good strategy or not — was miserably executed. It comes as no surprise that when the Turks see the British trying to run the Dardanelles with their navy, they turn on their Christian subjects, the Armenians. 1.5 million Armenians are killed.” — 12:22

“In those days, Louisiana and Texas had a lot of refineries. A lot of American industry is coming up by ships through Cape Hatteras shoals which are like 30 miles wide. The U-boats are just picking them off against the city lights.” — 22:25

“Putin’s latest gig is cutting undersea cables. That’s an act of a very frustrated person who can’t deploy naval power.” — 55:12

“If you occupy places and brutalize them for generations, when they have the opportunity, they flee to your enemy. That’s the story of NATO expansion. It’s all Russia’s former satellites fleeing to NATO saying, ‘Let me in.’” — 55:40

Transcript

0:50 It turns out that the possibilities for maritime powers are fundamentally different. Basically, a small subset of countries can do things that open certain possibilities. Others can’t. I’m going to talk about this story through the country with the 360-degree “you can’t get me” moat. It’s an instructive case for the United States of having this sort of position.

1:28 You can look at the great peninsula of Europe. You can see this northern coastline for Britain. Its enemies are sitting there and it’s an uncomfortable position. I’m going to talk about these continental powers — if you think about it, Britain has always been the balancer. In 1871, Germany unifies and becomes the dominant power. I’m going to pick up the story in 1939. I’m first going to talk about these strategies Britain used, to talk about how Britain tried to deal with it, then once you can do that, finding some peripheral way to deal with the continental problem. You probably know the analogy. That was then and now is now. We will see what this case study tells us.

2:39 So here’s Britain uncomfortably sitting on the edge of Europe. If it wants to get to Russia, which is its big ally in both world wars, it’s got to go way up north around the Norwegian coast to Murmansk and Archangel — or it’s got to go way around through the Mediterranean and through the choke point of choke points, which is the Dardanelles. The main port back in the day was Odessa.

3:10 On the high seas, France has got a pretty good coastline. Germany, if it wants to send things out to the world, it’s got to go through these narrow seas. Britain’s enemy in the two world wars, which is the dominant continental power — if it wants to get to its empire back in the day, that requires the cooperation of Turkey. If it wants to get to Russia, well, Turkey didn’t cooperate in World War I. If you think about World War II — the Fall of France, Turkey becoming part of the Axis — Britain is in real trouble.

4:03 Britain has this big empire and it’s got a massive basing system, more bases than anyone else. From this starting point, a very resentful Germany emerges from the settlement of World War I. Notice that a Polish Corridor separates East Prussia. Initially they’re taking Austria, the Sudetenland. Then they take all of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The Rhineland, which is supposed to be demilitarized — they ignore that and remilitarize in 1936. This gives them all sorts of industrial resources.

4:50 It turns out that Hitler’s plans require the resources not only of the Rhineland, but of Romania, which is going to have the oil for them. Hitler and Stalin are dividing up Poland between them — Russians don’t like to talk about that. This triggers World War II because the British have a security guarantee with the Poles to help deal with this.

5:26 Britain faces this massive problem. It’s facing two continental powers, Germany and the Soviet Union, with these expansive empires they want to create. Bad news for Britain. But then Germany invades Russia. Russia decides, “Ah, Germany is the major problem, not Britain.” And Stalin is going to be coordinating with Britain. This simplifies Britain’s problem of having two continental powers to deal with.

6:07 Once the United States has gotten into the war, you have a big cancer in Europe surrounded by water and allies. A lot of allies are neutral states. Then there’s a separate cancer in Asia — I say separate because the Axis powers were not well coordinated. So this is looking at the world from the British perspective. Britain’s problem is how to leverage the miracle of being able to access the whole world, versus a logistical nightmare of trying to supply forces through countries that will let you drive through.

7:04 Access to theaters, markets, resources, allies — if you’re surrounded by them, it changes everything. So Britain’s trying to leverage all of that against its continental enemies. It’s going to try to strangle them economically and militarily.

7:25 Now, the generation that led World War II — not just in Britain but elsewhere — were the conscripts of World War I. They knew full well, in the midst of World War II, exactly what had gone wrong. They learned a whole series of lessons. Let me compare what was done in World War I versus World War II. The generation that actually learned the lessons, not their children who claim the title.

7:55 First, the culminating point of attack. What’s that? Clausewitz, who is the Western guru on conventional land warfare, warned that if you go too far you’ll weaken yourself because your supply lines get extended and you end up further backwards than you would have otherwise been. In World War I, they sent young men over trenches into machine gun fire. What do you suppose is going to happen to them? They get mowed down coming out of trenches. Maybe you took a little territory. These offensives would go on for months, racking up hundreds of thousands of deaths.

8:44 You can look at the death tolls. In World War I, the British army gets the bulk of its forces deployed on the main front from 1915 to 1917. They suffered as many deaths as they did in World War II on just the Western Front alone. In World War II, they do make the mistake of committing to the continent as the opening move, but it doesn’t do well. They evacuate the army off the continent immediately. The French are covering the retreat from the continent, saving the British army. France loses more soldiers than Britain even though France isn’t in the war that long.

9:34 Then it takes years for Britain to get back on the continent. It takes waiting for the United States to get in the war. They’ve learned about the culminating point of attack. The long run coordination is also completely different. In World War I there were only two conferences trying to coordinate things — the June 1916 and November 1916 Chantilly Conferences. Well, the Russian Romanov dynasty is overthrown shortly after. The problem of World War I is that the Germans focused on the Eastern Front, knocked Russia out, and transferred forces back to the Western Front in 1916. The Allies never managed to squeeze them simultaneously from all fronts.

10:23 If you look at the coordination in World War II, it begins before the United States is even in the war, with the ABC staff talks, then the Atlantic Charter. They’re talking about what war objectives are and what the postwar situation is going to look like. This coordination happens not just among military leaders, but among civil and political leaders. There’s a combined command structure. We have offices in each other’s capitals. You’re setting up not only war planning but what the postwar institutions are going to be like to hold the peace.

11:08 In World War I, when Russia falls out of the war, the problem was that the port of St. Petersburg couldn’t supply Russia adequately. Well, that’s not going to happen in World War II. Russia has another large army. You’ve got to have supply lines. In World War I, there is no Lend-Lease aid. The Allies barely sent that much stuff to each other. The railways hadn’t been completed in World War I. The Murmansk railway wasn’t completed until 1916, and by then the Romanov dynasty is gone. It’s too late. In World War II, they had those completed railway systems.

12:06 In World War I, they did try to break the blockade on Russia. Getting a warm-water port that would hook in with the railway system would have been transformative. Russia had all the men, but they didn’t have the supplies. This is where the Gallipoli campaign comes in. Whether a good strategy or not, it was miserably executed. Was it joint? Joint means you’re coordinating your army, air force, and navy. What goes on? The British Navy tries to force the Dardanelles and it doesn’t work well. Do you suppose the Ottomans might think something is up? The Dardanelles is a very steep, narrow place. They have months to get troops in place. New Zealand, Australian and French troops show up and the Turks are there with a welcome party, essentially. They keep at it for eight months, taking massive casualties. Totally miserably executed.

13:09 It comes as no surprise that when the Turks see the British trying to run the Dardanelles with their navy, they turn on their Christian subjects, the Armenians, pulling them out of the army. The Turkish massacre of the Armenians begins. 1.5 million Armenians are killed.

13:53 The Normandy landings are a completely different story. This is another contested landing, but first of all, the buildup of war materiel goes on for over a year — equipment, the forces all ready to go in Britain. They had the Germans completely misinformed about where the landing would be — they thought it would be at the Pas-de-Calais, which is the shortest crossing. That worked. Everybody lands on a day when the weather cooperates.

14:27 Another lesson learned: The Royal Navy did not convoy merchant ships in World War I. They would convoy troop transports, but they didn’t protect merchant shipping. Well, the Germans almost sank Britain because of that. The Navy wasn’t thinking about the merchant marine. In World War II, the British would be doing full convoying.

15:01 Another difference between the wars is how they ended. At the end of World War I, if you look at the final position, the Germans are still occupying Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of France. The Germans had really lousy meals during the war but never experienced the full brunt of what their government had done. President Franklin Roosevelt felt that it was essential to march to Berlin to let the Germans know exactly what had happened — the devastation they had inflicted on others in order to end it.

15:43 In World War I, Britain and France win but they wreck the continental powers. It’s a Pyrrhic victory for France. World War II is going to be a different event because of these lessons about the continental situation.

16:08 Now for what the British did in World War II with blockade and commerce raiding. The opening move of a maritime power in a really big war is blockade. What you want to do is cut your enemy off from global resources and limit them to their own resources and those of occupied areas. As a maritime power, you can quite often do this because you control the seas. The British were well aware that Germany was trade-dependent. Most of its trade goes by sea. Geographically and economically, Germany was vulnerable. Germany gets alternate resources, but they come at much higher cost. You’re really putting stress on the German economy.

17:01 But if you blockade, a continental power can respond. Germany can’t easily get out through the narrow seas, so they can’t deploy a surface fleet effectively. They can’t easily blockade a coastline that faces the open ocean. What do you do if you cannot blockade? Well, then what you’re going to try to do is commerce raiding — sink things when they’re out and about.

17:37 This is why Germany’s occupation of France was so important. It then set up U-boat pens in Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire. They’re going to be using these to fight the Battle of the Atlantic. That’s the game. Maritime powers blockade. The response from continental powers is commerce raiding. Then the maritime response to that is convoying.

18:06 As the war begins in Europe, the United States establishes a neutrality patrol with Latin America to set up a big neutrality zone. Then the Lend-Lease Act, also before US entry into the war — the United States is going to take over British bases in the Western Hemisphere. Why do we care about those locations? Because you need them to send convoys back and forth across the Atlantic.

18:45 Even so, the Axis visits devastating losses. A lot of things are going down. At the very beginning these U-boats are effective. Britain is losing an awful lot of stuff off of its coasts. The Germans get really good at commerce raiding. There’s also the Fall of France which is a game-changer. Britain is only convoying just beyond Ireland. Once the Germans set up those submarines on French territory, then the hunting grounds expand dramatically. They’ve lost an awful lot of shipping in the fall of Norway and then the Dunkirk evacuation.

19:36 Then the Germans are really creative. Admiral Donitz, in service at this point, uses wolfpack tactics — a bunch of submarines on a convoy, attack it at night. Also, the Germans have captured British naval codes, so they have a sense of where the convoys are. They’re reading this traffic. 850,000 tons of shipping lost. This is Hitler’s Happy Time when things are going well for the U-boats.

20:11 Then there’s a big Greenland gap where air cover can’t reach, and you’ll see a lot of things are getting sunk in that gap. Meanwhile, the British have gotten pretty good at capturing Enigma machines — the encryption devices the Germans are using to encrypt their messages. They capture some rotors, some code books in 1940 and 1941. They can actually read the codes, and within 36 hours they can get the information out. We’re going to do evasive routing to avoid the wolfpacks. That may have saved up to 2 million tons of shipping.

20:58 Meanwhile, for the Germans, Rommel in North Africa is having troubles because he’s supplied by sea, and the British and their friends are sinking too many of his supplies. Hitler diverts U-boats from the Atlantic to go help in the Mediterranean. The United States isn’t in the war yet. It’s looking like it might be okay for the British.

21:35 But then the Germans add a fourth rotor to the Enigma machine. Now the British can’t read the codes again. This is a blackout from early 1942 until they can capture new machines with all the rotors plus the code books. It takes months.

21:54 The United States enters the war, which should be great news, except it produces Hitler’s Second Happy Time. Admiral King, unlike his predecessors in the previous war, doesn’t believe in convoying. He’s not for convoying. Therefore as merchant ships are going up and down the East Coast, the lighting is just highlighting their silhouettes for the U-boats. By the way, in those days, Louisiana and Texas had a lot of refineries. A lot of American industry is coming up by ships through Cape Hatteras shoals which are like 30 miles wide.

22:37 Admiral King rethinks it after losing a tremendous amount of shipping in the first three months of 1942 and goes to convoying. The United States does an interlocking convoy system. But then Donitz just starts hunting things further out.

23:08 The Brits get their four-rotor Enigma machine captured eventually, but there’s another problem. The British think that their own codes are secure, but they’re wrong. The Germans were reading British codes. You can see the devastating effect of that.

23:48 But eventually the air cover gap is closed. There are new technologies that are introduced that ruin the U-boat campaign. The Allies had centimetric radar. Germans never did. American aircraft could now see through the fog. The United States adds hedgehogs. What are hedgehogs? If you have a ship and you have hedgehogs, they throw charges forward of the ship. Anybody who’s anywhere underneath that pattern is done for.

25:28 In addition, the United States introduces auxiliary aircraft carriers — little ones — that provide air cover for the entire journey. Then destroyer escorts were introduced instead of the big capital ships. These escorts had everything on board: sonar, radar, depth charges, hedgehogs. U-boat service becomes the lowest life expectancy profession, so that in May of 1943, Donitz loses 25% of all deployed U-boats. That’s a massive percentage of what they have.

26:20 There’s a case of 25 U-boats going after a convoy and they only manage to sink a few ships but lose three U-boats plus another one gets damaged. Donitz’s own 19-year-old son Peter dies in all of this. He pulls U-boats out of the North Atlantic because it’s become a death trap.

26:52 Yet there are problems going on with the Arctic convoys sending Lend-Lease aid to Stalin, and it gets ugly. But that problem gets solved too. The Germans are losing U-boats faster than they can replace them. The Battle of the Atlantic is won by the Allies through convoying, evasive routing, increasing U-boat losses, and reading their mail.

27:20 Now look at the civilian side of it: the United States’ incredible construction of naval and merchant ships. In 1943, US Navy hulls and personnel are tripling. Merchant construction is set to double in the next year. A lot of people in the navy. If you look at 1941 and go over, that’s a bumper crop of U-boats, 1942, really ugly if you’re a merchant ship — tremendous amounts of tonnage being lost. But then hull construction goes up by four times, and by 1943, look at how many U-boats are being sunk. Even though the Germans are building a lot more U-boats, the kill rate is so high that new ship rates go up and away, and it’s in mid-1943 that you see construction far outpacing what’s being destroyed. There’s just way too much stuff for the Germans to sink.

28:40 Admiral Donitz did get one thing right. The previous head of the Navy had said that pocket battleships were the way to go. That was wrong. U-boats were the way to go. Hitler agreed. He made Donitz head of the Navy, and then Hitler went one step further — he said the surface fleet was useless to him in this war. This is a profound lesson for any continental power. A country surrounded by narrow seas ought to think about submarines. If you look at why the war turned out the way it did, it’s that Germany bought the wrong navy. Arguably, Germany bought the wrong navy twice. It should have bought a lot of U-boats and started earlier.

29:20 Britain could do things Germany just couldn’t. The effects of the blockade were devastating. You’re really straining the German economy. The blockade was very effective. Germany’s U-boats sank a terminal quantity of British trade — they came close. Only relying on oil imports and resources from occupied territories. The Germans tried and came close, but the raiding strategy ultimately didn’t work because it required a lot of things that had to go right simultaneously. It really helps reading other people’s mail. You need to be able to construct adequate shipping. You need to coordinate with allies. There are a lot of things going on here. Remove any one of them and the outcome could have been different.

31:00 So now let’s talk about peripheral theaters. What’s a peripheral theater? In this war, it’s not what you think. Why? Because the main theater is the Eastern Front where German ground forces were always fighting Russia. The peripheral theaters take up between them a fraction of German forces, but that’s what makes them peripheral. It doesn’t make them unimportant. By the way, who would want to fight in the main theater? People die in droves in the main theater. Basil Liddell Hart, the great strategist of Britain, was heartbroken in World War I because his strategy was to not do the continental commitment and instead fight in peripheral theaters. It wrecked his health.

32:00 According to Liddell Hart’s theory, what makes a really good peripheral theater? One, it has to be overseas so the enemy can’t easily reinforce it. Secondly, you need local sea access. But that local sea access has got to favor you, because you want it easier for Britain to project power there than for the enemy. Because then attrition rates will favor Britain. Also, the forces you commit are limited — they’re not your homeland defense. It’s not a disposable force, but if something goes south, you won’t ruin the homeland. These are risky but potentially war-changing operations.

32:48 Joint operations means cooperation of all services. You’re going to come in by sea, you’re going to project power by air, you’re going to fight on land. You better coordinate all that. And it has to be combined — meaning coordinating with allies. You need friendly local forces. Then you need to command your own sea lines of communication so you can determine how forces come in, how they go out. You need to be able to leave, which is what they did at Dunkirk. Continental powers can’t play this game because they don’t have the naval capability.

33:52 The war winds up with Britain and the Allies fighting in four peripheral theaters. First, the North Sea. There are three keys to the North Sea: Scapa Flow, the Norwegian coast, and the Channel. Britain always controlled the Channel. Germany went after Norway to break out. Norway is not an ideal peripheral theater for Germany because Britain has both land and sea access to that theater. Germany set up sub bases at Bergen and Trondheim in Norway, and at Hamburg and the Heligoland Archipelago. These are ruining those Arctic convoys. Norway winds up facing a totally hostile coastline.

34:40 The Mediterranean is where Britain really has its advantages. There’s Gibraltar, which is access to the Atlantic. There’s the Suez Canal. There’s Crete, which is access to the Black Sea. There’s the choke point at Malta, which becomes critical. If things went really badly, Italy is trying to bail out Mussolini. They’re trying to take Malta because whoever controls Malta controls the central Mediterranean — they can cause problems for the enemy or protect their own supply lines. Malta isn’t relieved until the end of 1942.

35:24 The Italians had been part of the Triple Alliance in World War I. Well, they’re part of the Axis in World War II. The Suez Canal lies in the center of Italian ambitions. Italy wants to go down the Balkan coast, take Ethiopia to unify their empire around the Red Sea. Mussolini goes into Greece except then he gets stuck. They chase the British out of Greece, and then Crete falls to the Germans. The Suez Canal is under threat.

36:12 Think about it — with the blockade of Malta, the fall of Crete, it’s really bad. But once the United States gets into the war, they can help Britain in North Africa. This is what is going on in North Africa. After the United States joins, Donitz’s oil tankers are getting sunk because of air power from Malta. These tankers are getting bombed out of existence. Rommel, while an excellent general — he’s inferior only in that he’s running out of supplies. The Allies take North Africa in that peripheral operation, then Sicily, and then the rest of Italy. Only then is there a possibility to do the Normandy landing.

37:12 Some would argue that the air campaign over Germany is another peripheral theater. You’re bringing the war home to Germans, destroying industrial capacity. Also it’s a major help to the Eastern Front. When the British start bombing Berlin, Hitler calls back anti-aircraft guns. These anti-aircraft guns can be used as anti-tank weapons. He pulls those back and that means the Russians have fewer anti-tank weapons to face on the Eastern Front.

38:03 That’s how the peripheral strategies worked. It’s about figuring out how to make all of them work together. The effects are additive — you should ideally add up the capabilities of you and your friends and then share them, divvy up the labor. Well, the Axis alliance was also additive in the wrong way — they had the combined GDPs of all the places they occupied, but their way of doing things involves big occupation forces. You’ve also damaged the countries in the conquest. And the Axis is not playing the coordination game to help each other.

38:53 It’s all about taking the big petroleum deficit zone — Germany needs oil. The North Sea oil hadn’t been discovered yet. Romania has oil. Yes, Hitler takes Romania. But it’s very difficult to find the manpower and the logistics to exploit everything. That’s a whole other part of Hitler’s problems. On the Eastern Front, the Russians have a huge army. If you look at Operation Barbarossa, which is the invasion of Russia, the Germans suffer a nearly 30% casualty rate. That’s catastrophic. If you keep having “successes” like that, it’ll be catastrophic. Only two countries have really enormous armies to throw at each other.

39:52 Once the Germans maximize their territorial extent, they’ve got a huge population under occupation. Nevertheless, the Russians mobilize twice the forces. If you look at the mathematics of production, Russia manages to produce more munitions than did Germany. The United States produced something like $100 billion in munitions. Germany produced less than $40 billion. The trick is getting the munitions to the men. The railway lines have been built, but now these railway lines have to carry everything.

40:40 The Lend-Lease aid — you look at it and wow. Britain got the most, Russia got a lot but less. China got nothing useful because the problem is ports and railways. Japan blockaded China’s coast effectively. What the United States was trying to do, flying things over the Hump from India, was probably correct as a strategy but horrifically expensive. Every bomber you use for supply is a bomber that can’t bomb Japan.

41:24 Russia, even though it got less Lend-Lease than Britain in total, is getting equally valuable useful things. Russia can produce tanks, but it doesn’t produce adequate trucks, locomotives, or rolling stock. The United States had loads of that — vehicles, all kinds of rolling stock, locomotives. The United States prevented Russia from going into logistical collapse. We fed them with Spam in a can. Everyone had much Spam during the war, and everyone was sick of it. But a little can of pork goes a long way. Lend-Lease aid goes through Murmansk and through the Arctic convoys. A quarter of it goes through Persia.

42:12 Talk about a dysfunctional Axis alliance. You can see in 1942, a tremendous number of Allied ships getting sunk on the Arctic convoys. These are fully-laden ships heading to Russia. The British and Americans called them off for most of 1943 because losses were too high. In 1943, Stalin is sending out feelers to Hitler trying to negotiate a separate peace. Hitler’s not interested. He wasn’t wasting his time attacking empty ships. He was only going after the laden ones.

43:00 What does it all add up to on the Eastern Front? Millions of Russians going after millions of Germans. As you watch that go, the Axis is killing Russians at a terrible rate, but Russia keeps absorbing the losses. The siege of Leningrad — St. Petersburg — begins. By 1942, it’s not looking good at all for Russia. But then as you stabilize, you can start doing peripheral operations. These casualties, while terrible, are cumulative on the main front. Meanwhile, you’ve got North Africa, then when the Soviets win the massive tank battle at Kursk, and the Allies are moving up the Italian peninsula — these are sequential operations adding up.

44:00 When you get to Normandy, the Russians are tying down the vast bulk of German forces. There are only 58 Axis divisions in the West. That’s what makes Normandy possible. When you start looking at the main front plus Normandy, and then additional operations, this continental cancer goes into remission. To summarize: before Britain had allies, it was just losing one thing after another. You should never dismiss the importance of a big continental ally. Russia is where the main fighting is taking place, not separated by the seas.

44:40 Then once the United States gets into the war, then you can really start doing things. First you have to win the Battle of the Atlantic — that’s what it’s all about — then you can start opening peripheral theaters. Churchill, the great wit, talked about the thing worse than fighting with allies, and that’s fighting without them. You need these complementary capabilities to gang up on your continental problem. You’re establishing precedents, laws, institutions that’ll hold the peace.

45:52 I’ve given you a big exposition on the British strategy in World War II. In a global war you go for blockade, peripheral operations, massive production, and alliance coordination. So that was then. How about now?

46:20 You can look at the United States with our position. You wouldn’t be able to blockade those coastlines easily. We’ve got the Atlantic and the Caribbean, but it’s basically hard to project power against us. We’re able to deploy forces in wartime across the oceans. On the big peninsula of Europe, Spain, France, and Norway have Atlantic access. They’ll probably get their navies out.

47:20 This is where China and Russia live. This is just the way it is. They’re surrounded by narrow seas that become kill zones in wartime. I get it, there’s the Arctic up there, but being able to run things in the Arctic is extremely difficult. Nature naturally contains both Russia and China.

48:53 Let’s start with Putin. Russia is fundamentally a continental mode of transport. It’s a long horse ride if you’re going to move things across Russia. He’s got one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov. Long time to be in the shop. It sank the dry dock that Russia has to repair it, and then there’s been all sorts of charges of corruption. It’s not getting repaired anytime fast. That one’s not doing him any good.

51:00 Putin has two seas that he likes. One’s the Black Sea, where in theory he could have blockaded Bulgaria, Romania, and threatened the Dardanelles. That was why he’s interested in the Kerch Strait and wanted to take Ukraine from east to west. He used to have a naval base at Tartus in Syria. But now that Bashar al-Assad has been overthrown, that base is useless. In any case, it’s a useless base because in wartime the Dardanelles can be shut down with mines. You don’t need a navy to stop a navy in narrow seas.

52:40 Russia’s main naval base used to be at Sevastopol in Crimea. He can’t do too much there anymore. There are fewer possibilities for him nowadays. The other sea is the Baltic. Kaliningrad is sovereign Russian territory. If Russia wanted to blockade the Baltic states, they could try it. But Sweden and Finland have ditched neutrality. They’ve joined NATO. The Baltic is really a NATO lake.

55:12 Putin’s latest gig is cutting undersea cables. That’s the act of a very frustrated person. Trying to leave the Baltic doesn’t work easily. It turns out that Putin and Russia are much more geographically constrained than people realize. It’s very easy to close up those exits. They’ve got two really big naval bases, one on the Kola Peninsula, but the problem is when they deploy out of there, they have to pass between Greenland and Iceland. You can see why Greenland and Iceland are strategically important. And for Russia going east, it has to go by the United States — the Bering Sea.

55:40 If you look at NATO expansion, initially in the Cold War, the early NATO nations were all smaller than Russia. Why Russia needs more territory remains a mystery. But all of Russia’s former satellites are fleeing to NATO, saying “NATO, NATO, let me in.” And then as part of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland, who’d been neutral for decades, say “Whoa, no, no, we’re going to join NATO.” Putin says, “Well, this is NATO coming at us in arcs.” If you occupy places and brutalize them for generations, when they have the opportunity, they flee to your enemy.

56:32 Putin’s muse — I don’t know if it’s his intellectual inspiration — is Aleksandr Dugin. He has a lot of ideas like Putin’s. It’s not a universal rules-based order. Rather, they want to divide the world into separate civilizational spheres, each a world unto itself. You can see the places that Russia has been taking: in 2008, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. Then 2014, Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk. This is a continental view. You want to color it all in. It’s the way a continental power thinks.

57:20 The United States thinks that Putin is contained by NATO. Putin’s bigger problem is actually China. NATO doesn’t want Russian territory. We just want Russians to stay at home. Putin has said that if you really feel deeply that a territory is yours, you should be able to take it. Well, there are places that China might feel the same way about — Russian places with the resources that China needs. Those resources out in Siberia, and water. Lake Baikal holds 20% of the world’s fresh surface water. China’s been blowing through its own water supply. Putin is dumping his ordnance on Ukraine while he’s letting this problem metastasize.

58:08 What are Xi Jinping’s possibilities? Here’s his world. China has 13 land borders and seven sea borders, many of which have disputes. Not all of them, but some. If Xi Jinping wanted to blockade somebody, he could try in the South China Sea. But then Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan all have other coastlines with high-seas access. Remember, I’ve just given you a whole lecture on what maritime powers can do. When people have high-seas access, it’s really hard to contain them.

59:20 The South China Sea is a legal mess. In any kind of war, you’re going to have many neighbors who join sides if they don’t like what’s happening. The North Sea, the Baltic, the Mediterranean — they shut down in wartime to commercial traffic. China’s neighbors would have great difficulty if China tried to use the South China Sea as a weapon. If the neighbors, as they have been doing, buy some missiles and aircraft, that might be enough to close down these narrow seas.

1:00:40 If you want to go the other way — the Pacific — where would China visit on the west coast? Hawaii would be the nearest big target. Hawaii’s dependent on imports for everything. But going the other way, the islands get bigger and the challenges multiply.

1:02:48 I leave you with Alfred Thayer Mahan, the most famous person ever associated with the US Naval War College. Here are his prerequisites for sea power: you need a moat — you’ve got to have insulation from land threats. You need a dense internal transportation grid to move goods efficiently, access to the sea to get the navy out in wartime, a dense coastal population, all the trade, a commerce-driven economy that is going to support funding a navy.

1:04:08 Let’s line up Russia and China against Mahan’s criteria. Well, neither one’s got a moat. They’re two of the most land-bordered countries on the planet. Their internal transportation is lamentable — China’s is getting better. Neither one has adequate sea access. Sure, Russia’s got the Arctic, but it’s barely navigable. As for dense coastal population, China has that, but Russia doesn’t way up north. China was more commerce-driven under Deng Xiaoping, but under Xi, the crony sector has grown over the private sector.

1:05:16 The litmus test is peaceful transfers of power, usually through elections. So sure, China and Russia remain continental powers with all the maritime limitations of where they’re at. Keep compounding growth and avoid war, as the Ukrainian war shows Putin is doing the opposite. But sadly, the enemy gets a vote.

1:05:52 Thank you so much for coming and being so generous with your time. Now for the Q&A.

1:06:08 First question: The lecture is framed around Britain’s brilliant strategy in how they prosecuted World War II. But what’s actually happening is that Germany and Hitler are just bungling things continuously. In 1940 and 1941, Halifax was saying, “Look, we’ve lost the Battle of France. We’ve lost everything.” Germany could have done a blockade of Britain and potentially won. Instead, Hitler decides to open up a second front against the Soviet Union. And then again, an unforced error — he declares war on America, which he didn’t have to do, guaranteeing American support in the war against Germany. How much of this is Germany continually bungling rather than about Britain being clever?

1:07:08 It’s both. I don’t know that Hitler was bungling. It was more that he was planning for a different kind of war. He lost so many naval assets doing the Norway campaign that he doesn’t have the naval assets to invade Britain. That’s unlike World War I, where the German navy was the second-largest fleet at the end of the war. This time, Germany did the smart thing in getting Norway, but then they don’t have a fleet. And since Hitler is sitting on this big petroleum deficit zone, he’s gotta get moving. He’s gotta go for resources.

1:08:00 The whole proposition of what Hitler was trying to do was incredibly risky. But it doesn’t mean that it isn’t a legitimate question. Even though you look at the totality of the Allies vs. the Axis and go, “I think the Allies are gonna win this thing,” the Battle of the Atlantic shows it goes this way, it goes that way. It’s not predetermined. Yeah, the Germans made errors. If you want to dominate Europe and you have a geographic position like Germany’s, they should have just kept growing their economy. The error is even going to war for these things.

1:09:12 You call it a blunder now, but at the time you don’t know. People take risky things and then you say they’re brilliant. When it fails, you say they’re idiots. But it’s dicey. When we’re trying to explain who wins a big war, we have to look at the broader picture. Second question about America’s industrial contribution and specific strategies used in different battles.

1:10:08 Define “win.” What is “win”? If Germany’s win means dominating all of Europe plus Russia, you come up with one answer. If Hitler had just taken Austria, done the Sudetenland number, and quit, he’d be called Bismarck II, a genius. But that’s not who he is. The challenge for both the Germans and the Allies is geographic. Germany can be invaded overland potentially, but Germany just cannot deploy a navy the way Britain can. Germany should have bought a completely different navy. Maybe they would have knocked Britain out before America entered. Do it fast. They didn’t do it.

1:11:20 After the fall of France in June 1940, Britain was running a very effective maritime strategy on its own. In the Atlantic, the U-boats are not in the narrow seas — they’re in the open ocean, picking off British trade through the Atlantic. Germany was sinking up to 500,000 tons of British shipping per month at the worst points. That’s an effective blockade of Britain. But the Americans eventually can produce many more ships. Ultimately it wasn’t a matter of who had the better strategy at sea. It was who could keep up the industrial production. It comes back to industry and not strategy alone.

1:12:08 They’re not actually blockading Britain — Germany doesn’t control the approaches — but they’re sinking things and new things come in. Meanwhile, Germany has exactly zero merchant marine going anywhere. Tremendous amounts of goods are still getting out to Britain. You’re right about the importance of productive bases. This is different from the Napoleonic Wars. When you’re powering your ships with coal, Britain had some A-list coal. But when you’re changing energy sources, the calculus changes. But the productive base is what matters.

1:13:12 The game of takeaway is what it comes down to — economic size will determine the outcome of wars. Air power enthusiasts will say, “It’s all about controlling the skies.” But what matters is having air cover for your convoys, and that’s what does it. Would the Battle of the Atlantic have turned out the same way without American technology? Negative. If I remove radar and those hedgehog weapons, it doesn’t turn out the same way. What happens if the United States just doesn’t coordinate with Britain? Things turn out very differently.

1:14:20 Different people are designing different parts of the solution. You’re determining that you’re sharing technologies freely with allies. Britain’s providing a lot of free intelligence. If you remove any one piece, the Battle of the Atlantic turns out differently. It’s a package of many things. When you have people who will give just one cause, they’ll probably be right that it matters. But then they are just ignoring all the other things.

1:15:08 The question then is what would have changed the war. Could the war have gone differently? Yes, anything would have changed that. But would any single thing have changed who won the war? Germany had one-fourth of the GDP of the Allies combined. It depends whether the war is a limited war or total war.

1:15:53 Let’s talk about Bismarck. This is the difference between limited and unlimited war. These concepts are useful and you apply them to other things. In an unlimited war, the opposing state is not going to exist at the end of the war. In Hitler’s most unlimited variant, he’s going to literally exterminate the Slavs. A limited war means you want maybe a couple of provinces. The opposing government’s going to live.

1:16:24 Bismarck fought the Danish war, then there’s the Austro-Prussian war, then the Franco-Prussian war. In the Danish war, it’s about a couple of duchies that Bismarck covets because he wants to unify the Germanic states. He trounces Denmark. Does he march on Copenhagen? No way. He just says, “Cede this territory because it’s got a bunch of Germans in it.” How much is victory worth to Denmark? For Denmark, just making Bismarck stop is enough — the value of the object’s lower to them. He gets away with that one.

1:17:12 Austria — he just slams them. The Prussian needle gun allows them to deploy where the Austrians can’t. The French are watching all this and they’re getting nervous. But the peace with Austria is generous — it’s just saying, “Hey, let’s cede a couple of provinces.” Austria was a big empire. You lose pieces, you own pieces. The value of the object again is much lower. It seems to be a generous peace. But meanwhile, all these little Germanic states are coming together to create a unified Germany. Then with France, when he takes Alsace-Lorraine, the French never give up on that one.

1:18:00 These are limited objectives. He doesn’t destroy the Austrian government or the French government. But the cumulative effect of these limited wars is far greater than the places conquered. By doing all of this, Prussia has transformed from a second-tier power to the greatest power of Europe, second only to Britain. And nobody else gets the big picture. The other powers are just clueless.

1:18:48 Daniel Yergin, who wrote this big history of oil, discusses the importance of oil in World War II. The argument is that once you’ve committed to this massive war, you’ve got to take those oil fields. But the blunder is splitting forces between Moscow and the Caucasus oil fields. Just go for the oil only. That would have been more strategic.

1:19:20 Democratic leaders would have surrendered by 1943 when it was clear the war was lost. Dictators don’t. They just double down. This is the advantage of a democratic system with elections. Elections are a moment to reassess when things go badly. The election forces reassessment. Most human beings don’t like to change their minds. Doubling down on bad decisions is a universal human problem. If you have a dictator, you’re guaranteed he’ll double down.

1:20:40 So Hitler is going to keep going after everything. Then if he wins there, he’s going to go after the next thing. The enemy gets a vote, and you may think these are easy targets, but they’re not. You have to do things to counter them. This is the advantage of democracies, which have at least some amount of franchise.

1:21:20 The problem with World War I is another case study. To the best of your abilities, you should prioritize your adversaries: primary adversary, secondary adversary, tertiary adversary. The combatants couldn’t agree on who was primary, secondary, third. And that led to disaster. Civilians running the show who don’t really understand military operations — that war sets communism and fascism loose on the world. You can argue we’ve been dealing with that ever since.

1:22:00 For most of my life, I thought we’d move past these things, but now we’re dealing with a new authoritarian vision which seems to rhyme with fascism. It’s a toxic way of dealing with the world. The people who lived through it set up international institutions that held the peace until the present day, when irresponsible leaders decide those institutions aren’t good enough. Here we are. There’s a price to pay for playing chicken on the world stage.

1:22:40 That’s my reason for doing lectures on strategy — to give people some data to think about. Draw your own opinions and your own conclusions. Don’t just take what any one person says. If we blow our alliance system, we’re going to be in a position where things don’t go well. Particularly if we think we’re going to go it alone against China and think that’ll go well for us. It won’t. Look at the mathematics of industrial output and population size.

1:23:20 A questioner asks about Russia and China being compared to the Axis. No, I was just saying that if you occupy Russia’s position or China’s position, you’re more vulnerable to blockade, period. The question about whether the economic disparity was more central than strategy: the output of China versus the United States — even if you look at international trade, China does more trade with the world than the United States does.

1:24:20 More concepts about limited and unlimited wars and how much winning is worth to you. If you’re talking about the United States and China — tell me what this war is, who’s going to fight, and then we can talk about what’s feasible. The value of the object matters enormously. If you look at Taiwan, maybe China can take it. But that lovely chip foundry that everyone wants? It’ll be the first casualty of that war. There’s no way you’ll capture that intact.

1:25:00 It’s not blockade nowadays. It’s rather trade sanctions — “If you don’t play nice, we’re not going to trade with you.” China is very trade-reliant. But here’s the challenge: the world benefits more from trading with China than from trading with just the United States alone. There’s more volume of trade with China. Then it would be difficult to coordinate a sanctions regime. But sanctions don’t have to be leak proof. Even knocking a couple of percentage points of Chinese growth would be devastating. Look at the comparison between North and South Korea. It adds right up. If you knock off 2% growth per annum, over time that’s enormous.

1:26:20 Also, trade supply chains are already moving out of China. It’s slow, but it’s happening over a 10-year period. In the immediate term, who is in a comparable position to World War II America’s industrial dominance? Not the United States alone today. Perhaps we can cobble together a coalition that has comparable economic growth or ability to compete. The coalition would center around the democratic world.

1:27:04 Not today — no one’s centering around the US because we’re not playing nicely with allies right now. But there are many countries that are eager to develop. They have cheaper labor now, places like Vietnam. My impression with India is that one of India’s great advantages is its demographics. There are investments going on there. People are interested in making money.

1:27:48 If China is foolish enough to do a Taiwan scenario, the ramifications are enormous. It’s a mistake. As annoying as dealing with China might be, we should argue with them at international institutions. We built those institutions and should be able to get others to see it our way. If China goes the Putin route, they will get a timeout from the global order. Compounded economic growth is much better than territorial expansion. It is much better to forget about invading other people and focus on trade, goods, ideas.

1:28:40 On the general framework of how continental powers are constrained — I wonder if it’s worth even designating the distinction. To the extent that you think positive-sum trade matters, that’s true regardless of whether we use the maritime-continental framework. Yeah, I’ve just discussed geography because it’s so foundational. Particularly what’s hilarious about people who buy into the Dugin civilizational books — they never look at the geography. “I’m going to get a big navy.” Well, what does that mean from your geographic position?

1:29:28 I’ve just finished editing a book on this topic. If you have a fleet, what does that open for you? What does it open for your enemies? You see Italy in World War I — with that coastline, a simple investment in submarines prevents anyone from freely using the Mediterranean. It also makes the British do very expensive things. Geographic position limits what you can do.

1:30:08 That’s why I look at China and its relationship to these international institutions. Actually, these international institutions give China enormous advantages. It’s a de facto alliance system. If you are the biggest trading partner with say 120 countries, that’s an incredibly strong position. The reason America has a lot of alliances is because of trade.

1:30:52 But China comes with this piece of baggage: “We’re big, you’re little, so do what we say.” They’ve literally said it over and over again. To the Vietnamese, basically: shut up, you’re small. The Vietnamese don’t like it. So the Vietnamese actually prefer dealing with the United States, which actually respects how your political system works. We’ve been really intrusive in other countries’ affairs — that is the American busybody gene. No one’s perfect in this world. But China is usually more willing to just trade on their own terms. We tend to interfere and then do things we shouldn’t do. Sarah, thanks so much.