A BLUEPRINT FOR MODERN THREATS

Could lessons from the last great conflict help the democratic world triumph over the rise in autocratic power?

- WORDS: LOUIS HARDIMAN

In May 1942, the Japanese captured General Jonathan M Wainwright IV after he surrendered the remaining US forces in the Philippines. Wainwright remained in Japanese captivity until his liberation by the Red Army in August 1945. While struggling to survive as America’s highest-ranked prisoner of war, he kept a secret diary in which he expressed his dissatisfaction at the Allies’ lack of pre-war preparation: “The expense of making ourselves big enough and tough enough to have prevented that war would have been but a brief fraction of its eventual cost.” If the Second World War could have been avoided had the Western Allies been more unified, prepared and heavily armed, can the 1930s serve as a lesson for modern-day democracies?

In their latest book Victory ‘45, James Holland and Al Murray argue we are returning to a world that mirrors the 1930s, emphasising the importance of Wainwright's warning some 80 years ago. As autocracies seek to expand - Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine and China's hostilities towards Taiwan - the democratic West is positioned as the primary check on dictatorial ambitions, as it was from 1939 until Operation Barbarossa. “Those in the West who cherish freedom and democracy should be reading about the Second World War,” Holland tells History of War. “All the answers to the problems that we're facing in Ukraine and Europe and of rearming are all there in front of our noses.”