Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Everyone who visited Hitler’s headquarters that autumn could sense the euphoria. In just two years the political map of the world was torn up. In July Hitler had already authorised new armament programmes to build up a large battlefleet and overwhelming air power to destroy British resistance and to keep America at arm’s length. A clumsy attempt by the Soviet side to buy time in October by hinting at a negotiated end to the conflict was swept aside by Hitler, still confident that he was close to destroying Soviet power once and for all. A few weeks later, prompted in part by the scale of German success in blunting any Soviet threat, Japan turned south to attack America and Britain in the Pacific and carve out a new empire in south-east Asia. On 7 December Japanese aircraft attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Four days later Hitler declared war on the United States as well. German leaders did not consider America a serious military threat. Two months before, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had told the Japanese ambassador that ‘American policy represented one great bluff’. Germany planned to complete the establishment of the New Order before America could intervene.14 Over the weeks following Pearl Harbor Japan’s forces took the south by storm; by February they had captured Malaya, Singapore, most of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and much of Burma, and had threatened Australia and India. On all fronts desperate defensive efforts kept alive both Soviet and western hopes, in the outskirts of Moscow, which German forces failed to take over the winter of 1941, in the approaches to the Suez Canal, on the borders of northern India, and in the northernmost territories of Australia. These battlefields proved to be the limits of Axis advance, but who in those catastrophic months would have believed it?

  On the face of things, no rational man in early 1942 would have guessed at the eventual outcome of the war. In the jargon of modern strategy, the Allies faced the worst-case scenario. The United States was not yet armed, and would have large trained forces only by 1943 at the earliest; the Soviet Union had lost the heart of its industrial structure and German forces were poised to seize the oil of the Caucasus and the Middle East. The situation for the Allies – and the coalition only emerged in December 1941, not sooner – was desperate, demoralising. In January 1941 Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s personal emissary to Churchill, conveyed the President’s conviction ‘that if England lost, America too would be encircled and beaten …’15 Even the belligerent Churchill had moments of bleak despair when he sketched to his staff his picture of ‘a world in which Hitler dominated all Europe, Asia and Africa’ and left to Britain and America ‘no option but an unwilling peace’.16

  It was from this sorry foundation that the Allied powers first halted, then reversed, the apparently inexorable drive to conquest of their enemies, Germany, Italy and Japan. Between 1942 and 1944 the initiative passed to the Allies, and Axis forces experienced their first serious reverses – at Stalingrad and Kursk on the eastern front, at the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in the Far East, and El Alamein in the Middle East. By 1944 the demoralisation of the Allies was dispelled; contemporaries could see that the odds were now overwhelmingly on Allied victory. The neutral states that hedged their bets earlier in the war – Turkey, Spain, Sweden – now looked for association with the winning side. The countries of Latin America came, one by one, to declare war on Germany. Argentina was the last, on 27 March 1945, six weeks before German defeat. Persia declared war on Germany in September 1944; Saudi Arabia and Syria in February 1945; Romania changed sides in August 1944, from the Axis to the Allied cause. The embattled democracies of 1939 led a world crusade six years later.

  1 Axis expansion in Europe 1938–42

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  Somewhere in the changing fortunes of war between 1942 and 1944 lies the heart of the answer to our question of why the Allies won. So dramatic was the transformation that it is hard not to assume that there was a particular turning-point, some uniquely significant battle like Waterloo, a decisive error of judgement, a moment of strategic hesitation which cost the Axis the war. Of course there were important battles, and human error explains much on both sides. But the war was fought worldwide for six long years. The chances of a single battle or decision seriously explaining its outcome are remote. For much of the war the chief campaigns were based on attrition, for months or years on end – in the Atlantic Battle, in the air war, on the eastern front, in the slow erosion of the German foothold in western and southern Europe or the Japanese hold on the islands of the south Pacific.

  The explanation of Allied victory requires a broad canvas and a wide brush. The war was unique in its scale and geographical extent. Colossal resources were mobilised over vast distances. The battlefield was a world battlefield in a very literal sense. For the Allies there was no question of winning the war in some defined area of engagement – it had to be won in every theatre and in every dimension, land, sea and air. This made the pursuit of victory costly, extensive, and above all time-consuming. The war made extravagant demands on the warring states of both sides. They each pitched a third (or more) of their manpower into battle, and converted up to two-thirds of their economy to feed the insatiable demands of the front-line. This was warfare on a scale the nineteenth century could not have contemplated, indeed on a scale hardly possible today, and it drew its justification from the desperate, Darwinian view of the world peddled by the doom-mongers of the 1930s. All states, fascist, communist, democratic, shared the common but terrifying assumption that war had to be ‘total’, what Mussolini called a ‘war of exhaustion’, to win the struggle for survival.17 The outcome of war depended as much on the successful mobilisation of the economic, scientific and moral resources of the nation as it did on the fighting itself. This may not be as glamorous an explanation as one of simple battlefield performance, but it was a civilian’s war as well as a soldier’s. Allied success in the long campaigns of attrition can be convincingly explained only by incorporating the role of production and invention.

  In the discussion that follows a rough balance has been kept between two different kinds of historical approach, between the war as a series of decisive military campaigns and the war as a set of distinct themes, between how the Allies won and why the Allies won. The first half of the book examines the four main zones of conflict in which the Allies prevailed between 1942 and 1945 – the war at sea, the land struggle on the eastern front, the offensive from the air, and the reconquest of Europe. The second part explores the elements that conditioned and caused those military successes: the balance of resources, combat effectiveness, leadership and strategic judgement, the mobilisation of the home front, and last, but not least, the moral contrasts between the two warring camps.

  The zones of conflict are self-defining, for they were the arenas in which the Allies chose to exert their maximum effort. It may well be argued with hindsight that they should, and could, have made other choices, but that is hardly the issue here. To understand why the Allies prevailed in these zones is to understand the outcome of the war. Though each zone was fought for independently, the outcome in any one affected the outcome in others. If the submarine menace had not been contained in 1943, the invasion of Europe the following year would have been infinitely more hazardous; if the bombing offensive had not diverted large quantities of men and materials away from the eastern front, the Soviet advance might well have been slower and less secure; and so forth. There is, in short, a strong line of connection between each zone, which explains the Allies’ determination to prevail in them all.

  The war at sea was a critical one for the western Allies, for the simple reason that all their major arteries of communication and supply were across water. Sea power was the only means by which they could bring other kinds of military force to bear on the enemy, and the only means by which they could fight a genuinely global war. For most of the Second World War Britain and the United States fought a predominantly naval conflict, and relied more heavily on naval power than anything else, until they shipped the armies to Europe in June 1944 to start the re
conquest of the Continent. In the Pacific the United States navy bore the brunt of the conflict with Japan right up to the point of Japanese defeat. The naval war linked all the zones of conflict. Supplies for the Soviet Union were dangerously convoyed to Archangel or Vladivostock or the Persian Gulf. The vast American war effort – men, tanks, planes and trucks – was shipped in great armadas across the Atlantic Ocean. The British war effort was unsustainable without the flow of materials, food and equipment from all over the world. ‘It is in shipping’, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, ‘and in the power to transport across the oceans … that the crunch of the whole war will be found.’18

  The Axis states knew how much the oceans mattered, which is why they made such strenuous efforts to sever the arteries one way or another. By 1942 German submarines were sinking British ships faster than they could be replaced, while the Japanese Imperial Navy won for itself a brief period of ascendancy in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. For the next two years the western Allies struggled to defeat the submarine and to contain Japanese naval power. The reasons for their eventual success in both theatres are elaborated in what follows. Axis defeat on the high seas paved the way for the more effective reinforcement of the Soviet Union and western Europe, and the complete defeat of Italy and Japan.

  While the western Allies tried to secure the seas, the Soviet Union was locked in the world’s largest land battle, stretched across the heart of Eurasia, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Germany was by far the most powerful of the three Axis states; the core of that power was her huge army, eight million strong. The overwhelming bulk of it was directed at Soviet Russia. In 1942 Germany deployed 178 divisions on the Soviet front; her allies and co-belligerents, Hungary, Italy, Finland and Romania, provided another 39. In North Africa Rommel had only four divisions. When the Soviet Union was invaded in June 1941 Hitler expected to conquer it in four months. Few western observers gave the Soviet Union much chance. Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, gave it even less than Hitler: ‘a minimum of one month and a possible maximum of three months’.19 Within a matter of weeks Soviet forces lost two million men and five thousand aircraft, dwarfing the losses in World War I; within months German armies besieged Leningrad and Moscow.

  The key to the eventual victory of the Allied states lies here, in the remarkable revival of Soviet military and economic power to a point where the Red Army could first contain, then drive back the German invader: remarkable, because it followed the loss by December 1941 of 4 million men, 8,000 aircraft and 17,000 tanks, equivalent to almost the entire strength of the Soviet forces in June;20 remarkable, because it followed the German capture of more than half the Soviet steel and coal output, and the entire Soviet ‘breadbasket’, the fertile black earth regions of the Ukraine and the western steppe, where the vital food surplus for the cities was produced. So severe was the mauling that it is hard to imagine any modern state under these circumstances continuing to fight. It has been claimed that in October Stalin tried to negotiate with the Germans through a Bulgarian intermediary, but this was most likely a ploy to buy time. When the Germans were nearing Moscow most of the Soviet government apparatus evacuated, but Stalin decided to stay in his capital to help rally its defence, spurred on, it has been argued, by the evidence of patriotic defiance among elements of the Moscow population.21 In 1942 there were local successes, but also long retreats, as the German armies pressed on the southern flank through the Crimea and beyond. But in 1943 the Soviet forces defeated their enemy at Stalingrad, and then at Kursk, and the long drive back into Europe began. How and why this happened, against every reasonable expectation, remains the central question of the war.

  Stalin, quite naturally, hoped that in the critical years the western Allies would find some way of relieving the pressure on the Soviet war effort. They did so in two ways, neither of which entirely satisfied the Russians. First, they launched a bombing offensive against the Axis on a scale without precedent. Second, and after much inter-Allied argument and hesitation, they launched two vast amphibious operations, one against Italy in July 1943, the other a year later, in June 1944, against German forces in northern France. Bombing has always been a contentious issue. Aside from the strong moral objections which it rightly raised, and continues to raise, there have always been serious doubts about its strategic worth. The bombing offensives absorbed very large resources and their results were regarded as ambiguous at best, even by the politicians who ordered them in the first place. Nevertheless bombing was the first choice of Anglo-American planners in their efforts to get directly at Germany in 1942, and it remained a central element in western war-making until the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945. For this reason, if for no other, its contribution to Allied victory deserves serious assessment.

  There exists a great deal of confusion about what bombing was supposed to achieve in the war. The popular expectation that bombing alone would cripple the German economy, destroy the morale of its people and bring about German surrender was never seriously entertained by British and American leaders. The achievements of bombing were more modest, but were nevertheless substantial. Bombing speeded up the re-entry to Europe of western forces; it helped to open up a ‘Second Front’ in 1942 and 1943 by diverting large quantities of manpower and equipment away from the Russo-German conflict to the defence of the Reich. Finally, the choice to confront Germany through an air campaign created the conditions for the defeat of the German air force. In Italy and Japan bombing undermined the home economy and home morale critically; in Germany bombing prevented the effective development of an economic super-power. In any argument about why the Allies won, this is an impressive catalogue of reasons.

  Bombing, like the war at sea, created circumstances that made possible the main thrust of Allied armies in 1944 to defeat Germany on three European fronts, east, west and south. This was rightly seen as the only way to secure victory, but for the western states it involved an operation of very considerable risk. The assault on the Normandy coast on the morning of 6 June 1944 was the largest amphibious attack ever launched. History was replete with examples of failure: Gallipoli (which almost finished Churchill as a serious politician in the First World War); the Spanish Armada; Napoleon in 1805 (when his strength on land was overwhelming); and more recently Hitler’s own failure to invade Britain in the autumn of 1940, when the opposition on the beaches of Kent and Sussex was nothing to the network of defences facing the Allies four years later. So difficult was the enterprise that the Germans thought the Allies might try a more indirect route through the Balkans, or Portugal, or Scandinavia rather than risk the frontal assault on Fortress Europe. The success of the D-Day landings sealed Hitler’s fate, as the landings in Italy a year before sealed Mussolini’s. Like the bombing, this was an enterprise whose outcome deserves careful explanation.

  The history of each of these four zones of conflict is central to the overall explanation of Allied military triumph. They are linked together by the wider themes which follow. The success in combat was determined in great measure by issues of production, scientific discovery, military reform and social enthusiasm. In all these spheres there are marked contrasts between the Allied and Axis sides which require elaboration. It has already been observed that the balance of human and material resources between the two sides can be reduced to three critical questions: how did the Soviet Union recover its industrial resilience? how did the United States turn itself in a year into a military super-power, when every other state had taken years to rearm? why did Germany, with so rich and industrially developed a continent at her disposal, produce so much less than the Allies? On the theme of fighting power it is tempting to reduce the issue to the simple question of why the Red Army managed to transform its effectiveness in a matter of months, when it looked a clumsy, spent force in 1941. This is almost certainly the most important question; but should we not also ask why the two military superstars, Germany and Japan, failed to sustain their momentum in the second half of the war? If the graph of Allied co
mbat effectiveness rose steeply upwards, that of the Axis levelled off, and finally declined.

  Some of these contrasts in fighting power can be explained by better use of intelligence or by superior technology, but it is impossible to ignore the human factor. Leadership counted for a great deal. So, too, did popular enthusiasm for war. The leading personalities contributed in all kinds of ways to the final outcome. Churchill, with his dogged hatred of Hitlerism, Roosevelt, with his defence of embattled democratic values, and Stalin, who roused a furious people to the defence of Mother Russia, all emerged under the stress of war as leaders of quality; but they tempered their own contribution by listening to advice and leaving much of the day-today task of running the war to others with more time and competence. In Germany the opposite happened. The easy victories persuaded Hitler that he had an inspirational grasp of strategy and operations. As the war went on he concentrated the war effort more and more in his own hands and trusted almost no one to give him advice. The German war became a remarkable one-man show in which intuition displaced rational evaluation, and megalomaniac conviction ousted common sense. Hitler was able to achieve much more than might have been expected given the manifest limitations of his education and experience, but in the end he took on too much.

  Not surprisingly, such wide differences in the style of leadership produced contrasts between the warring societies as a whole. In the Allied states there developed a powerful bond between leaders and led which helped to sustain populations through the bad times, and brought societies closer together. This was true even of the Soviet Union, where the home population was regimented and oppressed to a greater degree than that of Hitler’s Germany, but nevertheless exhibited a fervent, crusading patriotism that transcended the risks and miseries of everyday life. The response of Axis populations was more ambiguous. Important sections of society became disillusioned with the consequences of wayward, one-man leadership – so much so in the German case that some of Hitler’s senior officers tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him in July 1944. The costs of Mussolini’s overblown ambitions became too much for the Italian King and army, who kicked him out in July 1943 and sought a peace with the Allies three months later. In Japan there were large numbers who thought from the start that the war was a mistake. Though they fought with fanatical tenacity from fear of what they thought the vengeful Allies might do to them, there was always an ambivalence about the Axis war effort. As the war slowly turned against the Axis states, they were forced to rely more on naked terror and crude propaganda to keep their populations fighting. On the eastern front the German authorities shot the equivalent of a whole division of Germans, more than fifteen thousand men, for indiscipline, defeatism or dereliction of duty.22 In Japan in 1945 gangs of militarist thugs toured the home front bullying and murdering anyone who talked of peace, while young recruits were browbeaten into adopting suicidal tactics.