Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  The German people did not commit collective suicide, though many who had served Hitler did kill themselves. Rommel and von Kluge took cyanide in the autumn of 1944 to avoid dishonour. Field Marshal Model, after disbanding his defeated Army Group in April 1945, walked into a nearby forest and shot himself rather than face Allied vengeance. After Hitler’s death German surrender quickly followed. On 2 May German forces capitulated in Italy. After a confused period of negotiation in northern Germany, as individual German commanders tried to surrender, the German Supreme Command finally signed the act of surrender at two o’clock in the morning of 7 May. The terms were to come into effect on all warring fronts at midnight 8 May. A formal surrender ceremony was held in Berlin on the night of 8/9 May. Air Marshal Tedder signed as Eisenhower’s deputy; the hero of Stalingrad and Kursk, Marshal Zhukov, signed for the Soviet armies. In Britain the 8th and 9th of May were declared public holidays. At midnight on 7 May all the ships, large and small, around Britain’s coastline set off their sirens and whistles in noisy celebration. In the Soviet Union news of the surrender was only announced on 9 May; the authorities waited another two days before allowing celebrations, for fear that German resistance might flare up again from the embers. That night a thousand guns fired a salute in Moscow, and hundreds of aircraft released red, gold and violet flares over the city. Hung from balloons, a giant red flag hovered over the Kremlin. On the radio Stalin, who had never allowed Soviet casualties to be announced, spoke in a faltering voice of ‘countless losses’.96

  * * *

  When Eisenhower placed the note in his wallet announcing the failure of Overlord he did so not from misplaced modesty, but from quite genuine anxiety as to the outcome. He found the note again on 11 July, five weeks after the secure establishment of the bridgehead. His naval aide asked if he could keep it, and Eisenhower reluctantly agreed, conscious perhaps that he might still have need of it. He was not the only one to express doubts. Although Moscow was reported to be ‘awash in boozy good feeling’ at news of the Normandy landings, the night before D-Day Stalin was scathing about his western allies: ‘Until now there was always something that interfered … Maybe they’ll meet up with some Germans! What if they meet up with some Germans! Maybe there won’t be a landing then, but just promises as usual.’97 Only weeks before the invasion Churchill confided to Eisenhower his nightmare of the beaches of Normandy ‘choked with the flower of American and British youth’. On 5 June Brooke still believed the invasion could be ‘the most ghastly disaster of the whole war’.98

  Victory in France when it came was both sudden and complete, but it was by no means preordained. The balance of technology was at best even, though German heavy tanks, the Panthers and Tigers, outgunned those of their opponents. Until well into June the manpower of 7th army and von Schweppenburg’s Panzer group outnumbered the invading force, and possessed a much greater density of both manpower and firepower than German armies in the east. Moreover the German forces had in general much tougher battle experience than their enemy, and displayed a greater willingness to fight stubbornly, hand to hand if need be, without the help of air power or the artillery barrage. Too little allowance is made in criticisms of Montgomery for the quality and tenacity of the German defence, and the inexperience of his own forces. There were points in the invasion where things could have gone badly wrong. If at any stage in the first four or five weeks the twenty divisions of 15th army had all been moved to the Normandy front the balance would have been very different. The weather was not ideal on D-Day, but if Eisenhower had decided at that critical moment to wait for the next brief period when the moon and tides held good the invaders would have been swallowed up by the great gale, which coincided exactly with the next block of favourable dates, 19–21 June. ‘Thank the gods of war’, Eisenhower wrote on the meteorologist’s report of the storm, ‘we went when we did!’99

  Victory depended on a great many things: the prodigious organisation of supplies by sea and air, meticulous planning, the solid virtues of civilian management. But two explanations stand out above the rest. The first is the inestimable value of air power to the invading armies in every field of war – supply, reconnaissance, battlefield support and the bombing of enemy supplies and communications. The impact of Allied aircraft was magnified many times by the successful defeat of the Luftwaffe over Germany in the first half of 1944, and the destruction of German oil supplies. Aircraft gave the Allies a striking power on the battlefield that artillery alone could not supply. One German commander calculated that 50 per cent of his losses were caused by bombing. German troops were worn down by shock and fire and were demoralised by the overwhelming air superiority of the enemy. Air attack prevented the German forces from ever seizing the initiative and dictated German front-line tactics.

  The second factor was deception. No doubt German forces would have remained dispersed even if more had been known about the Normandy plan, so certain were the senior German commanders that the northern Channel thrust made most operational and strategic sense. But the careful preparation of the FUSAG deception, and the exceptional good fortune over months of anxious subterfuge that shielded the Overlord plan from German eyes, ensured that the balance of forces, potentially so favourable to the defender, was evened up. German commanders were compelled by their uncertainty to do the very opposite of everything they had been trained to do: to dilute their forces rather than concentrate them. By the time they reverted to concentration at Mortain, the damage had been done and the Allies enjoyed local superiority in numbers strong enough to deliver the final, annihilating blow.

  The defeat of Hitler’s entire western army between June and August 1944 certainly did not win the war on its own, but it ended once and for all any fantasy Hitler might have harboured about stalling the western front in order to win in the east. However short the straws at which he grasped in 1944, there remained a slender chance of revival. New technology was in the offing – jet aircraft, ground-to-air missiles, rockets, long-range submarines undetectable by Allied radar. Allied victory in France put paid to any prospect that Germany could avoid defeat. ‘The war was won’, Eisenhower concluded in his final report as Supreme Commander, ‘before the Rhine was crossed.’100

  6

  A GENIUS FOR MASS-PRODUCTION

  Economies at War

  ‘With our national resources, our productive

  capacity, and the genius of our people for

  mass-production we will … outstrip the

  Axis powers in munitions of war.’

  F.D. Roosevelt, Message to Congress, 10 June 1941

  * * *

  THE SOVIET AIRCRAFT designer, Alexander Yakovlev, set down in his memoirs one of the few first-hand accounts of that most remarkable of Soviet wartime achievements, the evacuation of hundreds of factories and thousands of workers from under the very noses of the approaching German armies. In September 1941, with the enemy only 150 miles from the Soviet capital, the Moscow factories producing the Yak-1 fighter were ordered to the east. Under heavy air attack, the machines were run until they had completed every part for the aircraft on the assembly line. Outside the factory Soviet pilots waited to fly the planes straight into combat. Then the plant was dismantled piece by piece.

  Yakovlev’s design bureau was scheduled to follow the machines. He drove to the station at Khimki to watch the equipment leave. He found a scene of complete confusion. Hundreds of people were milling about on the wooden platforms. A continuous line of battered trucks brought machinery of all kinds to be loaded on to flat railway cars. Trains with forty cars stood on the track. One left every eight hours for Siberia. Yakovlev found his own workers in the mêlée. Men, women and children were loaded into box cars hastily converted for the long journey. Each one had a number of double bunks, an iron stove in the middle and a paraffin lamp. Each train was placed under the command of one of the workshop superintendents, whose job it was to supervise the loading and unloading of their invaluable cargo.

  The Yak plant was destin
ed for western Siberia. Crude wooden barracks were set up to welcome the industrial refugees, while local workers prepared the supplies of electricity, water and fuel. But as with so many of the factories shifted eastwards, there were long delays through Russia’s overstrained rail system. The trains did not arrive until after the frosts had taken grip. In sub-zero temperatures the workers struggled to reassemble the workshops. Within six days of arrival production was restarted. After three months, more fighters were turned out each week than the plant had produced in Moscow. The figures may owe a good deal to the distorting effects of Stalinist economic heroism, but even after such allowance is made there is little dispute that the evacuation saved the Soviet war effort in 1942 from certain disaster.1

  What Yakovlev witnessed was a small part of a vast exodus. Between July and December 1941 1,523 enterprises, the great bulk of them iron, steel and engineering plants, were moved to the Urals, to the Volga region, to Kazakhstan in central Asia, and to eastern Siberia. One and a half million wagon-loads were carried eastwards on the Soviet rail network. An estimated 16 million Soviet citizens escaped the German net, many of them factory workers, engineers, plant managers, all needed to keep the uprooted industries going.2 The whole process was a messy, improvised affair. Workers arrived without their machines; equipment without its workforce. So short of rolling-stock was the rail system that car-loads of machinery were dumped beside the track in the Russian interior so that trains could return to the battlefront in the west to pick up further cargoes. The transplanted enterprises were destined for the most inhospitable regions of the vast Soviet Union. Workers struggled to assemble their new premises in temperatures forty below, while the machines, thick with hoar frost, had to be revived with braziers. There are too many accounts of work restarting on frozen earth floors in buildings with no roofs for this to be mere legend.3

  What the Soviet people could not evacuate they destroyed. Thousands of mines, steelworks and engineering plants were abandoned. Food that could not be transported was torched. Yet for all the exceptional and desperate measures adopted, by the end of 1941 Soviet production sank to a mere fraction of the level before the German invasion. The overall levels of output were never restored throughout the conflict, but the war effort was sustained on the remarkable expansion of armaments and heavy-industrial output in the Urals and beyond. By 1942 the eastern zones supplied three-quarters of all Soviet weapons and almost all the iron and steel. The restoration of economic order out of the chaos and confusion caused by the German assault was as remarkable as the revival of Red Army fortunes after Stalingrad, and just as essential to the Allied cause.4

  It is often forgotten that in the critical middle years of the war the balance of economic resources was not yet weighted heavily in the Allies’ favour. Until the German invasion of the Soviet Union Britain and her Empire were overshadowed by the economic potential of the European Axis states and their conquered territories. Alone, it is unlikely that Britain would have survived. After the invasion of the Soviet Union the balance improved until German armies swept through the rich iron, coal and steel regions of western Russia and the Ukraine, depriving Soviet industry of two-thirds of its coal and steel. In the year leading to the siege of Stalingrad Germany produced four times as much steel as the Soviet Union. During the crisis months of 1942 and 1943, when the tide was turned on the eastern front, the balance of resources and weapons had not yet moved in favour of the Red Army. Even with the entry of the United States the situation was not transformed at once. The Battle of Midway was won with overwhelming naval strength on the Japanese side. After years of disarmament and isolation, the United States was not a major land power, and German diplomats reported to Berlin their conviction that it would take years for America’s economic potential to be realised in large, well-armed forces. In reality the transformation took only a matter of months; so rapidly was America’s consumer economy mobilised that by 1943 a substantial transfer of resources became possible from the United States to the two major allies.

  By 1944 the balance of weapons did swing massively in the Allies’ favour. But this widening gap was not a result simply of the possession of greater quantities of manpower and raw materials. In the Soviet case 8 million tons of steel and 90 million tons of coal in 1943 were translated into 48,000 heavy artillery pieces and 24,000 tanks; Germany in the same year turned 30 million tons of steel and 340 million tons of coal into 27,000 heavy guns and 17,000 tanks.5 If the Soviet Union made the most of its attenuated resources, the new German empire failed to make the most of its economic advantages. This was partly a result of economic warfare. The Allies tried to deny their enemies the use of critical resources, oil in particular. Bombing seriously restricted the scope of Axis production from 1943. Unconstrained by enemy action, Axis production in 1944 and 1945 would certainly have been higher.

  The key years were earlier in the war. It was in 1942–3 that the disparity between the two sides was created by Soviet industrial revival and American rearmament. Neither could be taken for granted. Success on these two economic battlefronts shaped the military successes, at Stalingrad and Kursk, in the Atlantic Battle, and in France.

  * * *

  In 1941 the Soviet economy was threatened with complete collapse. In a matter of months German forces conquered the main industrial and agricultural regions of the Soviet economy. The rich grain lands of the west, the Soviet ‘breadbasket’, passed over to the enemy. In 1942 grain supplies fell by half for the 130 million Soviet citizens in the unoccupied zones; meat production fell by more than half.6 One-third of the Soviet rail network was lost, and 40 per cent of electricity generating capacity. The lifeblood of modern industry – the supply of iron ore, coal and steel – was cut by three-quarters. The availability of vital resources for modern weapons – aluminium, manganese, copper – fell by two-thirds or more.7

  The Soviet state was for the moment reduced from being the world’s third largest industrial economy, behind the United States and Germany, to the rank of smaller economies, such as France, Italy and Japan. Formerly resource-rich, the Soviet economy was now poor in almost everything except oil, timber and lead. Another government might have given up the struggle there and then, or, like the Tsarist economy in World War I, limped on from one disaster to the next. The figures alone can scarcely convey the extent of the catastrophe, as a confused mass of officials, workers and equipment fled before the invading armies into the vast, predominantly rural hinterland, there, with a shrunken fuel supply, deteriorating transport and a hungry workforce, to rebuild Soviet industry and keep over two hundred Soviet divisions in the field.

  Against every reasonable expectation, the Soviet economy repaired the fractured web of industry, transport and resources and in 1942 produced more weapons than a year before, and more weapons than the enemy. Moreover many of these weapons were of improved quality, reversing the uneven technical confrontation of 1941. It proved impossible to make good the losses of coal, iron and steel, but Soviet factories were able to use the iron and steel that could be produced solely for the most urgent war production. In 1943 the gap between Soviet and German production widened further. In the middle years of the war Soviet factories produced three aircraft for every two German, and almost double the number of tanks. The balance of heavy artillery was three to one. The Soviet economy outproduced the German economy throughout the war from a resource base a good deal smaller and with a workforce far less skilled.8

  This was a remarkable achievement by any standard, but it is easier to describe than to explain. The simple answer might be that the Soviet Union operated a command economy, directed by the state and centrally planned. There is certainly something in this. The Soviet authorities did not have to collaborate with private capitalist interests, or reach compromises with labour. The economy was governed by decree and reluctant workers or incompetent managers filled the swelling population of the Gulag camps, where they worked for the war effort behind barbed wire.9 But Stalin could not simply command the ec
onomy to produce, any more than Canute could stop the tide. Coercion was never enough on its own to distil weapons from the disordered industrial rump left in 1942. Soviet economic achievements owed more to planning.

  The Soviet Union epitomised the cult of planning that gripped a whole generation of Europeans and Americans after the Great War. Soviet planning was introduced from the mid-1920s to replace the threatened revival of a semi-capitalist economy with an economy based entirely on social ownership and modern systems of production. Planning was perceived to be the only way in which the economic and social backwardness of the Soviet Union could be overcome quickly. The pre-war Five-Year Plans, begun in 1928, transformed the Soviet Union in ten years into a major industrial player and turned Soviet society upside down. The peasantry was regimented and stripped of its private property; thirty million moved from the countryside to the cities in under a decade. On paper the Soviet Union by 1940 was the world’s largest military power, and the second largest economy. Centrally planned industrial development, on greenfield sites, was nothing new to Soviet officials when the war came. The large-scale movement of population to staff the new factories, and the training needed to give them even rudimentary skills, was a familiar experience. The planning process itself was based on the crude matching of resources to plans for physical output, means to ends; though the system worked imperfectly, with much creative improvisation and a heavy cost in state terror, it gave economists, engineers and managers just those skills most in demand for organising a war economy.10

  There was a solid base from which to work in 1941, though nothing could have prepared Soviet planners for the nightmare they faced as one after the other key elements of the planned economy fell under enemy control. Central planning became impossible and the government was forced to introduce what they called the ‘regime of emergency measures’.11 In July 1941 the head of the Soviet economic planning agency Gosplan, Nikolai Voznesensky, was instructed to draw up a regional plan for a war economy based on the Urals-Volga-Siberia heartland. He moved from Moscow to the provincial capital at Kuibyshev, on the Volga river north of Stalingrad, with the Ural mountains visible to the east. Here he drew together the Soviet commissariats responsible for military production – Aviaprom for aircraft, Tankprom for tanks – to form an industrial cabinet away from the front-line. For a year they struggled from one emergency to another, improvising, hustling, bullying. Where there was no coal they ordered factories to burn wood or peat. Shortages of rail transport compelled firms to become self-sufficient, supplying all their own parts and services, and making do without the usual ring of small contractors surrounding every armaments complex. Geologists scoured the Siberian countryside for new supplies of vital minerals. At Sverdlovsk hundreds of scientists and technologists were sent from the Moscow Academies to spend all their time working out solutions to the thousands of technical problems thrown up by improvised, poorly-resourced production.12