Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Religion was mobilised in every state to support the national war effort, though it was by no means the only, or even the prime, source of moral validation. The conscription of moral energies, like the mobilisation of technical and economic resources, was a necessary element in the war effort on both sides, particularly in this war when societies were fighting for their very existence, or thought they were. Like the religious wars of the sixteenth century, the Second World War was fought with a ferocity and desperation born of real fears and deep hatreds. It was not a war simply for balance-of-power politics, but also for ideals deeply held. Moral commitment to the cause was forged from a heady mix of outrage, vengeance, loathing and contempt, an intensity of feeling and a depth of anxiety not experienced since the days of French Revolutionary Europe or the Thirty Years’ War. Populations on both sides sustained the struggle with some sense of the justness of their cause, with that ‘sacred hatred’.

  No account of Allied victory can afford to ignore the moral dimension in war. The conflict was never a simple one of right against wrong, as the confused battle-lines of Christianity demonstrate. Roosevelt was clear in his own mind that on the basic moral issues Stalin’s dictatorship was of a piece with Hitler’s. The first line of Churchill’s declaration of support for the Russian people broadcast on the night of 22 June 1941 began with the words: ‘The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of communism.’11 None of the Allies, the democracies included, fought an unblemished war by any standard. The real success of the Allies lay in their ability to win the moral high ground throughout the conflict by identifying their cause with progressive, post-Enlightenment values. Their enemies they tarred with the brush of reactionary, even barbarous, vices. The western democracies were self-righteous about their liberal virtues; but even the Soviet Union was regarded then as a system striving for social progress, a ‘new civilisation’ as the British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb called it. The Allied war effort was sustained by the powerful sense that the Allies were prosecuting just war.

  The belief that their cause was on the side of progress in world history gave a genuine moral certainty to the Allies, which the Axis populations largely lacked. Popular commitment to war in the aggressor states was half-hearted and morally ambiguous. In the Allied communities, on the other hand, there was a powerful crusading rejection of the forces of fascist darkness. This helped to mask the deep doctrinal and political differences between the three major Allies, and encouraged the greatest of efforts, particularly from the Soviet people, in destroying their enemies. The moral forces at work on the Allied side kept people fighting in a common cause; but as the war went on Axis populations suffered a growing demoralisation, a collapse of consensus, and increasingly brutal regimentation of the home front. This contrast is an important part of any explanation for the eventual outcome of the war.

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  Hatred of Hitler and ‘Hitlerism’ was the moral cement of the Allied war effort. In the same speech in which Churchill bracketed communism and Nazism together, he gave overriding priority to the German threat: ‘We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.’12 These sentiments were not just for public consumption. Churchill developed a deep personal loathing for Hitler; his defeat became an obsession, ‘the destruction of Hitler’ the driving force of his war effort.13 When the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Maxim Litvinov, was asked to report to Moscow on the attitude of the western Allies to the war in 1943, he concluded that ‘the struggle against Hitler’ was the defining aim. Roosevelt, he found, hated Hitler, was a ‘staunch anti-Nazi’ and surrounded himself with advisers who wanted simply ‘to eliminate Nazism’.14

  Hitler exerted a special power in binding his enemies together. On the surface the reasons for this are clear. Hitler’s unquenchable, unpredictable appetite for conquest was a threat to every other state and way of life. Yet the issue is more complex than this. Hatred of Hitler and Hitlerism long pre-dated the final evidence of the Holocaust and the catalogue of crimes exposed in 1945. Its roots go back to the 1930s, even before the outbreak of war, when Hitler was singled out from other dictators – Mussolini, Stalin – as the greater force for evil, and German aggression was feared far more than that of Japan and Italy, though both had actually waged particularly brutal wars in the 1930s, unlike Germany. Stalin’s rule in the 1930s was atrocious by western standards, but Stalin was not demonised like Hitler until after the war. The English novelist George Orwell believed that most intellectuals preferred Stalin to Hitler, accepting ‘dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsifications’, as long as they felt ‘it was on “our” side’. Even Orwell, whose own denunciations of Soviet oppression swam against the general current, thought Stalin’s dictatorship ‘a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany’.15 When the American public was asked by pollsters in the summer of 1941 to choose between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, 4 per cent favoured Germany and over 70 per cent the Soviet Union.16

  The threat that a Hitler-led Germany represented eclipsed every other menace faced by the Allies. It has been the general view, both then and since, that the war was Hitler’s responsibility and the defeat of Hitler the Allies’ primary purpose. As Churchill confessed, ‘his life was much simplified’ by seeing the war in personal terms. Unlike many of his countrymen, Churchill made a distinction between Hitler and Nazism on the one hand, and Germany on the other. He had an unlikely ally in Stalin, who wanted to smash German fascism, but not necessarily to eradicate a potentially communist Germany.17 Roosevelt was much more inclined to see Hitler as typical of the German people as a whole. He displayed a deep prejudice against Germany, rooted in his childhood, when he was sent to school in Baden on one of many trips to German spa towns with his ailing father, who was strongly anti-German. The young man developed a strong dislike of German militarism, of German ‘arrogance and provincialism’.18 His later attitude to his childhood hosts was anything but Christian. At the time of Munich he told his Cabinet that all Germany’s neighbours ought to combine to batter the German population from the air until their morale cracked. During the war his private comments on the German fate betrayed an unusual brutality. He favoured the punishment of Germany advocated by the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, which was to turn Germany into an agricultural state, whose impoverished population would have to live from army soup kitchens. More than once Roosevelt suggested some form of extreme population control – castration was his recommendation, though it is difficult to take seriously – to prevent the reproduction of this militarised people.19 Even the mild Eisenhower exhibited the most pronounced Germanophobia. At lunch with Lord Halifax in July 1944 he announced that he would recommend liquidating the German General Staff, the Gestapo and any Nazi officials above the rank of mayor. His treatment of German prisoners in American hands at the end of the war was brutal and neglectful.20

  Among the wider Allied populations hatred of Hitler, Nazism and Germany was powerfully instilled. In 1942 the Soviet regime launched a formal campaign of hate against the aggressor. Hitler was shown in countless cartoons and posters as a scavenging animal – a hyena, a rat, a vulture – or a primitive, ape-like creature; his followers became vermin, ‘foul hounds’.21 Soviet journals preached a single-minded detestation of the enemy. ‘May holy hatred’, ran the Pravda editorial on 11 July, ‘become our chief, our only feeling.’ The Soviet poet, Konstantin Simonov, called on his readers to ‘kill a German, kill a German, every time you see one!’ Here are echoes of Churchill’s casual slogan ‘kill the Hun!’22 Britain did not officially instigate a progamme of hatred, but one was widely evident. Lord Vansittart, Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office in the 1930s, sold over half a million copies of Black Record, a diatribe against the German race, ‘a breed which from the dawn of history has been predatory and bellicose’, led by a fanatical anti-Christ.23 In a series of lectures given at Oxford shortly after the outbreak of war, the histori
an R.C.K. Ensor told his audience that the Germans were not like other civilised peoples: they were aggressive, militaristic, prone to cruelty. ‘Ask yourself whether a Dachau or a Buchenwald would be conceivable on English or French soil,’ he continued. ‘I do not think it would.’24 Anti-German sentiment, rooted in hatred of Hitler and a crude racial stereotyping, was widespread well before the course of the war lent such views an evident validity. The war exacerbated them. ‘Whether you like it or not,’ ran an editorial in the Daily Express, shortly before Pearl Harbor, ‘vengeance on Germany is becoming the prime war aim of all Europe.’ NOT ENOUGH HATE was the headline above another editorial: ‘You can’t win a war like this without hating your enemy.’25

  Hitler aroused emotions strong enough to hold together an unholy alliance for the whole course of the conflict, strong enough to fire exceptional levels of popular hatred, strong enough to incite the peaceable Chamberlain to declare war in 1939 against all his instincts, and to rouse Roosevelt from neutrality to intervention. The strength of feeling owed something to the nature of the man himself. Hitler’s populist roots, the demagoguery, the crude messianism singled him out from the generation of orthodox statesmen in the 1930s. His dishonesty in international dealings was regarded as quite distinct from the usual pursuit of flexible self-interest. Roosevelt considered Hitler’s word worth no more than ‘the bond of gangsters and outlaws’.26 In the 1930s Hitler’s world view was characterised outside the Reich as nihilistic, amoral, destructive. ‘Hitler is the arch-destroyer,’ ran a sermon preached at Canterbury Cathedral; ‘wherever he goes he brings death.’ The style of Hitler’s leadership provoked abroad an apocalyptic language that curiously mirrored Hitler’s own expectation of a final struggle, a reckoning of accounts, the new order versus the old. An English guest at a Nazi Party rally in Berlin recalled in his memoirs that he had observed what appeared to be flashes of blue lightning escaping from Hitler’s body, and concluded that at certain moments Hitler was actually possessed of the devil.27

  More significant for understanding the reaction to Hitler than the man himself is what he was taken to represent. Hitler was the personification of a German threat abroad that could be traced back to at least the 1890s. Popular anti-German feeling was composed of a number of strands. Fear of Prussian militarism and bellicosity was a well-established feature of it well before 1914; H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air, published in 1908, when no bombers yet existed, painted a frightening picture of devastating attacks by ‘German bomber fleets’, which heralded ‘the beginning of the end’ of civilisation.28 Blame for the Great War was laid at the door of German ambition by the victor powers in 1919. The continuities in German power-seeking were regarded as self-evident by much foreign opinion. ‘The Germany of the Kaiser’, wrote the American journalist Walter Lippmann, in 1944, ‘was not nearly so evil a thing as Hitler’s Germany. But it had the same fundamental design of conquest.’29 In the 1920s, side by side with liberal sympathies for German mistreatment at Versailles lay the constant fear of German revival and rearmament. In the 1930s it was commonly assumed that Germany would violate Versailles and rearm in the air, posing the sort of annihilating threat first painted by Wells. The British Air Ministry expected the Germans to use bombing in a ‘ruthless and indiscriminate’ fashion because that was the German way.30 Even before the Nazi revolution, Germany was regarded as the disruptive force in world affairs. Hitler played a part already written for him.

  The representation of Hitler as anti-Christ, as a symptom of a more profound malaise in European life, exaggerated the German threat. Before 1914 a whole generation of European thinkers turned their back on simplistic notions of liberal progress. There emerged a prominent cultural pessimism, fears of decline and decay for western civilisation, premonitions of war and social chaos, a yearning for spiritual renewal. Both extreme right and extreme left rejected the solid virtues of bourgeois Europe – scientific rationalism, the pursuit of peace and prosperity, the values of Christian respectability. They turned instead to the cult of violence and overthrow, exalting the strong at the expense of the weak; life was seen as Darwin saw it, a struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest. The sense of impending doom, of the end of an age, was fuelled by the horrors of the Great War and the revolutionary upheavals at its end. Violence and social chaos were established facts. The liberal order was visibly in decay. The moral certainty of the pre-war age was destroyed. ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish’ asked the poet T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, written in 1922.

  The belief that the European order was bankrupt, that the pursuit of progress was a dead end, was widely held in post-1918 Europe. The economic crisis in 1929, which was so severe that the very future of capitalism seemed in doubt, was further proof of the fragile nature of the existing system. The idea that some kind of violent, purifying transformation was necessary to renew European civilisation, or the white race, was not confined just to the radical political fringe. A New Order based on harsh authority, eschewing sentiment and compromise, was a more serious prospect in the 1930s than the survival of traditional liberalism. Hitler reflected, but did not cause, the profound moral crisis of the inter-war years. He embraced the idea of a New Order; he accepted violence and struggle as the elements of human existence; he gloried in his harsh post-Christian morality. Hitler appeared as nothing less than the harbinger of a new Dark Age. ‘A Nazi victory’, wrote the American philosopher, Melvin Rader, in 1939, ‘would not only destroy the freedom of Europe; it would jeopardize every noble ideal of human culture, every high concept of human morality, every fine achievement of hard-won democracy.’ Rader thought the war a turning-point in world history, upon whose outcome depended ‘the fate of mankind’.31 These were large claims for a conflict ostensibly over the fate of Danzig. Hitler was taken to stand for all those forces worldwide making for disintegration and violence. An English bishop wrote in response to the Pope’s ‘Five Peace Points’ in May 1940, that there was a choice ‘between the Christian religion and nihilism, the destruction of humanity that Hitlerism brings’.32 As a focus of Allied hatred Hitler was the object not only of the accumulation of half a century of anti-German sentiment, but also of the deeper fear that civilisation was now confronted by barbarism, order by chaos, good by evil.

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  The firm conviction that what they were fighting was a wicked thing greatly simplified the Allied war effort. The willingness to fight the war to the end was nourished by the image of ‘just war’. Moreover the fact that the Allied powers were all the victims of aggression also simplified the task of constructing the wartime consensus. Where the aggressor powers had to find ways of justifying aggression to the home populations, the Allied peoples fought wars of self-defence, in which victory was pursued for its own sake. Defence was less morally ambiguous than attack. Roosevelt did as much as he could during 1941 to avoid having to declare war first because of the strength of pacifist and isolationist opinion. The Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, and the German declaration of war four days later, solidified American public opinion behind a patriotic war of defence. The Soviet war effort was presented by Stalin not so much as a clash of ideologies, but as a sacred mission to save Mother Russia. “The Red Army’s strength’, Stalin announced in his Order of the Day, to Soviet forces in February 1942, ‘lies above all in the fact that it is not waging a predatory, imperialist war, but a patriotic war, a war of liberation, a just war.’33

  The Soviet situation differed from that of Britain and the United States because the Soviet Union was actually invaded and occupied. Britain and the United States fought their wars of self-defence on foreign soil; the Soviet people fought to regain lost territory. The German conquest of the western Soviet Union also precipitated a crisis in Soviet society that had no parallel in the west. At times in 1941 and 1942 the situation resembled the military disasters and economic chaos that sapped the Russian war effort in the First World War and brought the collapse of the Tsarist syst
em. Sustaining Soviet morale was essential to the revival of Soviet material power during the critical middle years of the war. The sacrifices both expected of and endured by the Soviet people required an exceptional level of moral mobilisation. Indeed, how that resolve was summoned up remains one of the central questions of the war.

  The problem in any assessment of the Soviet will to war is to distinguish genuine commitment from the fear of punishment that hung over every Soviet head. Behind the front operated an estimated three-quarters of a million NKVD security troops, whose task was to root out defeatism, to hunt down saboteurs and fifth columnists, and to shoot soldiers who deserted or fled before the enemy. Stalin’s order 227, published in July 1942, that retreat meant death, was not literally applied to every soldier who retreated, but was certainly used on occasion as an encouragement to others. Order 270, in which Stalin declared that all Soviet soldiers who fell into enemy hands were ‘traitors to the Motherland’ faced the ordinary Soviet soldier with a grim choice.34 Yet it is difficult to reconcile this image of a terrorised soldiery with all the evidence of spontaneous commitment and self-sacrifice. A great many Soviet people approved of the harshness because it matched the expectations of the time. One soldier recalled his reaction to hearing the order ‘Not a step back’: ‘Not the letter, but the spirit and content of the order made possible the moral, psychological and spiritual breakthrough in the hearts and minds of all to whom it was read …’35 A story from the wartime journals of a British war correspondent reveals the inadequacy of any explanation based entirely on Stalinist terror. At a railway station in Moscow at the height of the November fighting in Stalingrad he observed an elderly Siberian soldier waiting on the platform for his train to the front. Suddenly over the loudspeaker system came a low but distinct voice. The soldier gave a start and listened with deep attention. Then he whispered to himself the name ‘Stalin’ and solemnly performed the sign of the cross.36