Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  The Soviet leadership was well aware that a whole population cannot be made to fight and work at the point of a gun. The war was presented in Soviet propaganda not as a war for communism but as a war for the Russian motherland. The very name chosen for the conflict, the Great Patriotic War, emphasised the continuities between the war with Hitler and the earlier wars against Napoleon, or the Teutonic knights. The rediscovery of Russia’s past history allowed the current Soviet conflict to be identified with an almost mythic contest between German and Slav that stretched back seven centuries. The term Soviet was used less and less frequently, to be replaced by a new vocabulary of nationalist endeavour. The communist hymn, the ‘Internationale’, was suppressed, to be replaced with a new Russian national anthem.37 The regime presented the war as a people’s war, sustained by the daily heroism of ordinary Russians. Above their struggles stood the Russian Father, Stalin. The symbol of the great leader, whose wisdom and resolution would hold the war effort together, was a necessary symbol, widely accepted by the Soviet public. The young Petro Grigorenko, a later Soviet dissident, remembered after the war that everyone he mixed with agreed that Stalin had produced the turnabout in the fortunes of war. He ended the war still believing that ‘without Stalin’s genius’ victory might not have come at all.38 Soviet soldiers were said to charge into battle shouting ‘For Motherland and Stalin!’, in that order.

  The entire Soviet war effort was suffused with a grim atmosphere of sacrifice and death. The people were immersed in a popular culture that exalted death in battle and preached violence towards any enemy of the war effort. Soviet newspapers were full of stories of extraordinary heroism for others to emulate. ‘Every soldier must be ready to die the death of a hero,’ ran a Pravda editorial in July 1942, and there is enough evidence from the German side to corroborate the tales of suicide attacks on tanks and Soviet soldiers refusing to surrender until cut down to the last man.39 The Russian attitude to death in battle was not a casual one, as is sometimes supposed, but was rooted in a social psychology that had long endorsed self-sacrifice and leadership by example. There was little formal code of honour like the rules governing Japanese military behaviour, but there was a strong sense of a deeper social and ethical commitment beyond loyalty to Stalin or the Party. Some of that commitment can be explained by the image in the mind of the Soviet people of the enemy they faced. German forces were presented, with good reason, as utterly amoral and bestial. Atrocity stories crowded every news page. Soviet propaganda created a dehumanised image of the enemy, not unlike the American image of the Japanese as apes or sub-humans, or German depiction of the Jews as vermin. The public language used against the German enemy was violent in the extreme: the conflict was described as ‘a war of extermination’, aimed at ‘annihilating to the last man all Germans’. Soviet soldiers told to expect mutilation and death if they were caught routinely meted out harsh treatment to German soldiers. Russians were in a very real sense absorbed by the immanence of death. They sought death in battle, they inflicted death, they confronted death. Which other people could have suffered the loss of more than twenty million of their number and continued to fight?40

  For Britain and the United States death was the exception rather than the rule. American civilians were not subject to mainland attack at all, while British civilian casualties ran to sixty thousand, a small fraction of civilian losses in the other warring powers. It was a priority in both states to keep casualties to a minimum. About 3 per cent of those mobilised for military service lost their lives. The American censors deliberately played down the theme of death in the first two years of conflict. Life magazine did not show a dead American until September 1943. The Information Manual produced for Hollywood by the newly created Office of War Information instructed film directors to limit scenes of death or injury: ‘In crowds unostentatiously show a few wounded men.’ Between May and November 1942 only five out of sixty-one war films showed deaths in combat.41 American authorities remained anxious that the reality of war might dent morale. Pictures showing weeping were banned. Only in 1944, and partly in response to popular demand, did the American media show the war in its truer colours. American society was less prepared for the traumas of battlefield violence than the people of Europe and Japan. The first American forces to fight in North Africa suffered a 25 per cent casualty rate from psychological disorders. A report by army psychologists on one American division found that during heavy combat a quarter of the soldiers soiled themselves, and another quarter vomited.42

  Unlike the Soviet Union, the two western Allies were democracies, whose populations were used to a high standard of living and amenity. They could not be regimented to the extent of Soviet citizens, or their armies terrorised to fight. Throughout the whole war only forty British soldiers were executed.43 Those who suffered what was euphemistically called ‘lack of moral fibre’ were demoted or redeployed, but not thrown into Gulags or shot. In the American forces a good deal of emphasis was placed on mental health. One million conscripts were rejected on neuropsychiatric grounds. Almost one million soldiers were admitted for treatment of psychiatric disorder during the war, and almost half a million of these were subsequently released permanently from fighting. Combat zones with a high death rate – long-range bombing, for example – were staffed entirely by volunteers.44 On the home front it was necessary to establish some kind of moral consensus. It was not difficult to paint the enemy in the blackest terms. But it was necessary to paint over the war effort of Britain and America with a thick moral gloss as well, to make it clear that the democracies were, on balance, fighting a liberal war. Since their major ally, Soviet Russia, was anything but democratic the presentation of the wider Allied cause had to be delicately handled.

  The moral commitment of the home populations was easy to mobilise when there was a direct and violent threat. The Battle of Britain and the Blitz repaired Britain’s dented morale after the defeat in France. They provided the core myths of invincibility and steadfastness for the remainder of the war. The period of bombing saw the creation of a war effort more united than it had been in the first months of war.45 In the United States the attack on Pearl Harbor had a galvanising effect on domestic opinion. Hatred towards the Japanese, drawing on decades of anti-Asian racism, was immediate and general. The Japanese were regarded as sub-human, racially and physically inferior, fanatical and heathen. Public loathing for Japanese forces was almost certainly stronger than anti-German feeling, until the unveiling of the horror of the camps in 1945, after the German surrender. Even the mild General Marshall talked publicly of the ‘treacherous barbarians’ of the East, and had no compunction about contemplating the fire-bombing of Japanese cities.46 In opinion polls during the war a tenth or more of those polled favoured the physical extermination of the Japanese race. What is startling is not so much the savage response as the fact that the question was put at all. A comparable poll on the German enemy excluded the extermination choice.47 Despite the priority given to the European theatre, vengeance against the Japanese was a core element in popular attitudes to the war, fuelled by a diet of atrocity stories which helped to dull resistance to the indiscriminate destruction of Japanese cities and the eventual use of the atomic bomb.

  Both the Blitz and Pearl Harbor came at the onset of hostilities. After that the direct threat of invasion receded. British and American forces were only intermittently in heavy combat. The battlefields were for the most part remote from the home populations. For the first years of war there were long periods of reverses or stale inactivity which made it more difficult to maintain popular enthusiasm. Though the news was carefully filtered, it was impossible to disguise the reality of the war, or to stifle criticism. Even when the tide of war had turned in the Allies’ favour, moral commitment needed sustenance. During 1944 and 1945 when victory appeared certain the willingness to accept sacrifices for a cause already secure began to weaken. In Britain and the United States war production was eased off during 1944, and larger numbers of consumer good
s began to reappear in the shops. The partial relaxation of the domestic war effort coincided with the period of the highest western casualties of the war, a juxtaposition that was hard to reconcile for those still doing the fighting. The Allies by then had little choice but to fight to the finish. Since most of the war had been spent presenting the enemy as an abomination, there was no question of negotiation or compromise. Roosevelt’s call for unconditional surrender, though made almost casually at the end of the Casablanca conference, was the logical outcome of the Allied view of the enemy. The moral chasm between them had been made too wide to bridge.

  British and American propaganda was chiefly concerned to reinforce the positive moral stance from which it was argued victory would spring. This was expressed in the conventional language of freedom against tyranny, barbarism crushed by civilisation. ‘We wanted to make the world safe for democracy – and protect the Four Freedoms,’ wrote the American General Wedemeyer after the war.48 When the film producer Frank Capra was recruited by General Marshall to produce a series of documentaries on Why We Fight, to help educate American opinion, Capra took as his working theme the ‘enormity’ of the enemy’s cause, ‘and the justness of ours’. The western war was presented as a decent war, as the ‘good war’.49 This was not difficult to do in the light of Japanese and German atrocity, and the vicious and illiberal regimes that ran the Axis war effort. It was more difficult when explaining morally complex issues such as western policy on bombing enemy civilians, or the fact that the west was fighting for democracy and freedom at the side of the Soviet Union.

  The ethical issues raised by bombing were never clearly in focus during the war years. What criticism there was came from the belief that the western states should maintain the values of liberal decency in the way they conducted the war. The authorities were concerned enough with avoiding such criticism to highlight the military nature of the targets they attacked, even when those targets were whole industrial cities. The attacks on the enemy war economy stretched the term ‘military target’ out of all recognition, but everything possible was done to ensure that the two western states were not seen to be engaged in indiscriminate terror-bombing, of the kind Germany was alleged to have carried out against Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry, or Japan against Nanking. The American emphasis on the precision bombing tactic, though its results were known to be exaggerated, was publicly promoted to create the illusion of good bombing against bad. These efforts reflected serious public concern. Londoners polled during the Blitz were almost evenly divided on the question of whether to give the German people an equal measure of terror. Public concern did little in the end, however, to inhibit the use of the bomber in inflicting almost a million civilian deaths in the name of democracy.

  The most striking moral paradox of the war years was the willingness of ostensibly liberal states to engage in the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians from the air. Serious consideration was at times even given to the use of chemical and biological weapons. There was little evidence of moral scruple in discussions about the use of atomic weapons. This paradox can be explained partly by the deliberate choice made by the western democracies to save the lives of their own populations by resorting to technological solutions rather than strategies with high manpower losses. The atomic bomb was the supreme expression of the reliance on technology to inflict insupportable damage, while reducing the democracies’ losses to virtually nil. The use of technology produced a distance between those who planned and executed attacks and the victims themselves. A western ground army would never have run amok in Hamburg, murdering forty thousand people. Bombing permitted a kind of moral detachment, evident in the language surrounding it. The attack on city suburbs was called ‘de-housing’, as if the buildings could in some way be separated from the families inside. The fire-bombing in Japan was justified on the grounds that the residential districts were scattered with small-scale industry, which had to be burnt out, along with indistinguishable but innocent households. A second, and less charitable, explanation is simply that the western states did react with a crude vengeance. They adopted a strategy of lynch-law against those states that violated the world order, and did not accept that there was a moral case to answer when dealing with outlaws. The sense of outraged decency provoked by bombing has grown with the passage of time. During the war the awkward moral position was side-stepped or ignored.50

  Few even moderately informed Britons or Americans could have been unaware of the political complexion of their Soviet ally, although it was true that information from the Soviet Union was difficult to obtain. During the period when Hitler and Stalin were in temporary alliance the Soviet and Nazi systems were treated by much western opinion as varieties of the same warped totalitarianism. When German aggression brought the Soviet Union into the anti-Hitler camp it was impossible to sustain the image of a ‘decent war’ in combination with a regime run by a one-man, one-party dictatorship, full of concentration camps and secret policemen. The moral coalition worked only to the extent that the west was able to suppress or at least lighten their ally’s dark image. This was done deliberately. Capra found that the first seven authors assigned to write the scripts for Why We Fight contributed what he regarded as ‘Communist Propaganda’. Roosevelt promoted Soviet sympathisers and played down public criticism. Soviet missions in Washington and London were permitted to circulate newsletters and books presenting the Soviet view. In Britain Soviet War News sold over fifty thousand of each edition.51 The British Ministry of Information published during the war a special manual providing journalists with ‘Arguments to Counter the Ideological Fear of Bolshevism’. The first suggestion was that the ‘Red Terror’ should be portrayed as a figment of the Nazi imagination, a mirror-image of German behaviour; the publication went on to recommend that British propaganda should then construct ‘a positive picture of Russia’ – the patriotism, the contributions of Soviet scientists and artists to knowledge and culture, the increased encouragement of savings and possession of personal property, and the improved Soviet attitude to religion. This last point was to be used ‘only in addressing people already sympathetic to the USSR on other grounds’.52 These guidelines proved too much for George Orwell, who gave up his weekly war commentaries for the BBC in 1943 to write his powerful satire on Soviet life, Animal Farm. The Ministry of Information banned its publication until after the war. Then Orwell began work on Nineteen Eighty-four, depicting a world in which history is falsified, truth becomes untruth.53

  To strengthen their positive stance both western Allies played on the promise of a new world after the war in which all states, including the Soviet Union, would play a part in securing international peace and cooperation. The war was presented as a crusade for the defeat of tyranny and aggression, and not a new wave of conquest and empire-building. The declaration of the so-called United Nations in January 1942, to which 49 countries had subscribed by 1945, was a public expression of world opinion against the Axis New Orders, a reassertion of public morality in dealings at home and abroad. The Soviet Union found itself pledging to preserve ‘life, liberty, independence and religious freedom’ and to observe ‘human rights and justice’. Since the document was also signed by Poland, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Bolivia, Abyssinia, China, Cuba and Persia, the concept of human rights and justice was interpreted loosely at best. What mattered at the time was not so much the moral credentials of the signatories, but the sense conveyed in the document that those who signed it walked on the side of the angels against ‘savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world …’54

  The moral ambiguities in the Allied coalition were never strong enough to undermine the image of a righteous cause. The wartime consensus was built around simple shared aims. There were no deep conflicts about the main war aims, or about the necessity of fighting the war to a victorious conclusion. With language of liberation, freedom and reconstruction, the Allies developed a positive moral outlook which worked in countless ways to keep people fighting a
nd labouring with the promise of better to come. This helps to explain why from early on in the conflict, well before victory was even a remote prospect, the certainty of a just cause promoted confidence in Allied victory. ‘I am absolutely convinced’, wrote the German novelist Thomas Mann, from his exile in the United States in October 1941, ‘that Hitler’s game is up and that he will be destroyed – no matter how many detours and how much unnecessary effort is required to complete the work …’55 Churchill’s private secretary wrote as early as February 1941: ‘I am confident that we have won. We shall see much serious damage and undergo many trials and dangers … the ultimate issue cannot be in doubt.’56 Stalin in November that year argued that the ‘moral degradation’ of the German invader made their final rout ‘inevitable’. When a few weeks later General Wedemeyer observed the British Chiefs-of-Staff in Washington discussing future strategy with their opposite numbers he was struck by how little affected they seemed by the desperate situation facing the Allies: ‘There was nothing in their demeanour to reveal concern or doubt about final victory.’57

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  On the Axis side the war was fought with much less moral certainty or popular commitment. At the outset of the conflict there was no clear consensus in favour of war, and a great deal of evident misgiving. When the American journalist William Shirer heard the news of the British declaration of war on Germany on 3 September 1939, he was standing among a crowd of 250 Berliners. He watched them listen carefully to the announcement from the street loudspeakers. ‘When it was finished’, he wrote in his diary, ‘there was not a murmur. They just stood there … Stunned.’ All that day he observed only ‘astonishment and depression’ on the faces all around him.58 On the day that Italy entered the war, 10 June 1940, Mussolini addressed a dispirited crowd in front of the Palazzo Venezia. The news aroused little enthusiasm. In his diary for that day the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, who had opposed running the risk of war with the west, expressed nothing but profound regret at the decision to fight: ‘I am sad, very sad. May God help Italy!’59 In Japan, which had been at war with China for ten years, the news of war with the US was greeted, according to one witness, the journalist Kazuo Kawai, with ‘indifference and shock’.60