Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Early on in the trial, on 29 November, the defendants were shown a film taken by American forces of the liberated concentration camps. A psychologist was posted at either end of the dock to note the reaction of the prisoners. Even allowing for calculated expressions of remorse, the reactions are worth recalling: ‘looks pale and sits aghast … has head bowed, doesn’t look … covers his eyes, looks as if he is in agony …blinks eyes, trying to stifle tears … Goering looks sad … Doenitz has head buried in his hands … Keitel now hanging head …’ The film pricked all but the coldest conscience. When the psychologists visited the cells that same evening, many of the prisoners were still in shock, most were horrified and shamed by what they had witnessed. Hans Frank, the Nazi ruler of wartime Poland, burst into a sobbing rage when asked about the film: ‘Don’t let anybody tell you that they had no idea! Everybody sensed that there was something horribly wrong with this system. To think that we lived like kings and believed in that beast …’100 From within the wretched remnants of Hitler’s elite there surfaced, in varying degrees, a recognition of the immoral character of the regime they had served.

  The history of the Nuremberg Tribunal exemplifies the moral contrast between the two sides (and the awkward morality behind a victorious coalition of democratic and communist powers). The indictments were an extension of the Allied conviction that they had fought a just war against aggression and barbarism. The justness was demonstrated by the fact that the victors had not, as Justice Jackson put it, exacted immediate vengeance while ‘flushed with victory and stung with injury’, but had submitted their case to the due process of law. The same procedure was adopted when Japan’s leaders were brought before a second International Tribunal, at which a catalogue of appalling atrocities against civilians and soldiers was paraded in horrifying detail. The revelations in both trials confirmed the picture created during the war to sustain the Allied war effort, of primitive savages in the east, and devious barbarians in Europe. This image had both simplified and strengthened the Allied cause. During the war, hatred of Hitlerism papered over the deep cracks in the Allies’ own coalition of interests and ideologies, and it continued to do so, if falteringly, during the trials. It was a hatred that had sustained the most significant moral effort of the war, the mobilisation of the Soviet will to win. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Allied cause, the belief that they fought on the side of righteousness equipped them with powerful moral armament.

  There were many on the Axis side who would have agreed. War was not widely welcomed, nor were its purposes understood. Popular propaganda was distrusted. A hard core of enthusiasts saw the war as a way to impose a brazen ‘new morality’, rooted in racism, violence and enslavement. But many more continued to fight only through fear, or struggled, like the German resistance, to reassert a conventional morality. As the war deteriorated for the Axis states, the instruments of terror were turned on their own people and soldiers. They fought from sheer survival instinct, but the underlying moral dilemma of fighting an aggressive war in which brutalisation and atrocity had become routine was inescapable. The repeated efforts to murder Hitler revealed a system divided against itself, just as the wave of suicides at the war’s end surely revealed uncomfortable consciences. Historians are loth to pronounce on moral issues, even where the balance of right and wrong seems clear-cut. But can there be any doubt that populations will fight with less effect in the service of an evil cause?

  10

  WHY THE ALLIES WON

  ‘There has been no instance yet in the history

  of wars of the enemy jumping into the abyss

  of himself. To win a war one must lead the

  enemy to the abyss and push him in to it.’

  Joseph Stalin, Order of the Day,

  23 February 1944

  * * *

  AS ALLIED ARMIES closed in for the kill in the spring of 1945, and German leaders urged their battered forces to stand and die like heroes, Hitler took time to reflect on why he had lost the war. His remarks were faithfully recorded by his indispensable secretary, Martin Bormann, who followed his leader with pad and pencil so that posterity would be denied none of Hitler’s prophetic wisdom. There they sat as Germany crumbled around them, the thick-set, boorish stenographer, a dull sounding-board for his master, and Hitler, isolated, physically broken, consumed with hatred and self-pity, but clear-headed enough to look back over his years as warlord to see where he went wrong.

  The start of his troubles Hitler traced back to the Munich crisis of 1938. He regretted his failure to keep his nerve and conquer Czechoslovakia in defiance of Britain and France. He was convinced that had he done so the west would have backed away, German domination of the Continent would have become fact, and the great war to the east could have been postponed until Germany was thoroughly prepared. He regretted his friendship with Mussolini: ‘anything would have been better than having [Italians] as comrades in arms …’1 Italy drew Hitler into the Mediterranean and the Balkans, when the Soviet Union was the priority. Looking back, Hitler realised that he should have attacked Stalin in May 1941, and won an extra five weeks of dry weather. Better still, he should not have fought a two-front war against Britain and the Soviet Union. He was forced to attack the Soviet Union because Britain’s ‘stupid chiefs’ refused to make a sensible peace: perhaps, he reflected, he should have struck south, seized Gibraltar and swept into the Near East to smash British resistance. But then, standing in the wings was Stalin, just waiting for the moment to strike.2

  The remarkable thing about Hitler’s reflections was how little blame attached to him. At every move it was other people, other forces, that compelled him to act. ‘I, perhaps better than anyone else, can well imagine the torments suffered by Napoleon,’ Hitler told Bormann towards the end of the dictated testament, ‘longing, as he was, for the triumph of peace and yet compelled to continue waging war, without ceasing …’3 Munich was the fault of Neville Chamberlain who ‘really intended to wage ruthless war against us’; Hitler was let down by Mussolini, frustrated by Stalin, served by a German elite composed of feeble ‘petty bourgeois reactionaries’. Above all German defeat was the work of the Jews, a refrain that echoes through Bormann’s jotted notes. The war, Hitler believed, was ‘typically … and exclusively Jewish’. It was sustained by the ‘most powerful bastion’ of world Jewry, the United States, whose President, ‘the elect of the Jews’, worked tirelessly, in Hitler’s view, to keep war against Germany going. ‘If we should lose this war’ – and this in February 1945 – ‘it will mean that we have been defeated by the Jews.’4 Hitler was quite unable to grasp the extent of his own responsibility. Germany was a plaything for fate, doomed by the forces of world history to fight on ‘until our last drop of blood has been shed’. Hitler thought the suffering would be redemptive, purifying, good for Germany. Out of the ashes of defeat, a new Reich would arise.

  No one doubts that the war was ultimately Hitler’s responsibility, or that Hitler made mistakes on a grand scale. In most postwar explanations of the outcome Hitler’s failings stand at the head of the list. The story is a familiar one. German victories early in the war were the result of short, opportunistic campaigns against enemies who were weaker and isolated. In 1941 Hitler made the mistake of invading the Soviet Union in the belief that the tactics of ‘lightning war’ would bring victory in four months. In December 1941 Germany found herself at war with a combination of the three largest industrial economies outside Continental Europe, a war that Germany, allied to economically weak states, could never hope to win. Hitler’s belief that a German super-power could tear up the political structure of Europe and western Asia and replace it with a Party-led authoritarian empire was always irrational and deluded.

  Much of this argument comes with hindsight. The idea that the whole imperial enterprise was flawed from the outset is a postwar rationalisation. Moreover, Eastern Europe was dominated for forty years after the war by an authoritarian super-power, run by single-party dictatorships which denied c
ivil rights and smothered society with secret policemen and a thick blanket of ideological conformism. The Soviet bloc lacked the wanton destructiveness and deadly racism that a Nazi empire would have displayed, but there was nothing deluded or irrational about the new system. The dominance of communism and the Red Army was achieved as a direct consequence of the power they had built up in the military defeat of Hitler’s empire.

  The assumption that German defeat was a result of fighting a ‘two-front war’ is also questionable. There is no necessary link between military defeat and fighting a two-front war. The United States fought a war on three fronts – five if the bombing offensive and the Battle of the Atlantic can be defined as fronts in their own right. All of those fronts competed with each other for resources of manpower, shipping and weaponry, and all bar the Atlantic were thousands of miles from the security of the home country, situated at the end of long and vulnerable shipping lanes. The Soviet Union was the only major combatant power to fight a one-front war, although for much of the critical central period of the war Germany too fought on one main front until the western Allies threw the full weight of their forces into France in the summer of 1944. For much of the First World War Germany survived a two-front war until the Russian war effort collapsed in 1917, but paradoxically she was defeated in a one-front war in 1918.

  Clearly the fact of a two-front war is not an explanation for defeat as such. But is it any sounder to argue that Germany was overwhelmed by the economic size of the coalition assembled against her from 1942? This has always been a popular view. In 1946 the economist Raymond Goldsmith claimed that Gross Domestic Product won the war: the Allies simply had more of it than the Axis. Even during the war such a view was not uncommon. When Maxim Litvinov, deputy to the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, heard the list of American and British supplies read out at a meeting in Moscow in September 1941, he broke all the rules of Soviet negotiation, leapt out of his chair and shouted: ‘Now we shall win the war!’5 This was before American belligerency turned the United States into a fighting power rather than just so much inviting GDP.

  The drawbacks in this argument have already been laid out, but they are worth a curtain call. Economic size as such does not explain the outcome of wars. China had on paper a large economic product in the 1930s, but it did not help to make China a significant warring state. If the explanation covers only the product of industrial powers then there remains the awkward evidence that Germany had greater industrial capacity than Britain in 1940, and access by 1941 to a good deal more than Britain and the Soviet Union together, and yet was unable to bring either power to defeat. And had Germany prevailed in Europe before 1942, could the United States really have used its larger GDP to reconquer the Old World? The balance of economic product explains everything and nothing. Political will, technical modernity, a popular willingness to accept sacrifice, the simple constraints of geography, these are just some of the many variables that affect the mobilisation of economic resources. The line between material resources and victory on the battlefield is anything but a straight one. The history of war is littered with examples of smaller, materially disadvantaged states defeating a larger, richer enemy. General Eisenhower, listening to politicians in Washington in the spring of 1942 talk glibly about the economic defeat of the Axis, observed in his diary that ‘not one man in twenty in the government realises what a grisly, dirty, tough business we are in. They think we can buy victory.’6

  There was no other way for the Allies to dislodge the Axis states from their conquests in 1942 than to defeat them on the battlefield. As Stalin put it, they were not going to jump into the abyss without being pushed. Some way might have been found of ending the war by negotiation, but this would certainly have meant making concessions to Axis imperialism. Fighting, and fighting better, was the only way to expel Germany and Italy from the European New Order, or to drive Japan from her new sphere of influence in Asia. Fighting power owed something in the long run to the large surplus of weapons available to the Allies, though in the critical battles of 1942 and 1943 that surplus was not as large as it became in 1944 and 1945 when Axis defeat was much more certain. In the first years of war the chief Allied states did not fight well, or were ill prepared for conflict. They were at a distinct disadvantage against Germany and Japan whose fighting skills prompted their rulers to risk war with industrially rich powers in the first place. Neither the Japanese nor German leaders rated Allied fighting power very highly, and they thought even less of it after their early successes. The Japanese military in the southern zone became over-confident. Rear-Admiral Takata remembered after the war the views he had heard: ‘They said the Americans would never come, that they would not fight in the jungle, that they were not the kind of people who could stand warfare …’7 Hitler formed the same dismissive view of the enemy. The first reports on American troops in North Africa suggested that they were simply ‘rowdies’ who would ‘take to their heels very quickly’. Hitler thought America could never become ‘the Rome of the future’ with such poor spiritual stock.8

  To win the war the Allies had to learn to fight more effectively, just as in the early 1800s the Coalition partners learned to tame Napoleon. They had to be prepared to fight together, and to continue to fight until the end of the conflict. Issues of morale and politics intimately affected the fighting power of the Allies, as did the strictly military elements of command, training, equipment and tactics. In Marshall’s view the will to collaborate was the nub of the matter: ‘In my opinion,’ he told an audience at Yale in February 1944, ‘the triumph over Germany in the coming months depends more on a complete accord between the British and American forces than it does on any other single factor, air power, ground power or naval power …’9 Marshall’s audience, who would have known nothing of the arguments between the Allies, must have puzzled at his cryptic remarks on the harmful effects of past ‘discord’, but unity of purpose and plan was not something to be taken for granted. It was always under strain: in the bombing offensive (where British and American air forces fought different campaigns, by day and by night); in the arguments about the route of re-entry to Continental Europe; in the tension between Soviet demands for a Second Front and western hesitation. It is no coincidence that Germany was defeated during the nine-month period when all three Allies, assisted by the exiled forces of the conquered European lands, put the main weight of their military effort together for the first time.

  The Allies would have been the first to admit that fighting power was their real weakness. After the terrible defeats of the summer and autumn of 1941 the Soviet General Staff began a comprehensive review of what had gone wrong and right in Soviet practice. By March 1943 five volumes of critical analysis were published, covering everything from the use of tanks and aircraft to the laying of smoke-screens and the use of gunboats on Russia’s rivers.10 The fruits of Allied reflection have already been discussed, and need only a brief summary here. The reforms covered both the organisation of forces and their equipment and operational skills. The purpose was to achieve improvement in the qualitative performances of all Allied forces and technology, without which quantitative supremacy would have availed little. With better training and improved weapons the morale of Allied troops was also raised appreciably. Mistakes were still made, but the gap between the two sides narrowed in every sphere of combat.

  The Allies did not depend on simple numbers for victory but on the quality of their technology and the fighting effectiveness of their forces. Axis forces did little to alter the basic pattern of their military organisation and operational practice, or to reform and modernise the way they made war. They were not under the same urgent pressure as their enemies and they responded more slowly to the sudden swing in the balance of fighting power evident in 1943. There is a deeper contrast here. In Germany and Japan much greater value was placed on operations and on combat than on organisation and supply. Here were societies where military endeavour ranked as the highest social duty, where military elites dominated
the waging of war. The best military brains were at the battlefront, not in the rear. It is inconceivable that a Marshall or an Eisenhower, with no combat experience between them, could have won supreme command in either the German or Japanese war effort. The German army was notorious for its stubborn inability to release from conscription men whose scientific or managerial skills were in desperate need on the civilian front. Staff officers were obliged to spend time fighting at the front, which explains why even the armed forces were starved of large numbers of experienced planners and organisers. One-quarter of all air force staff officers were killed or captured at the front.11

  In both Germany and Japan less emphasis was placed upon the non-combat areas of war: procurement, logistics, military services. In the Pacific War there were eighteen American personnel for every one serviceman at the front. The ratio in the Japanese forces was one to one. The postwar bombing survey of Japan observed the marked failure of Japanese air forces to provide ‘adequate maintenance, logistic support, communications and control, or airfields and bases …’ Young Japanese men did not want to be maintenance engineers; they preferred to fly.12 In the German army in Europe there were roughly two combatants for every non-combatant; but the American army had a ratio almost exactly the reverse, one fighter for every two service personnel. Some measure of the emphasis Marshall placed upon military services can be seen in his decision to divide the army into three separate components, ground forces, air forces and services, each with equal representation on the main staff committees.13 The American back-up for its combat troops was formidable. One German divisional commander in Normandy reported back the visible effects of the American supply system: