Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Contents

  * * *

  Cover

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Title Page

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Preface

  Author’s Note

  1. Unpredictable Victory: Explaining World War II

  2. Little Ships and Lonely Aircraft: The Battle for the Seas

  3. Deep War: Stalingrad and Kursk

  4. The Means to Victory: Bombers and Bombing

  5. Along a Good Road: The Invasion of France

  6. A Genius for Mass-Production: Economies at War

  7. A War of Engines: Technology and Military Power

  8. Impossible Unity: Allies and Leaders in War

  9. Evil Things, Excellent Things: The Moral Contest

  10. Why the Allies Won

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Reading

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is the author of many books on the Second World War and the Third Reich including Russia’s War (1998), The Battle of Britain (2000) and Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (2001). His latest book The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004) was joint winner of the Wolfson Prize and the Hessel-Tiltman Prize in 2005. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of King’s College, where he taught for twenty-five years. He is currently writing a book on inter-war cultures of decline.

  Illustrations

  * * *

  1 A 1941 cartoon portrays Hitler devouring one country after another.

  2 A US Dauntless dive-bomber during the Battle of Midway.

  3 A sinking Japanese merchant ship seen through the periscope of a US submarine.

  4 An American propaganda poster urges revenge for Pearl Harbor.

  5 German soldiers cross the Don river in July 1942.

  6 A column of Soviet T-34 medium tanks.

  7 The Soviet SU-76 self-propelled gun during the advance into Prussia in 1945.

  8 The Stalingrad ‘cauldron’ ablaze at night under air and artillery fire.

  9 A German truck protected against the fierce Russian climate.

  10 British propaganda exaggerates the effectiveness of British bombing.

  11 A bomber’s view of the attack on Hamburg, July 1943.

  12 Anti-aircraft guns on the German Kammhuber Line.

  13 German dead from a raid on Berlin in December 1943.

  14 Sailors of the Indian navy visit the ruins of Hiroshima in 1945.

  15 Allied soldiers storm the Normandy beaches, 6 June 1944.

  16 A group of British artillerymen face the German front at Caen.

  17 An artificial port, or Mulberry, off the Normandy coast, June 1944.

  18 View of an American shipyard, mass-producing Liberty ships.

  19 Steel furnaces at Magnitogorsk in the Urals.

  20 The assembly line at Willow Run, Michigan.

  21 German soldiers, horses and wagons on the Soviet front, summer 1942.

  22 Japanese soldiers train in archery as preparation for modern combat.

  23 A nuclear bomb of the type used against Nagasaki, nicknamed ‘Fat Man’.

  24 The three Allied leaders at the first summit talks in Teheran.

  25 British and American military chiefs at the Quebec conference, October 1943.

  26 Pope Pius XII broadcasts to Washington in the winter of 1939.

  27 German officers execute Soviet peasants on the eastern front.

  28 Allied propaganda presents the Japanese as primitive racial inferiors.

  29 A Soviet cartoon encourages the reader to see the enemy in animal terms.

  30 A Soviet poster identifies the Great Patriotic War with past Russian victories.

  31 A German propaganda poster plays on popular fears of Bolshevism, late in the war.

  Maps

  1 Axis expansion in Europe 1938–42

  2 Japanese expansion 1931–42

  3 Battle of the Coral Sea, 5–7 May 1942

  4 Battle of Midway, 4–5 June 1942

  5 Merchant ships sunk from 1 August 1942 to 21 May 1943

  6 Merchant ships sunk from 22 May 1943 to 31 December 1943

  7 The Eastern Front 1941–42

  8 Battle of Stalingrad, September 1942 to January 1943

  9 Battle of Kursk, July–August 1943 113

  10 Battle for Normandy, 6 June to 24 July 1944

  11 Breakout and pursuit in France, July–August 1944 210

  WHY THE ALLIES WON

  RICHARD OVERY

  Preface to the Second Edition

  * * *

  IT IS NOW almost twelve years since the first edition of Why the Allies Won was written. In the interval a great deal of additional material has been published and new perspectives opened up on the history of the Second World War. Some touch on the questions raised here, but others have opened up fresh avenues of approach to the issue of war as a cultural or social phenomenon rather than on the issues of war-making and strategic choice with which explanations of victory and defeat are bound up. In most respects the arguments about this narrower question of Allied victory stand or fall today in much the same way as they did a decade ago. As a result it has not seemed necessary to write a different book, but instead primarily to take the opportunity to correct mistakes and make clearer what was not clear in the earlier version.

  There is one area, however, where the historiography and the base of evidence are changing very rapidly. The history of the Soviet war effort has been the beneficiary of a decade of close research, which has not altered the basic shape of the narrative but has deepened understanding about the big issues raised and modified or overturned versions of events that seemed standard in 1995. The major question – how did the Red Army succeed in holding back and then defeating the overwhelming bulk of the German armed forces – now has fuller answers than it once had. The research on detailed aspects of the reform of Soviet military practice and thinking during the war has shown conclusively that mere numbers did not suffice to explain the difference between the two sides. The sheer depth of Soviet preparation for war, for all its drawbacks and miscalculations, has been shown to be more wide-ranging and significant than was once thought, thanks to the work of Lennard Samuelson and David Glantz. For all the catastrophic losses of 1941, the Soviet Union was never starting from ground zero in its attempts to rebuild its armed and economic strength in 1942 and 1943. The vexed question of Lend-Lease, about which a generation of Soviet scholars were so deprecating, has now been transformed by the evidence that the Soviet leadership understood very well how vital these resources were in a context where their rump economy could not produce both armaments and the raw materials and equipment necessary to sustain the war effort. Finally the whole idea that the Soviet side sought an armistice or separate peace in 1941 and again in 1943 has been shown to be without the serious foundation attributed to it a decade ago.

  On the wider arguments about the reasons behind Allied victory there will always be disagreement. Why the Allies Won did not differ from much of the literature of the early 1990s in emphasising just how important the Soviet contribution was. Perhaps in reaction to the predominantly Soviet-centred analysis of the outcome, there has been a drift back to a more balanced view. The impact of bombing, for example, though the subject of increasing moral condemnation has come to be regarded as more significant in limiting German (and Italian and Japanese) options than was once thought. It is worthwhile here to make clear, since it has been a subject of some co
nfusion in the arguments surrounding the book, that explaining the role of bombing in the defeat of Germany is not the same as endorsing the legitimacy of the campaign. There were pressing military and political reasons which explain the British and American choice, but the consequent death, disablement and dispossession of millions of civilians, was not in any sense consistent with the liberal values of the two states that embarked on the campaign or with their pre-conflict view of what was and what was not permissible in international law. Mass civilian deaths are not something of which anyone could approve or feel morally indifferent towards; but it is necessary in this context to understand the nature of the impact that such bombardment produced.

  There were two areas in the book where I displayed a woeful failure to grasp the technical and scientific complexity of what I was describing. The first was in the naval war, the second in the development of nuclear weapons and technology. I am very grateful for the advice I received on both areas, on whose basis I have made the necessary changes. The details tend to strengthen rather than weaken the overall thrust of the argument, but the details are important, particularly as so much of the discussion hinges on small but significant improvements in tactics and weaponry, which still tend to be underestimated in analysis of military conflict.

  I was fortunate that Why the Allies Won was chosen as the theme for the annual conference of the German Committee for the History of the Second World War when it met in Hamburg in 2002. The conference was an interesting reflection of the two very differing approaches to the history of the war still current among those interested in its outcome as a historical problem. The idea that this was a war that Hitler lost rather than one that the Allies won has remained embedded in much of the analysis of the conflict. The chief justification for writing this book in the first place was to challenge the assumption that the outcome was determined by the nature of the strategic gamble and persistent errors, political and otherwise, attributed to Axis leaders. That is still a pertinent ambition, all the more so since with the passage of time the nature of the stakes between the two sides has become clearer and more fantastic. The (often deluded) assumption that world history had reached a dead end in the years after the end of the First World War produced a growing popular sense of civilisation in crisis for which a new civilisation or a new order were deemed to be the only remedies. The bitter divide between the Allies and Axis can better be understood in the context of the collective anxieties and paranoia that fuelled an age of political extremes, encouraged desperate and vicious recipes for survival and resulted in Europe’s and Asia’s descent into a decade of barbarism and atrocity. An Axis victory would have brought radical change dressed up as the triumph of a new version of modernity. The intensity of the efforts to prevent that happening, which mobilised populations otherwise unaware of or indifferent to the world-historical forces they confronted, explains why this war became a war to the death – and why it took the lives of more than sixty million worldwide. While it is possible to explain (and argue about) how one side prevailed over the other, there lurks a still larger question about why the developed world in the inter-war years, having experienced and been horrified by the Great War, should descend in twenty years into a crisis more deadly and damaging than the first and in a milieu of political oppression, civil conflict and ideological hatred without precedent in the modern age. In a century’s time this may well seem a more significant question than the narrower, if important, issue with which this book began.

  I would finally like to acknowledge the helpful advice I have had from the following: Corelli Barnett, M.G. Brewer, George Bornet, Reg Curtis, Joseph Forbes, Evan Mawdsley, Henry Ploeestra, E.A. Rawes, Lt. Comm. David Waters and Alfred Weber. I am also grateful to Will Sulkin for giving me the opportunity to update and overhaul the first edition.

  Richard Overy

  University of Exeter

  May 2006

  Preface

  * * *

  WHEN PEOPLE HEARD that the title of my next book was to be ‘Why the Allies Won’, it often provoked the retort: ‘Did they?’ There are many ways of winning. With the passage of time it has become possible to argue that none of the three major Allies – Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union – won a great deal. Britain lost her empire and her leading world role; the United States found that they had traded one European enemy for another, an ‘evil empire’ apparently more dangerous and unfathomable than Hitler’s; as for the Soviet Union, the cost of sustaining the super-power status won in 1945 eventually produced a crisis in Soviet society which led to its collapse in 1991. The three Axis states – Germany, Italy and Japan – have made no attempt to become major military powers again, but they have all produced economic success stories instead. Germany and Japan became the superpowers of the world market, and their citizens a good deal richer than the British, whose war effort almost bankrupted what had been one of the wealthiest economies in the world in 1939. When people ask ‘Did they?’, these are the things they have in mind.

  The Allies unquestionably won the military contest in 1945, and it is with victory in this narrower sense that this book is concerned. I have not tried to provide a general history of the war – there are plenty of those already. The focus of the book is to explain the outcome, rather than to describe its course. I have restricted the narrative to those parts of the conflict I regard as decisive, first the areas of combat, then the other elements of the war – production, technology, politics, and morale. As a result, many familiar aspects of the story are dealt with only briefly. The eastern front has been given a prominence it surely deserves, but the battles in the Pacific and the war between Japan and China here must take a back seat. It is fashionable to see the use of intelligence as a critical difference between the two sides, but I am not sufficiently persuaded of this to give the subject a chapter of its own. Where intelligence clearly had special significance, its story has been woven into the narrative. All of this has been done in order to answer very directly the question of ‘why the Allies won’.

  There are conventional answers to this question. There is a commonly-held assumption that the Axis states were beaten by sheer weight of material strength, which ought inevitably to prevail in an age of industrialised warfare. To this might be added a related assumption, that Germany, Japan and Italy made fundamental mistakes in the war, not the least of which was biting off more than they could chew in fighting Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union together. Neither of these assumptions is very satisfactory, and it would be wrong to pretend that what follows is not in some sense a response to them. The more I have worked on the history of the Second World War, the more I have become convinced that the outcome had not just a material explanation but also important moral and political causes. I am also sceptical of the view that the Axis powers lost the war through their own efforts rather than those of the Allies. Mistakes were obviously made on both sides, but the outcome on the battlefield ultimately depended on a very great improvement in the military effectiveness of Allied forces. The Allies did not have victory handed to them on a plate; they had to fight for it.

  This might seem an obvious point to those who lived through the war, but it is one that is seldom made with much force. I owe a debt to all those veterans of the conflict I have talked with and listened to over the years. Their testimony has prompted me to think more critically about Allied success. I have accumulated many other debts along the way too numerous to mention. I would like to give particular thanks to Ken Follett who has read more of the manuscript than anyone else; also to Andrew Heritage for help with the maps; and to Geoffrey Roberts, Peter Gatrell and Mark Harrison for help on aspects of the Soviet war effort. I also owe a great deal to my publisher, Neil Belton, and to my editor Liz Smith, both of whom have helped enormously to make this a much better product than I could have made it. My agent, Gill Coleridge, has been more patient than I deserve.

  Richard Overy

  March 1995

  Author’s Note
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  * * *

  THROUGHOUT THE TEXT the terms ‘Allies’ and ‘Axis’ have been used. These terms need to be qualified. The ‘Allies’ covers a set of shifting coalitions: Britain, France and Poland from 1939 to 1940, Britain and the Soviet Union in 1941, and Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and a host of other smaller states from 1942; from 1944, with the fall of the French Vichy regime, France again became one of the major Allied powers. Both the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘France’ have to be understood also to cover their respective empires. In the British case this included the Dominion states Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, all of which made very substantial contributions to the Allied war effort. Neither the Allied nor Axis powers were united as a whole in a formal military or political alliance. Only Britain and the Soviet Union had a firm alliance, sealed in 1942. The Axis states were united only by informal agreements. Italy broke with the Axis in 1943, though Italians continued to fight for both sides. I have persisted in using the conventional shorthand fully aware of its lack of historical precision. The alternatives are simply too cumbersome to sustain readability, but the defects of the existing terms must be borne in mind.

  Measurements provide difficulties too. I have in general kept to imperial weights and distances, i.e. pounds, tons and miles. But in cases where the metric system is commonly used (for example in expressing certain gun calibres and wavelengths) I have kept the metric measurement. The use of tons needs to be clarified. I have used the word interchangeably for imperial, American and metric tons. In general tons applied to Soviet or German production are metric tonnes, 2,204 pounds instead of the imperial 2,240 pounds. In America the ton is generally 2,000 pounds. Measures of Japanese and American oil production have generally been quoted in barrels: approximately 7.5 barrels equal 1 ton of oil. Again, it proved too cumbersome to make all these differences explicit throughout the text.