Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

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  UNPREDICTABLE VICTORY

  Explaining World War II

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  WHY DID THE allies win World War II? This is such a straightforward question that we assume it has an obvious answer. Indeed the question itself is hardly ever asked. Allied victory is taken for granted. Was their cause not manifestly just? Despite all the dangers, was the progress of their vast forces not irresistible? Explanations of Allied success contain a strong element of determinism. We now know the story so well that we do not consider the uncomfortable prospect that other outcomes might have been possible. To ask why the Allies won is to presuppose that they might have lost or, for understandable reasons, that they would have accepted an outcome short of total victory. These were in fact strong possibilities. There was nothing preordained about Allied success.

  This is a difficult view to accept. The long period of peace and prosperity for the west that set in with the Allies’ triumph in 1945 could be said to show that Progress was once again in the saddle of history from which the momentary aberration of world war had unseated her. It has always been comforting in the west to see victory in 1945 as a natural or inevitable outcome, the assertion of right over might, of moral order over nihilistic chaos. For western liberals victory was a necessary outcome, a very public demonstration that in the scales of historical justice democracy counted for more than dictatorship, liberty for more than servitude. To hammer the point home, enemy leaders were put on trial at Nuremberg and Tokyo for all the world to see what happened to regimes that thrived on crime.

  Of course no one pretends that the triumph of freedom over despotism is an entirely sufficient explanation. The western powers defeated the Axis only in alliance with the Soviet dictatorship, which before 1941 they had shunned and vilified with only a little less vehemence than they reserved for Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the German onslaught and broke the back of German power. For years the western version of the war played down this uncomfortable fact, while exaggerating the successes of democratic war-making. Yet if the moral image of the war is muddied, the material explanation for victory seems unambiguous. Alliance between the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States created overwhelming superiority in manpower and resources. If there is any consensus about why the Allies won, it rests on the unassailable evidence that one side vastly outnumbered and outproduced the other.

  There is danger here of determinism of a different sort. As one historian of the conflict recently put it, the Allies ‘were certain to defeat Germany’ once German and Japanese aggression brought them together in December 1941.1 By 1943 the material gulf was huge. That year the Axis produced 43,000 aircraft; the Allies produced 151,000. The temptation has always been to assume that the figures speak for themselves. The balance of populations and raw materials greatly favoured the Allies: hence whatever the Axis powers did they would always come up against the strategic dead end of material inferiority. This is at best an unsophisticated argument. It begs endless questions about the comparative quality of weapons, or the gap between potential and real resources, or about how well weapons were used once the forces actually got them. It also ignores the very considerable efforts made by both sides to deny resources to the other, for example the submarine offensive against British trade, or the Anglo-American bombing of German industry. There was a wide gap between potential and actual output on both sides. The statistics do not simply speak for themselves; they require interpreters.

  It can be seen at once that there are no simple answers to the question of ‘why the Allies won’. Much popular belief about the war is illusion. Take, for example, the view that the war represented the triumph of democracy over tyranny. In reality democracy was narrowly confined in 1939 – to Britain, France, the United States and a handful of smaller European and British Commonwealth states – and was even more restricted once the conflict got under way. Far from being a war fought by a democratic world to bring errant dictators to heel, the war was about the very survival of democracy in its besieged heartlands. Victory in 1945 made democracy more secure in western Europe, America and the British Dominions, but outside these regions this form of government has had at best a chequered career in the half-century since the defeat of the Axis.

  If anything the war made the world safe for communism, which was as embattled as democracy in the 1930s and close to eclipse by 1942. One of the most significant consequences of the war was the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and its consolidation in the Soviet Union. This outcome reflected the significant role played by Soviet forces in defeating Germany. There is now widespread recognition that the decisive theatre of operations lay on the eastern front. Without Soviet resistance it is difficult to see how the democratic world would have defeated the new German empire, except by sitting tight and waiting until atomic weapons had been developed. The great paradox of the Second World War is that democracy was saved by the exertions of communism.

  This unpalatable fact is usually explained in terms of the common cause against Hitlerism, which helped to bridge the ideological gulf between capitalist democracy and communist authoritarianism. The pooling of resources and military effort was clearly a better way to secure survival than going it alone. But here, too, a word of caution is needed. Collaboration between the three Allied states could not be taken for granted. Until 1941 the Soviet Union was regarded by the west as a virtual ally of Nazi Germany following the signature of the German-Soviet Pact in August 1939, which ensured a steady supply of resources and food for Germany from Soviet production. When the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in June 1941, there was a residue of profound distrust between the Soviet leadership and the west which had to be dispelled before any alliance could be built. There was still powerful anti-communist sentiment in Britain and the United States. ‘How can anyone swallow the idea that Russia is battling for democratic principles?’ asked Senator Taft in Congress. ‘In the name of Democracy are we to make an alliance with the most ruthless dictator in the world?’2

  The alliance was forged in the end from the bare metal of national self-interest. It survived as long as each side needed the other to help achieve victory, and no longer. ‘We are much better off’, wrote Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of State, Adolph Berle, in his diary, ‘if we treat the Russian situation for what it is, namely, a temporary confluence of interest.’3 Throughout the war each side worried that the other might reach a separate agreement with the common enemy, and the naked pursuit of national interest led to endless squabbles between the three partners. In the end they fought separate wars, the Soviet Union on the eastern front, the United States in the Pacific, Britain and America in the Mediterranean and western Europe.

  The coalition certainly did produce a great weight of resources in the Allies’ favour as long as they fought together. But there are illusions to dispel again. God does not always march with the big battalions. In World War I Britain, France and Russia mustered 520 divisions in the middle of 1917, but could not prevail over 230 German divisions and 80 Austrian. But in March 1918, with Russia out of the war, 365 German and Austrian divisions could not defeat the 281 of the Allies. Instead the German powers admitted defeat six months later with the balance of divisions 325 apiece.4 Of course in World War I there were other factors at play: the Allies had more tanks and aircraft, and in 1918 there came a flow of vigorous American armies across the Atlantic; German and Austrian forces were hampered by collapsing home economies and declining enthusiasm for war; and so on. The basic figures are presented here only to illustrate the dubious value of relying on plain numbers to explain the outcome of wars.

  Such simple analysis is particularly inappropriate in the case of the Second World War, when the material balance changed sharply several times during the course of the conflict. Up to 1942 the balance favoured the aggressors and might well have allowed them to win before American economic power could be placed in the scales. German victories brought the vast spoils of Continen
tal Europe and of western Russia, turning the German empire in two years into an economic super-power, capable of turning out twice the quantity of steel that Britain and the Soviet Union together could muster. Japan’s seizure of the rich resources of northern China and of south-east Asia vastly improved her strategic position by 1942, while denying vital supplies of tin, rubber, oil and bauxite to the Allies. Even when America entered the war it took time before her enormous capacity could produce significant quantities of weapons, or, for that matter, the trained forces to use them. If the eventual outcome of the war owed something to the great Allied preponderance in material produced by American industrial strength, we still have to explain why the Axis states failed to use their economic advantages when they had them.

  What gradually swung the balance of resources back in the Allies’ favour were two factors: the sheer speed and scale of American rearmament, which dwarfed anything that the Germans and Japanese, or even the British, had thought possible; and the swift revival of the Soviet economy after the mauling it received in 1941, when it sustained losses so severe that most pundits assumed the worst. Without the extraordinary exodus of Soviet machinery and labour from the war zones of the western Soviet Union to the harsh plains of Siberia, Stalin’s armies would have been like the Tsar’s in 1916, the soldiers in the second rank picking up the guns and boots of their dead vanguard as they scurried into battle. Against every expectation Soviet society worked feverishly to turn out the tanks and aircraft their soldiers needed. With only a quarter of the steel available to Germany, Soviet industry turned out more tanks, guns and planes than her German enemy throughout the war.

  This surprising outcome also tells us something about the organisational capacities of the Axis powers. The huge disparity in weapons was due not only to American rearmament and Soviet revival, but also to the inability of their enemies to make the most of the resources they had. Some of this deficiency could be put down to the circumstances of war. Japan never got what she wanted from the oil-rich southern islands because American submarines lay across her supply lines, reaping a destructive harvest from Japan’s poorly defended merchant shipping. Germany extracted far less than Hitler wanted from the captured areas of the Soviet Union because Soviet forces torched anything they could not carry away before the Germans arrived. The rain of bombs on German, Italian and Japanese cities slowly eroded once flourishing industries. By 1944 bombing reduced German output of aircraft by 31 per cent, and of tanks by 35 per cent.5 To all these external circumstances were added homegrown failures. Italian war production was riddled with corruption and administrative incompetence; Japan’s economic effort was stifled by tensions between her soldiers and her businessmen, and a debilitating rivalry between the navy and the army; German industry and technology were the victims of ceaseless rivalry between the Nazi satraps and a military establishment whose technological fastidiousness made mass-production almost impossible. If these internal weaknesses had been resolved, the Axis by 1942 might well have proved the irresistible force.

  Even when the balance-sheet of resources is broken down, the crude quantities tell us nothing about the quality of weapons produced from them. In fact there existed wide differences in levels of technical achievement between the two sides. The large forces of the Red Army in 1941 were a less formidable asset than they looked on paper because they lagged in the main behind German standards. But in 1942 the famous T-34 tank began to pour in large numbers from Soviet factories, and the quality of Soviet fighter aircraft improved sufficiently to make combat less one-sided. There were significant gaps on the German side too. The new generation of aircraft designed to replace the ageing models developed in the mid-1930s failed to materialise in the first years of war for a whole host of reasons, and the Luftwaffe was stuck for the duration of the conflict flying the models with which it started the war. The balance of air technology, in which Germany enjoyed an enviable lead in 1939, swung the Allies’ way largely for reasons of Germany’s own making. Even more striking was the reality of Germany’s famous mobile forces. Though her scientists could produce rockets and jets by the end of the war, Germany failed to build the simpler trucks and jeeps needed to keep her armies on the move. By 1944 American and British forces were fully motorised, but the German army was still using one and a quarter million horses. When Hitler’s massive invasion force stood poised on the Soviet frontier in June 1941, it deployed 3,350 tanks but also 650,000 horses.6

  The material balance also tells us little about how the weapons were used once the forces got them. This was not a question of economic power or technical ingenuity, but of fighting skills. During the war there were plenty of instances of poorly-armed troops fighting superbly; a super-abundance of weapons and equipment was no guarantee that forces could use them effectively. Fighting power was determined not just by weapons, but by training, organisation, morale and military elan. Both German and Japanese forces showed this as they were pushed back in 1944 and 1945: fighting against very large odds, with a deteriorating supply of weapons, they maintained their combat skills and a resolute willingness to fight almost to the end. Hitler was convinced throughout the war that the German soldier was a superior fighter, both more competent and more spiritually fortified than his opponent, and that this could in some sense compensate decisively for the greater numbers of the enemy. In Japanese society the military were supposed to be imbued with bushido, a spiritual shield that gave each soldier the strength to fight to the limits of endurance and self-sacrifice, even against overwhelming material odds. The emphasis placed on sheer fighting skills in Germany and Japan brought them remarkable victories between 1939 and 1942; it also forced their enemies to think more about the quality of their own forces, rather than their evident quantity.

  The balance of fighting power, like that of resources, did not remain constant during the war. As might be expected, after the initial shock of defeat the Allies looked hard at the way their forces were trained, deployed and led. Lessons were quickly learned from Axis successes. The Allies were forced by the nature of their enemy to stretch their strategic imaginations to embrace ways of warfare that were more ingenious and effective. By contrast the early victories lent a certain complacency to Axis strategy and operations; there were few fundamental changes made to the military recipe that had worked so well the first time around. The gap in fighting power between the two sides narrowed remarkably quickly. There are echoes here of the Napoleonic wars. In both cases the aggressor initially demonstrated superior fighting skills and leadership, against forces that were divided and operationally ineffectual. In both cases the gulf between the two sides narrowed over time as the lessons of early defeats were evaluated and the weaker forces were expanded and reformed. By the end of the war Allied forces performed much more effectively than they had done at first. Axis forces, on the other hand, like the armies of Napoleon, stagnated – both were remarkably skilled in retreat, but it was retreat none the less.

  Clearly, then, the possession of bigger battalions fighting in a just cause is not a sufficient explanation of victory. We need to be much more precise about the reasons for Allied victory to find an explanation that is historically convincing, all the more so given the nature of the crisis that generated the war in the first place. In the 1930s the world order had been subjected to seismic shifts, rocked by forces which western liberal statesmen could scarcely understand. Democracy was in retreat everywhere, feebly keeping at bay the tide of violent imperialism, racial conflict and popular dictatorled nationalism. When war broke out there were widespread fears in the west that the march of Hitler’s brutal armies signalled the end of liberal civilisation. Well into the war the outcome hung in the balance, even after America joined the fray. The war was not some deviation from the natural development of the world towards a democratic utopia, but was a hard-fought and unpredictable conflict about which of a number of very different directions the world was going to take.

  Viewed from this perspective, Allied victory represented
a remarkable reversal of fortunes. In the 1930s the western liberal world seemed at the point of eclipse. The Great War of 1914–18 had called into question the values of the self-confident and wealthy states that fought it. It plunged the world from civilisation into a new barbarism, giving lie to the Europeans’ claim to be the bearers of peace and plenty. By the time it was over, Europe was impoverished, a whole generation of young Europeans brutalised and embittered. In Russia the war provoked social revolution as the Tsarist empire collapsed under the strain. The triumph of Lenin’s Bolsheviks in 1917 gave birth to an age of bitter social and ideological conflict. Communism threatened to undermine the very foundations of capitalist society, and was loathed by anyone with an interest in the status quo. Yet in 1929 capitalism almost destroyed itself. The Great Crash brought the worst recession of the modern age. Millions were thrown out of work, and millions more plunged into poverty. The old political system could not cope. Communism was one alternative. In the 1930s men and women from all walks of society were drawn to the communist claim that socialist order must be preferable to capitalist chaos. Terrified at such a prospect, the anti-communist right swung towards militarism and fascism and the promise of social harmony and a strong nation.

  The rise of extremist mass movements in the 1930s offered a profound and dangerous challenge to liberal democracy and conventional capitalism. On all sides could be heard a chorus of voices calling for a ‘New Order’ of planned economies and totalitarian societies. Communism and fascism offered a way out of what a great many had come to regard as a bankrupt political and economic system whose days were numbered. The fear that the existing order was in terminal decline produced a deep sense of moral anxiety among those who sought to defend it. The violent conflicts between liberalism, fascism and socialism in the 1930s were expressed by their champions in terms of fundamental human values, in a language of moral decline and moral renewal. The spirit of the age was of crisis, decay, transformation.