Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  There was no shortage of other candidates of high quality on the German side. Hitler could have made an effective deputy out of von Manstein or Guderian or von Rundstedt or Milch or many others; the list is a long one. It was simply not in Hitler’s nature to share the responsibilities of ‘leader’. For the Allies the war was a proving ground, a struggle for survival which by its very nature threw up commanders and organisers of high quality. Despite Hitler’s Darwinian view of life, the opposite was generally true in Germany where the story of the war is littered with wasted expertise, men at the peak of their profession sacked, demoted, imprisoned, humbled. Not even Stalin, who could be as capricious as Hitler, dispensed with Soviet talent so freely, at least until the war was over. The men Hitler preferred to employ were recruited for their loyalty to him and the Nazi movement. The most notorious, and almost certainly the most damaging, was Hermann Göring, who survived as Commander-in-Chief of the German air force throughout the war. A veteran of the Great War and of the early Party struggles, Göring rose to become one of the most powerful figures in the movement. An astute and ambitious politician, his credentials for high military command were if anything more feeble than Hitler’s, and only rather better than the unfortunate Udet’s. He bears a large part of the responsibility for the failures of German air power, but he was too important a political figure to be replaced. In 1940 Hitler gave him the new title of Reichsmarschall, making him the highest ranking officer throughout the armed forces. He was the only other man allowed to sit at the daily briefings with Hitler, when he was around, which was seldom. The air force functioned as well as it did only because its commander, unlike Hitler, neglected the routine of command more as the war went on. In the last year of war senior air force officers risked a great deal by petitioning Hitler to sack Göring, but to no avail. Hitler placed great store on personal loyalties.109

  Hitler chose to remain a lone commander. His isolation was more pronounced as the war went on. He seldom left the seclusion of his headquarters, or his retreat at the Berghof. He made almost no public appearances. He paid his own allies scant attention. Yet he retained a surprising degree of loyalty from his forces and from the wider German public. To those who saw him discussing the military crises, dominating the situation conferences, he exuded a powerful sense of optimism about the final outcome of the conflict. His personality continued to exert its compulsive, almost hypnotic effect on those around him. To those outside the Führer’s orbit, the myth of the lone German saviour battling to stem defeat and rescue the nation, though seriously diminished by the accumulating evidence of catastrophe, was still able to mobilise fading energies in the German public. Only in the last weeks of the war did Hitler’s will, and wilfulness, fade. Speer found a man who ‘had let go of the controls’. He was a physical wreck; his limbs trembled, he shuffled rather than walked, his face was yellow and swollen. He moved between bouts of petulant, shrieking anger and listless disillusionment. His companions still gave the Hitler salute when he came into the room. He played out a charade of command, ordering non-existent aircraft and troops to imaginary battles. His last order was to appoint Admiral Dönitz his successor as chancellor in place of Göring, whose loyalty he finally doubted.110

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  When Hitler read the news of Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945 he was overwhelmed with joy. That afternoon Speer was attending the farewell concert of the Berlin Philharmonic, at which they played Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. The piece was Speer’s choice, an epitaph for the regime. When he returned from the concert he found Hitler in a state of agitated euphoria. ‘The war isn’t lost,’ he told Speer. ‘Roosevelt is dead!’111 For weeks beforehand Hitler had been repeating the story of Frederick the Great, whose imminent defeat in the Seven Years’ War was suddenly averted at the last moment by the death of the Tsarina Elizabeth, and a switch in Russian allegiance. For some months Nazi propaganda had been making much of alleged divisions between the western Allies and the Soviet Union. Hitler and Goebbels were gambling on persuading the west to join Germany in a crusade against Bolshevism. Goebbels hurried back to Berlin from a visit to the front when he heard the news from America. He was convinced that the new President, Truman, unlike the ‘Jewish’ Roosevelt, feared communism more than Nazism. Hitler and he together drafted an appeal to the soldiers of the east to hold the approaches to Berlin at all costs. With the death ‘of the greatest war criminal of all times’, German soldiers should expect ‘a turning-point in the war’.112 It was all delusion. A day later all German armies in the Ruhr surrendered, and Marshal Zhukov launched the assault on the German capital that took the Red Army to Hitler’s bunker in a little over two weeks.

  Hitler was right to detect serious strains in the coalition by 1945, but he was wrong about their nature. There was no disagreement about the defeat of Germany, only about the consequences of that defeat. Stalin, it is true, nursed growing suspicions about his allies as news filtered through of efforts by German soldiers and politicians to reach a separate peace with the west. But there was no danger here; there was nothing German leaders could offer that was remotely attractive to Britain and America, least of all the prospect of an anti-communist crusade. Marshall’s ‘impossible unity’ was maintained through to unconditional surrender on 8 May. The willingness to fight in a common coalition for so long Marshall regarded as the single greatest achievement of the war.113

  Hitler, too, thought that Allied unity would not last. His own relations with his closest allies were limited and secretive. He did not share his strategy or his military thinking with anyone. Alliances were made and unmade. When Ribbentrop was presented with a casket by his staff containing all the alliances he had concluded as Foreign Minister, it was found that almost every one had been broken. When Hitler heard he is said to have laughed until the tears streamed down his face. Hitler found it difficult to imagine what cause had been sufficiently powerful to bind together such unlikely comrades-in-arms as capitalist west and communist east for so long. His own collaboration with the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 began to turn sour after less than a year; in under two years the two allies were at war. The only explanation Hitler could find for the survival of the coalition was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ that married together the forces of Mammon and the forces of world revolution to bring about Germany’s collapse.114 It does not seem to have occurred to him that he himself was the reason.

  The different attitudes to alliance reflected the deeper contrast in the way the two sides ran their war efforts. The Allied systems were centralised, unified and coordinated. They were run by a central staff with wide powers, but they all operated with a good degree of delegated responsibility. Each relied on leaders with solid professional and managerial skills who actually ran the war effort from day to day. Though each national leader could bring considerable influence to bear on the system, they waged what were essentially wars by committee, with the burden of duties spread over a wide administrative area. As the war went on military responsibilities devolved more to the professionals. No one could pretend that the system worked perfectly, but it was designed around checks and balances that reduced the element of arbitrary will or personal misjudgement, even in the case of the Soviet dictatorship.

  Hitler’s system was almost the exact opposite in every respect. Military affairs were dominated by the will of one man who considered himself to be a modern Charlemagne. There was no central staff to run the war effort. There was no unity of command, no formal structure to oversee military operations that united army, navy and air force around the same table. The idea of a committee war flew in the face of everything Hitler understood by the term leader. As the war went on Hitler delegated less rather than more, while his personal role in the war effort was further enlarged; so many responsibilities were there that no one, not even a leader more rational and more discriminating than Hitler, could have mastered them. Hitler dragged the military system and his own people behind him by the sheer force and momentum of his neurotic personalit
y sustained by the willingness of the population to believe in him. If Hitler helps to explain why Germany lost the war, he is also the reason why German forces continued to fight long past any prospect of victory. At the end of the war the tank general Heinz Guderian was asked by his American captors to reflect on the lessons of command on the German side. Guderian had seen Hitler at close quarters. He concluded, predictably enough, that the essential feature in any war was unity of command under an agency that enjoyed complete authority ‘over the whole military establishment’, but one that was run not by the head of state but by a ‘trained professional’, a ‘military man’.115 Dictatorship on its own was not enough.

  9

  EVIL THINGS, EXCELLENT THINGS

  The Moral Contest

  ‘The chief reason why we are at a serious disadvantage compared with the Nazis over this business of “big ideas” is that the evil things for which they stand are novel and dynamic, whereas the excellent things for which we claim to be fighting may seem dull and uninspiring.

  British Directorate of Army Education, Booklet i, November 1942

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  IN WAR THE gods are always on your side. Even in the Soviet Union, where God had been officially proscribed, religion was revived by the war. On the day of the German invasion Metropolitan Sergei, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, persecuted for years by the authorities, hounded by Emelian Yaroslavsky’s League of the Godless, appealed to the Soviet faithful to do everything to help the regime: ‘The Lord will grant us Victory!’1 In the Soviet Union an estimated half of the population were still Orthodox Christians, forced to live a religious half-life under a thoroughly secular regime. The number of priests was reduced by the 1930s to a few thousand. The churches were destroyed or in disrepair. No Patriarch, supreme father of the Church, had been permitted since 1926.

  With the coming of war everything changed. Stalin wanted national unity. Propaganda emphasised patriotism and tradition. In this the Church had a part to play. Stalin stamped out the crude anti-Christian activities of the Party zealots. Money was made available to restore churches; religious observance was openly encouraged. A commissariat was set up for Church affairs, popularly nicknamed ‘Narkombog’, People’s Commissar for God. In 1943 Stalin finally approved the restoration of Church authority. Breakaway sects – particularly the so-called ‘Living Church’ of Father Vvedensky, previously supported by the Party as a counter to tradition – were closed down; church leaders in the German-occupied territories who collaborated with the invaders were deposed and excommunicated. The Patriarchate was restored in September 1943. Stalin, the ex-seminarian, permitted the reopening of seminaries, and the Church was legally allowed to own property. When the first Patriarch, Sergei, died in May 1944, he was succeeded by Metropolitan Alexei of Leningrad. Moscow hosted a magnificent coronation. Russian Orthodox leaders came from all over the world, even Metropolitan Benjamin Fedchikov of the Aleutians and North America, who ventured the hope that Moscow might now become a ‘Third Rome’ behind Constantinople and the Holy City itself.2

  The faithful responded to the revival. By 1943 the churches of Moscow were so crowded at Eastertime that the congregations spilled out into the surrounding streets. Though Stalin did not go so far as to allow chaplains to accompany the troops, it was noticed that soldiers on leave began to use the churches in large numbers too. Priests incanted prayers for Stalin, who was treated as ‘an anointed of the Lord’. The church gave 150 million roubles to the war effort collected from its congregations. Sergei presented the Red Army with a battalion of tanks paid out of church funds. It was named the Saint Dmitry Donskoi battalion, after a fourteenth-century Russian prince who routed the Tatars at Kulikovo. At the formal ceremony of presentation, the church’s representative spoke of Russia’s ‘sacred hatred of the fascist robbers’ and described Stalin as ‘our common father’.3

  Much of this was for foreign consumption. Stalin knew that anti-Soviet feeling in the United States was linked with the Soviet persecution of the churches. Soviet spokesmen were sent to the Allied powers to provide assurances that communism had turned a new leaf. Foreign churchmen were encouraged to visit Moscow. Stalin told the British ambassador that, in his own way, he ‘also believed in God’. In Britain the Anglican Church sprang to support the Soviet alliance. From his pulpit in Chichester Cathedral, Bishop Bell called on his flock to ‘thank God for the heroic resistance of our allies in Russia’. At the pageant for the Soviet Union in the Albert Hall on New Year’s Day 1942 the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke of ‘a beacon shining through the vast clouds of destiny’, the burning light of Russia’s ‘indomitable faith’.4

  It would be a simple matter to argue that Stalin’s conversion turned the war into a Christian war, a latter-day crusade, right against wrong, the faithful confronting the heathen. Yet nothing illustrates more the ambiguities in any moral explanation of the conflict than the position of Christianity. Few American Christians took Soviet policy at face value. Roosevelt did believe in God, devoutly so. His faith carried him through the terrible years of illness. He was a lifelong Episcopalian, and his religious conviction was strengthened by his struggle with his disability, the successful outcome of which he attributed to Divine Providence.5 The first official statement following the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, approved by Roosevelt and broadcast on 23 June, made no distinction between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia on the question of ‘freedom to worship God’. Both states denied this ‘fundamental right’. The atheistic principles of communism were ‘as intolerable and alien’ as the doctrines of Nazism.6 There existed a strong religious lobby in the United States, including another breakaway Orthodox sect, the Theophilites, that was never fully reconciled to the connection with the Soviet Union. Among the strongest opponents were American Catholics, many of them of Polish or Italian extraction. In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical on ‘Atheistic Communism’, forbidding Catholics from collaborating with communism in any undertaking. The Catholic community was divided on the issue only because some saw Hitler as the more immediate evil and were prepared to fight Hitlerism first. When on 29 June 1941 the Pope broadcast to the faithful, some expected an endorsement of the German anti-communist crusade. The Pope instead abstained, calling on the faithful everywhere to place themselves in the hands of Providence.7

  The paradox for Christians siding with communism was clear. At least two of the three enemy states were nominally Christian. Italy was the home of Roman Catholicism; Germany’s population was one-third Catholic. Religion in both states lived in uneasy proximity with regimes that were strongly anti-clerical in outlook peddling new secular religions of their own. The same month that the Papacy condemned communism, a second encyclical was published, ‘Mit Brennender Sorge’ (‘With Burning Anxiety’), which condemned the Nazi persecution of the churches, Nazi racism and Mussolini’s deification of the state. Though Hitler often invoked God or Providence when he spoke, he was a thoroughly lapsed Catholic. Hitler considered Christianity incompatible with the new National-Socialist age – it was ‘merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics’. He deplored the survival of religious observance among German ministers and generals, ‘little children who have learnt nothing else’. He regarded Christianity and communism as two sides of the same coin, sharing in St Paul a common Jewish ancestor.8 Hitler took the German nation as his religion. This did not make him a pagan as was widely believed, although paganism was practised under the Third Reich. The German Faith Movement, under the banner of the golden sun-wheel, with the ‘Song of the Goths’ as their anthem, indulged in pagan festivals and invoked the gods of pre-Christian Germany. Heinrich Himmler’s SS generated a pagan theology, a pagan liturgy, even a pagan credo.9

  Many German Christians were alienated by Nazism. The German opposition counted thousands of priests of every denomination in its ranks; six thousand churchmen died in the concentration camps or in prison. However, most German Christians saw the defence of the nation as a Christian duty, a
nd the Church authorities reached compromises with the regime rather than risk a more violent anti-clericalism. But Nazism and Christianity were fundamentally at odds, and the Party made little effort to disguise it. Roosevelt could quiet his religious critics by showing a German state even more hostile to the Christian message than Stalin’s Russia. A few weeks before Congress finally approved Lend-Lease aid for the Soviet Union in November 1941, Roosevelt obtained a copy of a thirty-point programme for a German National Church drawn up by Hitler’s chief of ideology, Alfred Rosenberg. In his Navy Day Address on 27 October Roosevelt told his audience that he had in his possession a secret document which showed a Nazi plan to ‘abolish all existing religions’, to supplant the Bible with Mein Kampf, and to replace the Cross with a sword and swastika.10 Roosevelt was also armed with a personal assurance from the new Pope, Pius XII, that the encyclical condemning communism could be bent sufficiently to allow Catholics to support aid for the suffering Russian people. American Christians of all denominations could now rally to the cause with a clear conscience.