Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Aggressive war was not a popular choice in any of the three Axis populations. It was the aim of narrow sectional interests. In Germany and Italy war was declared because of the ambitions of two dictators, who carried their country into conflict against the strong advice of political colleagues and military leaders. In Japan war was promoted by the military elites, who persuaded the Emperor, against a chorus of civilian protest, that war was an unavoidable necessity. All bar two of the elder statesmen, or jushin, summoned to meet the Emperor late in November 1941, counselled peace and negotiation. Not even the military were confident that they could win outright a war against the United States; the risk of war was taken in the hope that Japanese forces could make the cost of reconquering lost territories too high for America, and as a result arrive at a negotiated settlement favourable to Japan. Once war broke out there was a patriotic response in all three states, though nothing quite like the drive for retribution and justice, the unity of purpose, that animated the populations of their enemy. Enthusiasm for war was least evident in Italy; in July 1943 Mussolini was overthrown by the army, and peace was agreed with the Allies before the final defeat of Italian forces. In Germany and Japan morale never collapsed completely, but the willingness to fight over the last two years of war was only maintained with large doses of propaganda and terror.

  Popular morale in Japan was already subdued when war broke out after the draining years of warfare in China. The early victories brought about a sudden revival of enthusiasm, but it was short-lived, as conditions on the home front rapidly deteriorated. The defeat at Midway, though represented at home as a great victory, brought home to a great many officers that the war could not be won.61 The ordinary soldier and civilian knew little in general about the true course of the war. Censorship stifled all forms of communication and was enforced with a brutal thoroughness. Official propaganda turned every defeat into victory. In 1943 the army invented a new verb, tenshin, to march elsewhere, in order to avoid having to say retreat.62 Little effort was made to tell people what the war was actually for. Instead it became an opportunity to rally round the Emperor. Loyalty to the sacred ruler and to ‘yamato damashii – Japan’s divine racial spirit – was summoned up to encourage a spirit of sacrifice and endeavour. When American pollsters explored Japanese morale after the war they found that almost half those asked believed that Japan’s spiritual values represented the country’s greatest source of strength.63 On the eve of war Admiral Ugaki, who became Commander-in-Chief of the 5th air fleet by 1945, wrote in his diary that the coming conflict was ‘sacred’, a war in which the highest honour was ‘to die as martyrs for our empire’ and whose simple purpose was to display ‘single minded loyalty to His Majesty’.64

  Religion mattered a good deal more in the Japanese war effort than in that of any other combatant power. The Emperor had a divine status in the eyes of the population. To die in battle for the Emperor was to die a holy death. The ashes of each dead soldier were solemnly returned to his family in a brief religious ritual. Even in educated Japanese society the motto ‘We are guarded by the gods above’ was taken with great seriousness. Propaganda made a great deal of Japan’s 2,600 years without a defeat. Divine providence was assumed to be the reason, The Japanese population expected the gods to intervene quite literally in the course of the war. A doctor from Hiroshima explained to American interrogators after the war what this meant in practice: ‘There is a big difference between the way they think about Christ in Europe and America, and the way the Japanese think about kamisama [gods] … This is one big place where Japan falls below America. It is all right to believe in the gods, but it is pure foolishness to think that the gods will help you out of holes like this.’65 The high levels of sacrifice displayed by Japanese troops were sustained by religious belief. Each officer cadet had to learn by heart in the first three days of training the 27,000 sacred words of the Emperor on the duties of a soldier. The suicide charge on the battlefield, the refusal to surrender, the stark fear of dishonour were instilled in all Japanese. In the Pacific war almost half of all the soldiers committed by Japan to the island battles were killed, a proportion of loss that eclipsed even the Soviet figures.66

  The popular emphasis on spiritual armament was supplemented by a good deal of coercion. The civilian workers were allowed no independent organisation but all belonged to the single Industry Patriotic Society. Factory police (kempei) were posted in every war plant, listening out for dissent or complaint, punishing offences on the spot in front of the workforce, or removing offenders into a gruelling police custody. Everywhere police agents provocateurs worked to eradicate defeatism by deliberately prompting comments on the futility of war, or the brutality or misgovernment on the home front, and punishing those foolish enough to loosen their tongues. Military police attacked and on occasion killed those suspected of pacifist sentiment. The military tapped the telephones of their civilian colleagues, and harassed and threatened ministers and officials who were less than wholeheartedly committed to the war.67 By 1943 a negative outlook was more and more common. The civilian population, restricted to slim food rations, poorly informed about the state of the war, brow-beaten by police and military both in the workplace and through the thousands of ‘neighbourhood associations’ established throughout Japanese society to keep it patriotic, became progressively disillusioned with the war effort, and with the military leadership. After Midway it was widely recognised by Japan’s rulers that Japanese victory could come only in the wake of German success. In February 1943 the officials of the Japanese Foreign Office met to discuss Japanese options after Stalingrad. They guessed, rightly, that Germany’s new offensive in 1943 would fail; seeing little chance of a German victory, they proposed that Japan should ‘reorient her policy’ towards a peace settlement with America. At the end of March 1943 Emperor Hirohito himself expressed the wish that the war be ended without delay. The military leadership was unmoved. But by the spring of 1944 even they could see the writing on the wall. A commission set up under Rear-Admiral Takagi reported in February 1944 that Japan could not possibly win the war and should seek a compromise peace.68

  From 1943 onwards Japan’s war effort kept going at the insistence of the military hardliners for whom surrender, even a negotiated surrender, was anathema. Ordinary Japanese citizens were aware of the wide gulf that had opened between the crude propaganda of victory and the reality of the war, particularly after the onset of bombing. ‘The government kept telling us that we would defeat the United States,’ complained one Japanese after the war, ‘but as my house was burned down and I had no food, clothing or shelter, I didn’t know how I could go on.’69 In 1944 it was impossible to disguise the reality of the war. The Japanese loss of Saipan, where only a thousand Japanese survived out of the 32,000 on the island, was reported by the General Staff nine days later. ‘We were staggered at this dreadful news,’ wrote a trainee pilot. ‘It was obvious that Japan had no hope at all of regaining supremacy on the sea or in the air.’ Bombing brought the reality home. One-third of the urban population lost their homes and possessions; over eight million were evacuated; two-fifths of the industrial workforce was absent from work for more than two weeks during 1945.70 Little attempt was made to persuade the population that there was a moral purpose in continued belligerency beyond the fear of dishonour. Waverers were victimised and terrorised, but behind the scenes Japanese politicians tried to find a way of ending the war that would satisfy the Allies and the die-hard militarists at the same time. The Japanese war effort was riddled with moral ambiguity. Behind a façade of national unity and confidence in victory, both leaders and led understood that the war was effectively lost. The American postwar study of Japanese morale found that by 1945 68 per cent were convinced the war was lost. Only 28 per cent were willing to continue fighting and embrace death rather than dishonour.71

  The German case was every bit as ambiguous. The German population was little prepared for the conflict when it came. The early victories provided a moral bo
ost, as they did for the Japanese. But in Germany, too, all information was carefully controlled and information distorted to mask the reality of war. Again there was no clear indication from the authorities about the nature of war aims, or the moral purpose behind the conflict. The war against France and Britain was presented as a revival of the 1914 war against Germany’s restrictive ‘encirclement’ by other European powers. Victory in 1940 was hailed as an end to the hated Versailles system, and revenge for the humiliation of 1918. To justify the war against the Soviet Union, the regime returned to the 1930s propaganda of Bolshevik menace. The population found the sudden escalation of the war difficult to accept. A security service report showed the initial reaction as one of ‘bewilderment’ leavened with ‘sober confidence’. Even Hitler’s propaganda supremo Joseph Goebbels found it difficult to switch on hatred for the new enemy with real plausibility. The party line was to stress ‘the treachery of Bolshevist leaders’. As the campaign dragged on into the winter of 1941 there was every evidence that popular confidence in the war effort was ebbing, not least, as Goebbels told his own staff, because the official propaganda made no mention of reverses and was simply not believed.72

  For Hitler himself the war with the Soviet Union was the one he had been waiting for throughout his political career. Though there were practical reasons for the campaign – to deny Britain an ally on the Continent, and to forestall any Soviet moves in eastern Europe – Hitler’s main aim, as he told Goebbels, was finally to eliminate ‘the Bolshevik poison’ from Europe. Hitler made no pretence that he was fighting a virtuous war, despite the strong moral antipathy to communism evident throughout Europe. Three days before Barbarossa was launched Hitler had a revealing discussion with Goebbels, later recorded in the minister’s diary. ‘Right or wrong’, Goebbels noted, ‘we must win … And once we have won, who is going to question our methods? In any case, we have so much to answer for already that we must win …’73 Hitler gave deliberate instructions that the campaign should be waged with unremitting brutality. The harsh treatment of populations in the east began with the invasion of Poland in 1939, when the murder of Polish intellectuals and leaders, and Polish Jews, had been sanctioned by the regime. The legitimisation of savagery developed its own momentum. Army discipline deteriorated during the Polish campaign. Efforts by regular soldiers to prevent the brutalities were swept aside by Himmler’s army of officials and policemen. Atrocity was permitted in the name of the ‘higher’ law of racial survival.

  Hitler revelled in his rejection of conventional morality. He poured scorn on what he termed the ‘beatific liberalism’ of the west.74 The war with the Soviet Union was not only a war of ideologies, but also a struggle for survival, a conflict of nature. Before the campaign the old laws of war were torn up. The army was issued with the ‘Commissar Order’ which permitted the murder of any Communist Party functionary found with the Red Army. In June 1941 the German army was freed by the regime from any restrictions under the 1899 Hague rules on the conduct of land warfare. The security services under Himmler were prepared to follow the armies into the Soviet Union specifically to murder anyone defined as an enemy of Germandom. Himmler asked his forces to behave with merciless violence against the races of the east who know ‘with animal instinct why they are fighting’. In July 1941 Himmler’s instructions to the security forces were to act against any populations defined as potentially anti-German or racially inferior by shooting indiscriminately all males, deporting the women and children, seizing food and valuables and burning the villages to the ground. Hitler sanctioned even the murder of women and children if it served his principle of preserving at all costs the lives of German soldiers.75

  At every level, from the chief of state down to individual army units in the field, the war was fought as a racial conflict of the most savage kind in which any methods, criminal or otherwise, were sanctioned. The armed forces were given a general amnesty before the campaign for anyone guilty of murder or looting. German commanders accepted the criminalisation of warfare because of the special nature of the enemy they believed they faced. In June 1941 the armed forces’ ‘Information for the Troops’ backed up the order to murder commissars: ‘anyone who has once looked into the face of a Red Commissar knows what Bolsheviks are … It would be insulting animals if you described those mostly Jewish features as animal-like.’ Not surprisingly the ordinary soldiers soaked up the constant dehumanisation and demonisation of the enemy. ‘Hardly ever do you see the face of a person who seems rational and intelligent,’ ran one letter from the front; ‘these sons of the steppe, poisoned and drunk with a destructive potion, these incited sub-humans …’ ran another; ‘We have seen the true face of Bolshevism … communist scoundrels, Jews and criminals.’76

  The result of the indoctrination of the troops with the image of a bestial enemy was to give licence to a wave of barbarisation in the east that could not be controlled by those soldiers or officials with more scruples or humanity. Many were outraged by it, but the war soon developed its own savage codes on both sides which nothing could reverse. Millions of Soviet prisoners died in the first winter of the campaign from studied neglect. Thousands more soldiers were simply shot down as they found themselves behind the lines of their rapidly advancing enemy. Within weeks of arrival at the front-line troops or police with no previous experience of violence or crime became infected with the barbarous virus. Group solidarity explained some of it. One unit of ordinary police from Hamburg assigned to the routine shooting of Jews in the east produced a small number of dissenters. When interrogated after the war none of them expressed moral revulsion at what they had been asked to do, but they did reveal a deep sense of shame for letting down their fellows, who had had to do their dirty work for them.77 The lead was taken from the top. Hitler’s utter lack of conscience, his view of war as a lawless state of nature, his moral detachment which always succeeded in making the victim seem the perpetrator, set the tone throughout the whole war effort. The war was never presented as a moral crusade. ‘We shall not place too much emphasis on fighting “for Christianity”,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary on the second day of the campaign. ‘That would, after all, be just too hypocritical.’78

  The law of the jungle might have assisted German fighting spirit in the Soviet campaign, but its moral effects were otherwise entirely negative. The criminalisation of warfare produced a growing indiscipline and demoralisation among German forces themselves. The German armed forces condemned to death 22,000 of their own men and executed between 15 and 20,000, equivalent to more than a whole army division.79 A further 23,000 were sentenced to long prison terms, and another 404,000 to shorter periods in prison or penal battalions. As a proportion of total mobilised manpower, these figures were higher than they were for the Red Army, 3.3 per cent against an estimated 1.25 per cent. Desertion or refusal to obey orders increased as the war went on, and the law of the jungle seeped into the military structure itself. The struggle for survival had a remorseless logic. The regime imposed ever more draconian terror on its own forces to keep them fighting until the very end of the war when Hitler, amidst the dying embers of his Reich, ordered any saboteur or deserter shot on the spot.80

  The effect of Germany’s conduct of war in the east on the rest of world opinion was bleak. The Allies were able to stoke up the fires of moral indignation almost effortlessly with the string of well-attested atrocities laid at Germany’s door. Though German allies and sympathisers – Italy, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia – sent troops to help fight the Bolshevik threat, their treatment at German hands was arrogant and discriminatory. Germany was feared and hated by most of Europe, and everything it did in the Soviet Union reinforced this image, even among those non-Russian nationalities who had at first welcomed the German armies as liberators from Russian-dominated communism. In the occupied territories German apparatchiks became a byword for criminality and violence – their rule was harsh in the extreme, their economic policies a mixture of looting and exploitation. This was not true
of all German officials, and neither was barbarism practised by every German soldier, but the dominant image abroad was dictated by those who did thrive on crime and vice. The Spanish ambassador to London told the Japanese ambassador in Madrid in December 1942 that the United Nations were ‘utterly certain of whipping the Axis’. The Germans, he thought, ran their war effort mechanically, inflexibly and ‘when it comes to diplomacy’ he considered ‘their heads are as hard as lead’. ‘There is not a single country’, he continued, ‘which in its heart is following the Germans. France, Belgium, Holland, all hate the Germans …’ Neither Hitler nor his entourage were worried by the state of world opinion in 1942, but their outlook unquestionably gave the moral field to the Allies. ‘If we win,’ Goebbels remarked in his diary, ‘we shall have right on our side.’81

  At home the moral bankruptcy of the eastern campaign stimulated the conscientious rejection of the regime by sections of German society, and brought more officers, horrified by what they had experienced in the east, into the German opposition. Many were drawn from the upper reaches of German society, recruited from field-marshals and generals, diplomats and senior officials. They were united by their detestation of Hitler. Twice, in 1938 and in 1939, the leading opponents had considered a coup d’etat, but had lost their nerve at the last moment. The war against the Soviet Union they regarded as a disaster: ‘a frightful, senseless and unfathomable war’, wrote one of their number in a diary.82 The resistance worked at the very heart of the German war effort. It included the head of German counter-intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris; there were a circle of opponents in the Foreign Ministry; in the Air Ministry there operated until 1942 the largest communist spy-ring in Germany, the Red Orchestra; even General Halder, the first army Chief-of-Staff under Hitler’s Supreme Command, was counted among the military opponents of the regime. The roll-call of prominent Germans from all walks of life who opposed Hitler’s war and the immorality of the regime revealed the extent to which the war effort lacked any broad base of public support. From resistance circles came a long run of peace feelers to the west, searching for some way of both ending the war and destroying Hitler with Allied cooperation. Neither proved possible. The west distrusted the motives of many of the conservative Germans who approached them; by 1943 the three Allies were committed to unconditional surrender, which the resistance could not deliver. The destruction of Hitler was frustrated time and again by the qualms of conscience or political caution of his domestic enemies, and also by exceptional bad luck. There were no fewer than 42 failed attempts on Hitler’s life.83