Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  I cannot understand these Americans. Each night we know that we have cut them to pieces, inflicted heavy casualties, mowed down their transport. But – in the morning, we are suddenly faced with fresh battalions, with complete replacements of men, machines, food, tools and weapons. This happens day after day …14

  Stalin paid the same close attention to servicing Red forces. The Red Army, like the American, had a large and influential service sector under the Main Directorate of the Red Army Rear, whose chief sat on the Defence Committee on equal terms with the combat commanders. Its director, General Khrulev, remembered after the war that his job was regarded by Stalin as ‘operational work, organically linked to the combat operations of the troops …’15

  In the 1940s both Germany and Japan were highly militarised societies. The forces controlled the selection and development of weapons; they bullied and harassed manufacturers to produce what they wanted; they jealously guarded military prerogatives, even to the extent of long and damaging feuds between the separate services. They resented and rejected interference and direction from mere civilians. Allied forces were by contrast supported by a large civilian apparatus; many of the senior commanders were civilians in uniform, and very conscious of it. The United States was so unprepared for war in 1941 that there was no alternative but to bring in men with virtually no military experience at all. Industry was freer to concentrate on large-scale production; scientists were freer to develop and experiment; managerial skills were rewarded as well as combat skills. No doubt Axis militarism brought its own rewards, but it made it harder to build a strong coalition of civilian and military expertise, or to capitalise on the early victories once the Allies were able to mobilise their economic, intellectual and organisational strengths for the purpose of waging war. The Allies, both dictatorship and democracies were committed to the rational exploitation of modernity. The Axis states sought to press modernity into the service of irrational or reactionary causes.16

  For all this, the margin of victory or defeat was often so slender that general theories look out of place. Battles are not pre-ordained. If they were, no one would bother to fight them. The decisive engagement at Midway Island was won because ten American bombs out of the hundreds dropped fell on the right target. The victory in the Atlantic came with the introduction of a small number of long-range aircraft to cover the notorious Atlantic Gap. The bombing offensive, almost brought to a halt in the winter of 1943–4, was saved by the addition of long-range fuel tanks to escort-fighters, a tiny expense in the overall cost of the bombing campaign. The Battle of Stalingrad depended on the desperate, almost incomprehensible courage of a few thousand men who held up the German 6th army long enough to spring a decisive trap. The invasion of France hung on the ability to keep the enemy guessing, against all conceivable odds, the centre of operational gravity, and then on the weather. It is hardly surprising that Churchill thought at the end of the war that Providence had brought the Allies through.17

  The Second World War was not of course won in a day, or in a month of good luck. But the narrowness of the margins returns us to the question of winning battles. For all the solid achievements of military reform and of military production, of science and intelligence, which made the Allied forces so much more effective by 1943–4 than they had been only two years before, the military contest still had to be won. Eisenhower’s ‘grisly, dirty, tough business’ had to be endured to the bitter end. Of all the conflicts that made up the war, the one that mattered most to the Allies was the struggle with Germany. On their own Italy and Japan might have made regional gains. The most likely scenario is that without the success of German arms to shield them neither state would have risked war at all. Germany’s success in overturning the old European balance of power in less than twelve months opened up possibilities that neither of her allies could have created alone, and even then they hesitated to follow in the German wake. But the German situation was different. The quantity and quality of its armed forces were in another league altogether. The chief instrument of the whole Axis war effort was the German army, more than two hundred divisions strong by 1941, supported by the most modern and effective tactical air force. It was this military strength that had to be defeated to secure Allied victory. The United States devoted only 15 per cent of its war effort to the war with Japan. The other 85 per cent was expended in the defeat of Germany.18

  If the defeat of the German army was the central strategic task, the main theatre for it was the conflict on the eastern front. The German army was first weakened there, and then driven back, before the main weight of Allied ground and air forces was brought to bear in 1944. Over four hundred German and Soviet divisions fought along a front of more than 1,000 miles. Soviet forces destroyed or disabled an estimated 607 Axis divisions between 1941 and 1945. The scale and geographical extent of the eastern front dwarfed all earlier warfare. Losses on both sides far exceeded losses anywhere else in the military contest. The war in the east was fought with a ferocity almost unknown on the western fronts. The battles at Stalingrad and Kursk, which broke the back of the German army, drew from the soldiers of both sides the last ounces of physical and moral energy. Both sides knew the costs of losing – neither victors nor vanquished, Hitler announced in January 1943, only ‘survivors and annihilated’. The other main fronts involved for most of the war much smaller forces. The German army fielded only 20–30 divisions at most in the Italian theatre, but succeeded in preventing Allied victory there for two years. The war in France in 1944, where Germany could have employed over fifty divisions, mostly understrength and some indifferently armed, was fought in its decisive phase between fifteen Allied divisions and fifteen German. Throughout the war German forces kept more tanks, guns and tactical aircraft in the east than on the other fronts.

  The German air force, unlike the army, owed its defeat to the western war effort. The revival of Soviet air power in 1942 did a good deal to blunt German tactical air forces, but the main axis of defeat lay across the Reich itself, and was the product of the bombing offensive. The German air force was compelled to adjust to a strategy it had not anticipated, as the bulk of German fighter aircraft had to be moved back to the Reich, behind a rampart of radar, anti-aircraft guns and searchlights, to fulfil the unaccustomed role of defending German industry. By September 1944 80 per cent of the fighter force was based in Germany on anti-bombing missions. The whole air effort was thrown off-balance as priority was given to the production and maintenance of fighters and the proportion of bombers and dive-bombers in the German air force as a whole fell to less than a quarter from well over a half. In the summer of 1944 there were four times as many serviceable fighters as bombers.19 The advent of the long-range fighter in the spring of that year was fatal for the Germans. The Allies were able to bring the fight all the way to the defensive fighters, which were neither able to attack the bombers – their stated mission – nor to fight off enemy escorts effectively. The German air force was drained of planes and pilots; Allied bombers hemmed in aircraft production and heavily damaged the plants producing aviation fuel. The switch to an anti-bombing strategy, and the destruction wreaked in the battles over the Reich, fatally weakened German air power at the front-line, which had relied on large numbers of medium-bombers. Allied air forces enjoyed a superiority of seventy to one in the invasion of France. German ground forces were compelled to fight the last two years of war with limited or non-existent air support. When the last Luftwaffe chief-of-staff, General Karl Koller, sat down at the end of the conflict to address the question ‘Why We Lost the War’, he reduced it to a single formula: ‘What was decisive in itself was the loss of air supremacy.’20

  In Keller’s view, partisan though it no doubt was, ‘Everything depends on air supremacy, everything else must take second place.’ There is certainly a strong connecting thread of air power trailing through all the major zones of combat. In the war at sea naval power was not entirely superseded by aircraft, but the major naval engagements of the Pacific Wa
r were all determined by aircraft firing bombs or torpedoes. In the Atlantic, escort carriers and long-range anti-submarine aircraft brought the U-boat threat to a halt. In 1943 aircraft claimed 149 out of the total of 237 German submarines sunk.21 Patrolling aircraft kept German naval forces at bay throughout the invasion of France. Allied aircraft took a heavy toll of the merchant shipping in the Mediterranean and in the Pacific. In the invasion battles in 1944 air power was regarded by both sides as the critical factor. ‘There is no way by which, in the face of the enemy air force’s complete command, we can find a strategy which will counterbalance its positively annihilating effect without giving up the field of battle …’: so wrote Field Marshal Kluge to Hitler on 21 July, a few days before the Cobra operation broke open the German front.22 On the eastern front Soviet air power from the summer of 1943 was able to do what German aircraft had done in Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and Ukraine. Underlying everything was the bombing offensive, whose far-reaching effects on German economic potential and on the German home front was sufficient to limit the expansion of German military might to a point where the Allied ground forces could fight on more than equal terms.

  Air power did not win the war on its own, but it proved to be the critical weakness on the Axis side and the greatest single advantage enjoyed by the Allies. Koller, in his reflections on defeat, did not simply attribute the failure in the air to German ineptitude, but recognised also that Germany’s enemies drew the right conclusions from the early years of war ‘and with an iron tenacity built up a superior air force which alone could lead to victory’. Koller was right that the strategy was a self-conscious one. Perhaps the most important decision was taken in the summer of 1941 in Washington, when General Marshall instructed the air force to draft its contribution to the Victory Programme – in effect to plan America’s air war. A small group of airmen led by Colonel Hal George was given the almost impossible task of drafting the plan in nine days at the height of a sticky Washington summer. They sat up until past midnight each night, and twice the team worked all through the night. They knew that Roosevelt had given the green light to produce as much as possible. Each of them worked out the figures for a particular element of air power – heavy-bombing, very-long-range bombing, tactical air support, training, and so on. When they came together at the Washington Munitions Building on a Sunday lunchtime to add all the figures up, they were astonished at the quantities needed to defeat the Axis. The plan was collated and approved, and the work was begun on establishing massive American air power even before America entered the war. The plan was leaked to the press some days before Pearl Harbor. In its essentials it was sent to Hitler by German agents in America. His staff drew up a draft directive – No. 39 – to hold the line in Russia, while they planned a course of action to keep American aircraft and men away from Europe. Hitler refused to accept the recommendation, and stuck to the contest with the Red Army.23

  That decision locked Germany into a strategy in which the defeat of Soviet ground forces was the principal mission. The failure to achieve this ambition exposed German forces not only to a revamped and angry Red Army, but also to the eventual realisation of that massive western air power anticipated in the Victory Programme. Both together defeated German forces, leaving Germany’s weaker allies to be destroyed in turn. When the Allies devoted their full attention to Japan in the summer of 1945, the Red Army swept Japanese forces in China aside in a matter of days, while American air forces transformed Japanese cities into open crematoria. The Red Army went on to become the backbone of the Soviet super-power, while American air power became the central pillar of the new military giant in the west. Both developments were the fruit of German aggression. To deny Germany’s bid for world power, the Soviet Union and the United States had to become world powers themselves. The war was won in 1945 not from German weaknesses but from Allied strengths.

  Even then, complete victory was not attained just through the reform of Allied fighting power, and its effective exploitation on the field of battle. The will to win, to continue through periods of intense crisis, stalemate or defeat, to keep the prospect of victory in sight and to mobilise the psychological and moral energies of a people under threat, proved to be inseparable from the ability to fight better. There is no doubt that at times in the war moral confidence was badly dented; in each Allied state enthusiasm for war had to be actively maintained. Individuals reacted to the demands of war in so many different ways that easy classification is defied. But on balance the commitment of both leaders and led to prosecuting the war to the finish, despite high levels of sacrifice and, in the Soviet case, exceptional losses, proved to be a positive element in the Allied cause. This had little to do with Gross Domestic Product, even if most soldiers had known what it meant. To those in battle the facts of aggregate economic strength were meaningless. People fought for many reasons, from fear, from hatred, from some sense of moral or racial superiority, from loyalty or patriotism. They did not fight to prove the statistics right, but from an effort of will.

  There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important – indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death for whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, ‘worth dying for’. If, he continued, ‘the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable … our courage must mount’.24

  Words like ‘will’ and ‘courage’ are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are the products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. Yet in war these are the qualities, this the language, generated by conflict. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers would in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese ‘were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak …’25 and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world. The irony was that Hitler’s ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies’ will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. This primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just.

  The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly by any means, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Sixty years of relative security and prosperity have opened up a gulf
between the present age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today’s perspective Allied victory might seem some-how inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning-point in the history of the modern world.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘… it is not so bad to be defeated in this war …’

  Shigeru Yoshida, August 1945

  * * *

  THE WORLD ORDER established after the Second World War was quite different from the fragile structure built in 1919. This time the system was dominated by those states with the power to maintain it, the United States and the Soviet Union. Britain and France, the key actors in 1919, found their postwar international position fatally weakened by their inability to stop Germany in 1940. Without allies there would have been no way that Britain could secure her empire, let alone defeat her enemies, once the French army was out of the contest. After 1945 Britain and France became powers of the second rank. Their evident weakness during the war encouraged nationalist struggles in both the British and French empires, and within a generation the empires were mostly gone. Of the western Allies, Britain lost most from the war – the old balance of power, the empire and a dominant role in the world’s economy.