Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Nevertheless, British democracy survived. In 1945 the sense that the forces of light had triumphed against the forces of darkness was overwhelming, even more so as the grim catalogue of German and Japanese crimes was fully exposed for the first time to the public gaze. The end of the war was welcomed as a break with a decadent, disordered past, as an end to unemployment and slumps, as an end to crude geopolitics and racism. The stale atmosphere of the prewar age, the morbid contemplation of decline, was blown aside by a widespread hope for a new beginning. The Axis New Orders, and the ideological baggage they carried behind them, were confined to history’s scrap heap. In the west the ideals of democracy and international collaboration had the field of opinion to themselves.

  The hopes for a progressive postwar order in the west rested almost entirely upon the United States. They alone possessed the economic strength and military power to prevent the return to economic stagnation and international instability, however unpalatable other western governments and peoples found this fact to be. In 1945 the willingness of American statesmen to assume the responsibility for maintaining a new international order could not be taken for granted. There were isolationists in the United States who wanted their country to do what it did in 1919, to withdraw from the political and military responsibility of remaking the post-war world. Gradually it dawned on American leaders that this time the Old World was neither able nor willing to maintain the peace, any more than it could win the war. Shortly after taking office in 1945, President Harry Truman recognised the transformation of America’s position: ‘we have emerged from this war the most powerful nation in the world – the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history.’ A different world system, with American power at its heart, was unavoidable. ‘The whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century’, wrote the American politician Dean Acheson, ‘was gone.’1

  The United States succeeded Britain as the major global power. From being a military stripling in 1940, America by 1945 had twelve million men in the armed forces, over seventy thousand naval vessels and almost 73,000 aircraft. America also possessed the atomic bomb, and, despite the spread of this technology worldwide, has retained a lead in nuclear weaponry down to the present day. Finally, the American economy emerged in 1945 strengthened by the war, capable of outproducing all the other great powers together. It was an economy committed to the capitalist values of liberal trade and market competition. American politicians and businessmen were determined that the world economy should not slip back into the bad habits of the inter-war years, of trade-blocs and tariffs, and exerted American political power to build a more open market. Generous funds were made available for reconstruction in the war-torn areas of the world outside the Soviet bloc. The siege-mentality of the pre-war era gave way to international collaboration through the new instruments of world-market regulation, the IMF and GATT. America’s economic priorities gave the world economy a kick-start after 1945 which made possible the long economic boom. Prosperity dulled political antagonism and the thirst for conquest. Battle shifted to the boardroom, and has stayed there.

  The American succession to world leadership in 1945 was the most significant change. The Soviet Union also emerged from the war as a major world power, but Russia had been a leading player in the international system for more than two centuries, and the Soviet state already possessed the world’s largest military forces before 1939. The war threw Soviet power more clearly into focus. In the absence of any powerful neighbour, Stalin’s state became the dominant political force throughout eastern Europe and Asia. It was a battered giant. The task of economic reconstruction and the search for military security absorbed Soviet energies for twenty years or more. But the war did secure the survival of communism. Victory in 1945 gave the Party a new lease of life. The political veterans of the war dominated Soviet life through to the 1980s. More than that, the war was used to present the Soviet Union as a force for world progress. Schoolchildren chanted: ‘By defeating Hitler’s Germany, the Soviet Nation saved mankind from annihilation … and preserved world civilisation.’ The triumph of the Red Army was used to underpin the illusion that communism was Khrushchev’s ‘wave of the future’, the system to which all societies were historically moving.2

  Victory in the Great Patriotic War helped to establish the core myths of the postwar Soviet state. When memories were fading in the 1960s, the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, resurrected the war experience in order to bolster Party power. In 1965 Victory Day was made an official public holiday, and a medal was struck for all participants of the war. Associated state propaganda played up themes from the history of the war acceptable to Party leaders. Any discussion of the early defeats, or suggestions of Stalinist incompetence, were stamped on by the censors. The publication of wartime memoirs was halted for fear that the true dimensions of Stalin’s leadership, or of the cost of the war, would escape into the open.3 It is no coincidence that the torrent of uncensored publications on the war in the 1980s contributed to the unravelling of the myths of communism, and ultimately of the whole Soviet system.

  The confident belief in a communist future engendered by victory found expression in the political success of communism throughout much of the defunct Japanese New Order, in China, North Korea and Vietnam. Communism filled a power vacuum left by the collapse of the old colonial empires, Japan included, and by the weakness and corruption of the Chinese regime under Chiang Kai-Shek. Most of the area fought over during the war was run by communist regimes by the mid-1950s, bent on modernising their states along Soviet lines. In all these countries high levels of state-directed economic growth transformed backward rural societies. No communist people became prosperous in the western sense, and neither did the war bring democracy any nearer for them. But communism presented itself as an ideological counterpart to fascism and militarism which had been laid low by Soviet arms in 1945.

  The consolidation of communist regimes in most of Asia and eastern Europe did not fit with the American ideal of the free world and open economy proclaimed in 1945. One of the first casualties of the peace was the moral consensus that bound the Allies together in the common defeat of Hitlerism. Once that enemy was removed, both western Allies were able to return to a relationship with their totalitarian companion with which they were more morally at ease. The Cold War began where it had been left off in 1941, with profound western distrust of Soviet motives, and an ideological divide every bit as deep as that between liberalism and Nazism. Only two years after the end of the war the American Air Policy Commission reported to Truman that the essential ‘incompatibility of East and West’ called for the build-up of a ‘devastating’ force of bombers and missiles equipped with nuclear weapons capable of operating at a range of 5,000 miles.4 American strategists moved effortlessly from one Manichaean world to the next.

  The transition from World War II to Cold War made possible the most remarkable consequence of all: the integration of the three Axis states with the western, anti-communist world. This did not happen immediately, and it was not simply imposed on the vanquished willy-nilly. For the three or four years following the war, conditions for the defeated populations remained bleak; food was scarce, industrial production a fraction of what it was pre-war, much of the urban area had been flattened by bombing, and it was far from clear what the intentions of the occupying armies were. Although there was a sizeable fraction of the population prepared to embrace communism, even in the Soviet-occupied eastern zone of Germany, where communism had been experienced in the raw, in all three defeated powers there had always existed a significant majority attracted to western values and western economics. What disappeared in 1945 was any belief that the path to recovery lay in a revival of the violent imperialism and economic dirigisme of the 1930s. America in 1945 was self-confident and rich. The window to the west, closed in the depression years of the 1930s by American isolationism and economic crisis, was now invitingly open. A future Japanese Foreign Minister, Saburo Okita, recalled how
in the depths of a wretched defeat people thought, ‘“It’s miserable now, but in time Japan will get back on its feet again, not through military power, but by new technology and economic power.”’5 The new Japanese constitution included Article 9, renouncing war ‘forever’ as a means of settling disputes and Japanese soldiers have not seen action since. When a western German state was set up in 1949, its constitution prevented German soldiers from ever serving outside the frontiers; the German forces permitted by the Allies by the mid-1950s were for defence only.

  The Cold War hastened the realignment of the Axis states with their former enemy. There was more than a touch of irony in German and Italian populations once again finding themselves confronting the Soviet colossus they had fought in the war, but this time at the side of Britain and the United States. But by the early 1950s, during the Korean War, the first serious fighting between ‘east’ and ‘west’ since the war, America needed to establish a firm military alliance in Europe to contain the Soviet Union, for which German and Italian participation was essential. She also needed the industrial potential of the two states to contribute to fuelling the Korean War boom. During the 1950s the remaining restrictions on industrial development imposed on Axis economies in 1945 were lifted, and their populations rushed for the economic growth they had been starved of for a generation. As one German observed in 1960: ‘The American outlook is based on enthusiasm for a better standard of living … the fellow who can figure out how soon he too can own a motor-bike or a Volkswagen won’t dream any longer of the day when there will be a Gauleiter’s job [Nazi provincial leader] opening up in Central Asia …’ The scramble for economic success had other causes too. There was no prospect for any Axis state to improve its lot by reviving pre-war territorial ambitions. Militarism and racism were thoroughly discredited, and the elites turned to more conventional paths to wealth and success.

  This still begs the question of how societies that failed so comprehensively at the task of waging war have succeeded so dramatically in the economic contest. No doubt the concentration of national energies on the achievement of material well-being did owe something to the deliberate choice made in the immediate postwar years to reject the failed policies of the 1930s and the war. Defeat in war shifted the values and status-systems of Japanese and German societies to an entirely new footing. Rational, civilian activities have been adopted because they have brought results: victory for the United States and Britain in 1945, economic miracles for Germany and Japan (and Italy too) in the fifty years that followed. In the long term the country that contributed the most to the defeat of the Axis, the Soviet Union, is the one that has lost most. Soviet militarism survived. There was no economic miracle. The manifest inability of the communist system to provide what the liberal west could offer, despite the smothering propaganda of socialist progress, eventually locked the Soviet system into a political dead-end. Its collapse after 1989 was not in any sense a certainty, but the choices made there after 1945, like Axis choices in the 1930s, made a circle impossible to square. The cost of maintaining the super-power status and the arms race finally outran the ability of the regime to persuade the people that the communist new order was worth that cost. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not caused directly by victory in 1945. The distance of time is too great for that. But victory proved a poisoned chalice. The Soviet people did not win freedom or prosperity, but their sacrifices have made it possible for all the other warring states to enjoy them both.

  APPENDIX

  Weapons Production of the Major Powers

  1939-45

  * * *

  Dashes indicate reliable figures unavailable.

  * figures for Britain, USA and Japan for January–August; for the USSR all year for aircraft, January–March for artillery; for Germany January–April

  † excluding landing-craft and smaller auxiliary vessels

  ‡ includes self-propelled guns for Germany and the USSR

  § medium and heavy calibre only for Germany, USA and Britain; all artillery pieces for the USSR. Soviet heavy artillery production in 1942

  was 49,100, in 1943 48,400 and in 1944 56,100.

  Hitler as the beast from the abyss, devouring one country after another. This 1941 cartoon formed part of a collection presented by Stalin to Lord Beaverbrook.

  The end of old-fashioned sea power: a US Dauntless dive-bomber attacks Japanese carriers during the Battle of Midway.

  American opinion was shocked by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The thirst for revenge is strikingly conveyed in this poster from 1942.

  American submarines strangled Japanese commerce in the Pacific. This merchant ship was photographed through the periscope of the submarine, June 1945.

  Some sense of the scale and ferocity of the Soviet-German war is conveyed here as German soldiers cross a smashed bridge over the Don river in July 1942 through a tangle of broken vehicles.

  The performance of the T-34 medium tank was marred by the lack of radios and a hatch which prevented all-round vision, clearly visible here. By the time of the Battle of Kursk in 1943, these deficiencies had been made good.

  The Soviet counter-offensive relied on large numbers of rugged, easily maintained weapons. Here the SU-76 self-propelled gun is in action in the advance into Prussia in 1945.

  German forces called Stalingrad ‘the cauldron’.

  The city ablaze at night under the impact of air and artillery tire from both sides.

  German soldiers were poorly prepared for the cold. Here an igloo has been built around a German truck to prevent the engine from seizing up in the strong icy winds.

  Artistic licence: in this drawing from the summer of 1940 there is no hint of how ineffective British bombing actually was. Factories could barely be located, let alone hit, and the slow Blenheim bombers pictured above were easy prey for German defences.

  In July 1943 British and American bombers destroyed 70 per cent of Hamburg. All the RAF bombers could see of the city at night were smoke, flames and the flash of anti-aircraft fire.

  The Kammhuber Line: across German-held Europe a wall of radar, searchlights and anti-aircraft guns was set up to combat bombing. These 88-millimetre guns were among 55,000 anti-aircraft artillery in place in 1944.

  Counting the cost: over 600,000 Germans lost their lives through bombing. Here the dead from a raid in Berlin in December 1943 have been laid out in a gymnasium decorated with Christmas trees.

  Tourist trap: the ruins of Hiroshima became a sight-seeing attraction for Allied forces in 1945. Sailors of the Indian Navy have made the 15-mile trip from the naval base at Kure to see for themselves what atomic power can do.

  The assault across the beaches on 6 June 1944 left well over three thousand dead in the first hours The fragile beachhead was secured by the end of the day, helped by amphibious tanks visible at the top of the picture.

  A group of British artillerymen facing the German front at Caen. For many Allied soldiers war was waged at one remove, with artillery and aircraft neutralising the enemy at long range before the infantry moved forward.

  The two artificial ports or ‘Mulberries’ set up off the Normandy coast were vital to the supply of Allied forces. The American port pictured here was rendered inoperable in the ‘Great Gale’ of 19-22 June 1944.

  The mass-produced ship: here sections of Liberty cargo ships wait to be lifted by crane and welded into position. Each metal plate was clearly marked to ensure an exact match with adjacent sections.

  When German forces seized the steel-producing regions of the Ukraine in 1941, Magnitogorsk in the Urals was developed to become the new centre of the Soviet heavy industrial economy.

  The ‘largest room in the world’: the main assembly hall at Willow Run, Michigan, where Ford produced B-24 Liberator bombers like cars.

  This could almost be a scene from the American Civil War. It is the German army deep in Soviet territory and mud in the late summer of 1942. German forces remained heavily reliant on horses and wagons throughout t
he campaign.

  Japanese soldiers in World War II trained in archery according to the samurai tradition. Armed with rifles they were judged poor shots by their enemies.

  A nuclear bomb of the type used against Nagasaki, nicknamed ‘Fat Man’. The bomb was 60 inches in diameter and 10 feet long, weighed 10,000 pounds, but had a yield equivalent to 20,000 tons of high explosive.

  During the first summit talks of the three Allied leaders. Stalin was presented with the Sword of Stalingrad Foreground, Stalin, Voroshilov (holding the sword), Roosevelt and Churchill,

  War by committee: British and American military chiefs thrashed out policy for Overlord at the Quebec conference in October 1943, General Brooke (standing) and General Marshall, fourth from right, dominated the proceedings.

  With Catholics on both warring sides, Pope Pius XII (seated) broadcast to Washington in the winter of 1939 the diplomatic view that the war was caused by materialism.

  Atrocity pictures were used in Allied propaganda to reinforce the popular image of a barbarous enemy. In this picture, published in Britain in 1944, German officers carry out the execution of two Soviet peasants.

  The Allies in the Second World War distinguished in their propaganda between the European and the Asian enemy. The Germans were regarded as corrupted barbarians, but the Japanese were presented as primitive racial inferiors – evident in this image published in Britain in 1944, reproduced here with its original caption.