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Account for the Allied
victory in World War II
This essay was originally written as part of my first-year course, and
enhanced as my submission for the Bowen Prize for History. It was the joint winner of the
prize.
During the course of the
Second World War, September 1939 to August 1945, it was by no means certain that the
Allies would secure victory - Hitler’s Wehrmacht had swept all before it,
conquering the Low Countries and France, and securing Germany’s northern flank
through occupation (Denmark, Norway) or coercion (Sweden). Poland had been neutralised in
the opening stages of the war. These territories, added to those of Axis allies, and
satellite states under German control (Slovakia, Vichy France), amounted to control of
almost all of mainland Continental Europe. Britain stood alone, preserved from the Blitzkrieg
only by virtue of her island status, while the United States still clung on to ideals of
isolationism, determined not to repeat what many saw as the mistake of 1917. The USSR,
until the advent of the ‘Barbarossa’ invasion by Germany in the Summer of 1941,
had been placated by Hitler and drawn into the Nazi-Soviet Pact, precluding any
possibility of her active intervention against Germany, and allowing her a free hand to
invade Finland and take a slice of Poland and an interest in the Baltic states. European
democracy, it seemed, had had its day. In December 1941, the Japanese air attack on the US
Naval Base at Pearl Harbour destroyed a significant part of the Pacific Fleet (all US
capital ships at the base, eight battleships in all, were damaged or destroyed), bringing
the US into the war against both Germany and Japan. At this stage, however, the US army
was ranked 18th in the world in size (and this takes no account of the poor state of its
armament), and only its navy could be considered an important military force at the
outbreak of hostilities. With the US chronically underarmed, the Soviet Union apparently
devastated by Germany’s invasion in June 1941 and Britain isolated, it is not
surprising that the Germans continued to feel supremely confident of their ability to
neutralise Russia, and scornful of the abilities of the Americans to intervene. At the
beginning of 1942, the Allies had a considerable amount of ground to make up, yet make it
up they did: in May 1945 a general cease-fire was called in Europe following the complete
conquest of Germany by Allied forces and Hitler’s suicide; in August of that year the
dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted an unconditional
Japanese surrender without the need to invade the Japanese mainland. The question of what
allowed the Allies to win the war must take account of a number of factors, both with
regard to the Axis and Allies: the war leaders; technological development and the state of
armaments; the economy, specifically the development of a war economy; military tactics;
morale both on the ‘home fronts’ and among the armed forces; and, of course,
specific military campaigns and battles.
When asked to name a
turning point in the course of the Second World War, there are many historians, military
and otherwise, who would answer without hesitation ‘the Battle for
Stalingrad,’
or perhaps ‘the Battle of the Kursk Salient’. For the purposes of this essay,
however, it is not enough to simply name the battles which turned the tide. Our purpose
must be to examine the underlying causes of the outcomes of these engagements. For
example, the Battle of Stalingrad was indisputably a turning point in the war, and like
all historical events it has causes and effects. The causes of the outcome (Soviet
victory) are what allowed this turning-point, and so the question must be ‘where was
the turning point in technological, military or economic affairs which allowed the victory
of Stalingrad?’ If we do not seek the underlying causes of a change in the fortunes
of war, then we can only view incidents like Stalingrad, the Battles of the Coral Sea or
Midway, or the Battle of the Atlantic, in historical isolation, seeing the chronological
and military context but neglecting the causal one. Only when viewed in their proper
context can their importance to the Allied victory be seen. Then, battles, campaigns and
engagements become symptoms of a broader range of aspects of the war effort, instead of
being regarded as the causes of the outcome of the war effort.
Let us now outline some information on the above mentioned
engagements; their value to us will be as examples to be referred to when discussing the
more general matters which really decided the war. The Battle of Stalingrad was the first
serious defeat of the German Army on land, and was the first significant victory for the
Red Army: the German Army Group B had been sent on a drive towards the river Don, and the
6th Army under General von Paulus was assigned to take the sprawling city of
Stalingrad.
The army made slow progress due to viscious Soviet resistance, but eventually forced
Chuikov’s Soviet forces back to the edge of the river Volga. In a dramatic turnabout,
however, by January 1943, three Russian Fronts (army groups) had encircled
Stalingrad,
capturing von Paulus in a huge pocket without many supplies. Hitler ordered the pocket to
be held - a breakout was never attempted, and attempts to bring in supplies from the air
failed. As the pocket shrank, the situation became more and more desperate until Paulus at
last surrendered, the day after Hitler had made him Field Marshall. Hundreds of thousands
of German soldiers perished of starvation or frostbite, and many more were taken prisoner
by the Russians. The next humiliation on land was the Kursk Salient campaign. Unlike the
street fighting of Stalingrad, this was open country and in theory gave the Germans the
opportunity to use their Blitzkrieg tactics to the full. In practice, this was the
first time the Germans were beaten at what they did best, large rolling tank battles on
open terrain with the full use of airpower and mobile infantry. If there is a point at
which Blitzkrieg ceased to be an effective or viable tactic, then it is probably
here. These battles can be used in the illustration of the importance of war leaders and
the importance of the economy and industry in ensuring sufficient supplies and suitable
equipment were provided to the involved forces. Perhaps most importantly, they will serve
to illustrate the importance of the relationship between strategic extension and economic
resources.
The Battle of the Coral Sea marked the point at which the brakes
were applied to Japanese expansionism in the Pacific. An American naval force prevented
the planned Japanese invasion of Port Moresby, whose intention was to gain a base for
activity against Australia. The Battle of Midway was a far more decisive victory for the
American Navy, levelling the playing field for future naval engagements with the
destruction of four Japanese fleet aircraft carriers by just ten bombs. These battles will
be used to illustrate the perils of strategic overextension, and this is a point which is
of course highly relevant to Germany also. The Battle of the Atlantic, where German
submarines attempted to impose an economic stranglehold over the British isles by
attacking shipping, is a prime example of the role of technological development and
superiority in achieving victory, and this point, and the German attitude to it, can be
also be illustrated with reference to developments in aviation and the Anglo-American
Strategic Air Offensive.
In examining the conduct of the war by the various protagonists, it
seems pertinent to begin at the top of their political hierarchies. On the Axis side, the
single most important statesman is obviously Hitler. In Japan, Emperor Hirohito was only
the constitutional monarch, with policy determined by a group of politicians and military
leaders, while Mussolini’s contribution to the war, while not insignificant, was
never in any danger of dramatically altering its course, and many of the points which
apply to him also apply, to a greater or lesser extent, to Hitler, so it is him that we
will focus on. Adolf Hitler was a hugely charismatic man, whose aims at the beginning of
the war were apparently twofold: firstly, a war of conquest to restore Germany to economic
and political predominance in Europe; secondly, a racial war, to eliminate the whole of
European Jewry - the focus of this war was the eastern expansion into Poland and the USSR,
as laid out by Hitler in his autobiography and political tract Mein Kampf, and in
his later, so-called ‘secret book’. The objective here was Lebensraum, or
‘living space’, a concept dear to Hitler’s heart which was to realised
through capture of the Ukraine.
When war broke out, Hitler was already in supreme command of the
German armed forces, particularly the army - although Goering continued to be important in
the Luftwaffe, and Admirals Raeder and then Donitz in determining operational
patterns for the navy, it was Hitler who held the reins of power in the army, and who had
overall strategic control. This was reflected in his choice of general staff officers and
high commanders. The head of OKW, the German High Command, Kietel, was secretly christened
‘Lackietel’ (literally ‘lackey’) by his colleagues in testament to his
devotion and unquestioning obedience to Hitler. The man in supreme control of the entire
German military apparatus, as Hitler was, could not afford to be surrounded by yes-men
like Kietel, and to a lesser extent Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of
OKW. However,
due to the nature of Hitler’s rule, they could not afford to be honest with him if
they held differing opinions - they were liable to be dismissed out of hand, or perhaps
even tried before the People’s Court. The desperation which gave rise to the 1944
bomb plot must surely have had its roots in the frustrations of Germany’s generals
that Hitler was leading them, indeed had led them, to military disaster and there was
nothing they could do to approach him or beg for a change in strategy. The problem was
that Hitler’s initial campaigns were so successful that when later ones ran into
trouble, he refused to believe that it was his fault. In addition, he became increasingly
divorced from battlefield realities - when the Sixth Army under von Paulus was encircled
in the Stalingrad pocket, he refused the general permission to mount a break out during
the critical opening stages of the encirclement, condemning soldiers who had sworn their
oaths of loyalty to him to a certain fate. Even when the encirclement was firmly in place
and the pocket shrinking, unrealistic orders continued to be relayed to von
Paulus:
Germans troops were expected to fight to the last man, saving their final bullets for
themselves; surrender was forbidden, so too escape; the day before von Paulus disobeyed
his Fuhrer’s orders and surrendered his troops, he had been promoted Field Marshall,
making him the most senior soldier in the Wehrmacht - Hitler believed that this,
along with exhortations to death and glory, could give the troops the courage to fight on
in an impossible situation.
If Hitler was determined to hang on to the city, more for its
symbolic value to both himself and the Soviet dictator, then it was Goering who sealed the
fate of the men inside the pocket. Asked by Hitler about the possibility of supplying the
city by air with rations, ammunition and medical supplies, he ‘snapped to attention
and declared solemnly: "My leader! I personally guarantee the supplying of Stalingrad
by air. You can rely on that."’ (recounted by Albert Speer in his memoirs Inside
the Third Reich, 1969. Speer was minister for armaments from 1942 and had overall
charge of Germany’s war economy). This pledge by Goering is an example of another
problem afflicting totalitarian regimes built around one person: the jockeying for power
which goes on and the promises that are made in the process. Because Goering felt that his
position as Hitler’s successor was insecure, he was thus attempting to curry
favour,
using his pilots and the soldiers in Stalingrad as pawns in a political game. The failure
of the Reich to split the military and political spheres resulted in a fundamentally
flawed command structure and had severe ramifications for millions of German soldiers in
both eastern and western Europe. The Luftwaffe general staff under general Milch
had already calculated that the supply of Stalingrad by air was an impossibility with the
state of the weather and the resources available on the Eastern Front. Mussolini can be
seen as being similar to Hitler, both in the control he exerted over the army and his
imagined abilities as a great strategist; the consequences were similar for millions of
Italian troops in the Balkans, North Africa and Russia. The fundamental difference between
them was that Mussolini’s armies were never powerful or effective in the first place,
as evidenced by Italy’s invasion of southern France after it had fallen to the
Germans, an invasion which was a military shambles and a considerable embarrassment to
Hitler.
By contrast to Hitler, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Stalin were not in complete control of their armed forces in the totalitarian mould. As
the heads of states whose attentions were turned to the war, they did of course take a
keen interest in the grand strategy pursued by their countries: Churchill entered the war
government as First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he had also occupied during the Great
War, when he masterminded the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign; Roosevelt took a keen interest
in naval affairs in particular, and Stalin also insisted in keeping his finger on the
pulse of military matters. However, none of these men took it upon themselves to oversee
the staff work of the military as Hitler did - this was something they left to the
professionals. All had trusted military advisors to whom they frequently deferred in both
strategic and tactical matters. Churchill’s head of the Chiefs of Staff from 1942 was
General Brooke, a capable and talented man who handled Churchill well, tempering the
excesses of Churchill’s ambitions with his own caution and experience. When Brooke
disagreed with Churchill, then he had the weight to prevent decisions against the better
judgement of the military - only once did Churchill overrule him, and that was on the
invasion and occupation of Madagascar, a relatively minor and ultimately successful
operation. Churchill was an excellent war leader, a militarily minded man with a keen
strategic brain, who still knew his and his country’s limitations. Ably assisted by a
number of excellent generals and staff officers (Brooke, ‘Bomber’ Harris,
Trenchard and Portal are notable), he steered Britain through the Second World War with
great overall success, managing to keep his finger on both the military and administrative
pulses of Britain. Roosevelt too had a capable military staff, and although his position
as President also made him Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, he did not interfere
unduly in military matters, preferring to dictate grand strategy, Sometimes this went
against military reality for the sake of political expediency - the commitment to
‘the Hump’ air route in China was a concession to Chiang Kai-Shek, and rash
promises to Stalin of a second European front in 1942 were immediately repudiated by an
indignant Churchill, who was more aquainted with the realities of invasion prospects than
his American counterpart. Generally, however, Roosevelt was not an interferer in the
execution of strategy, leaving it to some excellent commanders, including General
Eisenhower and Admiral Nimitz.
Stalin was closer to Hitler both in his style of government and his
relationship with the military. He was a totalitarian dictator, but unlike Hitler he did
not believe he was infallible, and in times of trouble frequently turned to his chief
advisors. The most important of these was General, later Marshal, Zhukov, the man who
broke the siege of Leningrad and organised the defence of Moscow. Although not suited by
temperament or training to staff work (he was dismissed by Stalin from the general staff),
Stalin retained him in Stavka, the Soviet supreme command, making him Deputy
Supreme Commander, second only to Stalin himself. He was given a free hand to deal with
the situation in the South, i.e. Stalingrad, and masterminded Operation URANUS (the
encirclement of Stalingrad) and its successor SATURN (the Battle of Kursk). The delegation
of such authority is what makes Stalin and Hitler completely different in the respect of
military command - Hitler expected his generals simply to execute his orders, only rarely
giving them a free hand to accomplish strategic objectives any way they saw fit
(Rommel is
a notable exception to the general rule, but this is probably more due to Hitler’s
indifference to German military activity in North Africa than to any belief held by the
Fuhrer that he himself was not the best person for the job).
The development of technology was an area in which the Allies
eventually excelled. At the start of the war, Allied tanks, aircraft and artillery were
hopelessly outclassed by their German counterparts. The dreaded Stuka divebomber and the
Me-109 fighter were two superb examples of German superiority in the air at the start of
the war. The various Panzer tanks were far more advanced than Allied contemporaries, and
available in far greater numbers . The concept of highly mobile mechanised warfare was
almost unique to the Wehrmacht, as was the close integration and tactical
employment of air power. Only the German surface fleet started the war at a disadvantage -
Germany had no aircraft carriers and precious few capital ships, which were in any case
used so timorously that their impact on the war was slight. By the end of the war,
however, the situations on land and in the air had been reversed. The Allies, starting at
a disadvantage as they did, were spurred to supreme technical achievements in both the
quantity and quality of the armaments they produced, while German research and development
stagnated. This was partly due to complacency on the part of OKW, Hitler and Goering.
Albert Speer gives an example of German refusal to accept Allied development in his
post-war memoirs, Inside the Third Reich. The Americans had finally realised that
the addition of long-range fuel tanks to Mustang and Thunderbolt fighters gave them the
ability to penetrate deep into Germany with the daylight bombing raids, so crucial as part
of the Strategic Air Offensive. Here, Goering is informed that American fighters have been
shot down over Aachen. After asserting the impossibility of the event, Goering goes on to
say:
‘"What must have happened is that they were shot down much
further to the west. I mean, if they were very high when they were shot down they could
have glided quite a distance farther before they crashed."
Not a muscle moved in Galland’s face
[Galland was a general in
charge of fighter forces for the air defence of the Reich]. "Glided to the east, sir?
If my plane were shot up..."
"Now then, Herr Galland," Goering fulminated, trying to
put an end to the debate, "I officially assert that the American fighter planes did
not reach Aachen."’
This attitude was by no means exceptional, although it seems barely
credible that such delusions could have been allowed to influence policy making to such a
degree. Certainly, it seems highly implausible that anything like this could ever have
occurred in any of the Allied states.
Another way in which unreality permeated into the sphere of German
military thinking was in the field of new weapons research. Instead of taking a keen
interest in the development of new aircraft, tanks and artillery, Hitler believed that the
types in service were fundamentally adequate, subject to periodical minor improvements. He
concentrated his hopes and resources instead on projects which consumed vast amounts of
money for very little tangible benefit to the war effort. The prime example of projects of
this type were the V-1 and V-2 rockets, but there were others. Hitler outlines his plans
for the use of the rocket weapons in War Directive No.55 on May 16, 1944:
‘The bombardment [of England] will open like a thunderclap by
night with Fzg.76 [later renamed V-1], combined with bombs (mostly incendiary) from the
bomber forces, and a sudden long range artillery attack against targets within
range.’
From Hitler’s War Directives, Hugh
Trevor-Roper, ed., 1966
The notion that rocket weapons could have a significant effect on
the outcome of a war was not fundamentally incorrect, but at this stage in the war, with
the Germans permanently on the defensive, it was unrealistic of Hitler to set great store
by such projects. As we shall see later, German failure in the area of intelligence
gathering in the UK also compromised the effectiveness of the V-weapons.
The preoccupation with new weapons led to the neglecting of more
conventional areas of development. For example, one crucial area of air force armament was
neglected by Germany almost for the whole war, one which could have had a serious impact
upon the outcome of the Battle of Britain (June-September 1940) - the Luftwaffe had
no heavy bomber. While Allied heavy bombers came to form the mainstay of their strategic
strike-force (Britain used the Avro Lancaster while the US employed the Boeing B17 Flying
Fortress and the Consolidated B24 Liberator), the Germans employed lightly armed and
armoured bombers with light bomb-loads in their strategic bombing efforts, such as the
Heinkel He111. As early Allied experiences in bombing occupied Europe were to show,
bombers developed inter-war, such as Britain’s Bristol Bleinheim and Fairey Battle,
had not anticipated the shape of the next air war and suffered appalling losses.
Crucially, Allied air forces responded, and the next generation of Allied bombers was
developed and produced as quickly as possible. The German’s response to the
ineffectiveness of their bomber force was to produce more of the same, with the
consequence that, following defeat in the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe’s
bombing capabilities became a less important consideration for Allied planners, lacking as
it did both range and defensive capability.
Those attempts to develop new tanks, the Tiger and Panther marks,
were also dismal failures - while they might have been successful in 1939 or 1940, the new
marks were hopelessly outclassed by the end of the war, both technically and tactically.
The same problems afflicted Japan, which suffered in its outlook from what Weinberg calls
‘victory fever’, and this affected their technological perspective. Again, from
a position of superiority at the beginning of their war, both in terms of troop training
and discipline, and in the air (the Mitsubishi ‘Zero’ or ‘Zeke’
fighter was the most capable plane in the Pacific theatre upon the outbreak of
hostilities), complacency set in, and later, desperation prompted the attempted
development of weapons such the ‘death-ray’ (which was only deadly if you
happened to be a rabbit sitting stationary ten yards in front of it!). Neither Germany or
Japan embarked upon any serious attempt at a nuclear weapons program, and it was left to
America to be the winner in the one-sided race for that devastating new technology.
There were some areas in which technological development between the
opposing sides was more evenly matched. Development led to counter development, which led
to a new development, and so on. This was especially true of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Allied developments to cheat the U-boat wolf-packs included: the refinement of convoy
communications and tactics; the modification of aircraft to reduce the size of the
Atlantic Gap, that area in the mid-Atlantic outside the range of Allied air-cover; the
invention of the Leigh Light for aircraft which were on anti-submarine warfare duties; the
development of radar which could detect periscopes even in choppy waters, and the
‘Hedgehog’ depth-charge launcher, which was mounted on the bow of ships. The
other major technological aspect of this particular theatre of war was the code-breaking
and radio interception field. In the war overall, the Allies finished way ahead on the
signals intelligence front, with the invaluable sources of ULTRA and MAGIC information,
but in the Battle of the Atlantic things were far more evenly matched, with each side
trying to read the others signals while preserving the secrecy of their own. The German
developments to increase the efficiency of the U-boats included the development of supply
submarines, which greatly increased operational efficiency by allowing the subs to
undertake far longer cycles of duty without the time consuming process of returning to
bases in France for refuelling and rearming; a system was created which allowed submarines
to detect the search radars of Allied planes and take evasive action (the Allies countered
by changing the bandwidth of their radar); efforts were made to shorten the length of time
it took to transmit between submarines, reducing the risk of signals interception or of
nearby ships or aircraft locating the submarine. The same thing was evident in the conduct
of the Strategic Air Offensive: it was a technological duel between the bombers of RAF
Bomber Command and the USAAF’s 8th Air Force, and the ground and air defences of the
Reich. It was ultimately won by the Allies with the addition of extra fuel tanks to
existing fighters, and great leaps were also made in the developments of bomb-sights,
radar, direction finding and target finding equipment (although the diversion of resources
to the Eastern front was also influential - for a discussion of strategic overextension,
see later).
Having touched upon the importance of intelligence in both the air
war and the war upon the seas, it might be pertinent to pause for a moment and consider
Axis failures in this field. A failure that was mainly Germany’s was in the gathering
of human intelligence (Humint). The German military intelligence branch, the
Abwehr, under
the command of Admiral Canaris, was persistent in its attempts to insert and maintain
agents in Britain, the US, the Dominions and the Colonies (especially in the Middle East).
Its efforts were a complete failure. As far as is known to this day, the entire network of
agents in England during the war was corrupted by British intelligence, and used to feed
false information back to Germany. The so-called Twenty Committee (twenty in Roman
numerals is XX, a double cross), comprising representatives of MI5, MI6, and the military,
achieved great feats of deception. Range modifications were passed on to the Luftwaffe
concerning the accuracy of the V-weapons which led to their ranges being shortened, and
many of them falling into the countryside short of London. Large areas of British coastal
waters were effectively closed to the German Navy by the misinformation that they had been
mined by the Royal Navy. Perhaps most importantly, the Twenty Committee’s agents
played their part in the grand deception that the Allied Landings (OVERLORD) would come in
the Pas de Calais area, instead of Normandy, resulting in a German belief even after the
beginning of the invasion that the Normandy landings were just a feint. Armoured divisions
were never committed to repelling the Normandy landings because of this belief. In the
field of signals intelligence (Sigint), Axis failures were equally crucial. The Enigma
encryption machines employed by the Germans had been reproduced by the Poles as early as
1932, and it was arguably the Poles' greatest contribution to the Allied war effort that
they handed these machines over to the Allies in 1939. The Government Code and Cipher
School at Bletchely Park worked ceaselessly to crack the German codes, and while German
modifications to the machines sometimes retarded their success, the overall effect was
incalculably important. Transmissions of all of the armed services could be monitored: air
raids and submarine activity could be monitored, the success of Humint deception could be
verified, the plans of German High Command could sometimes be anticipated. While care was
taken never to act on such information without some other verification, lest the source be
betrayed, ULTRA, as the source was referred to, was an invaluable mine of information for
the Allies. Similarly, the cracking of Japanese naval codes, whose decrypts were codenamed
MAGIC, produced important results for the Americans in the Pacific.
Both the Strategic Air Offensive and the Battle of the Atlantic can
be seen as victories for Allied adaptability and new technology and tactical doctrine.
They can also be seen as victories for Allied production capacity, and the extremely
efficient utilisation of resources. With America heavily industrialised, but with no
armaments industry as such, it was obvious that the expertise of captains of industry
would need to be put to good use in American rearmament. There are two superb examples of
the achievements of American industry, and it so happens that they relate to the two
campaigns described above. In the Battle of the Atlantic, the mainstay of both the British
and US merchant navies came to be a vessel originally christened the ‘Ugly
Duckling’, but later renamed the ‘Liberty Ship’. This was constructed from
pre-fabricated sections which were then welded onto the ship’s carcass. Although only
capable of a plodding ten knots, the ease of construction and the speed at which they came
off the line (the quickest was finished four days and 15½ hours after her keel was laid)
made them extremely useful to the Allies in keeping the Atlantic open. A vessel which also
saw service in the Atlantic, but was more importantly one of the two main bombers of the
USAAF, the B-24 Liberator, represented the ultimate in mass production technology. The
project to construct them was taken on by Henry Ford, and by creating the ‘largest
room in the world’, the Liberator could be assembled on one huge production line.
After a time, the planes were being produced at the rate of just under one an hour.
These unrivalled technical achievements are symptomatic of the
differences between Allied and Axis production strategies, and the crucial differences in
styles of utilisation. Firstly, it should be considered that, although Germany started off
at an advantage, she still lost ground by the end, finishing at a disadvantage. This is
due to a number of factors: firstly, the inherent ability of both the USA or USSR to
outproduce her individually - their combined resources, along with Britain’s, were
phenomenal. Secondly, there was the matter of the relationship between state and industry:
in the Soviet Union, industry was completely state owned and state run, ensuring that
there could never be any conflict between the two, and that each would be responsive to
the other’s demands; in the USA, industry was on a completely free enterprise basis,
privately owned and funded. This meant that the government had to rely on the
industrialists to divide the various war production tasks among them. This division of
labour, along with the capitalist ethic, produced its own benefits in innovation and
efficiency. Hitler, however, had the benefits of neither system: he was attempting to
exert control over private industrial concerns as if they were nationalised. This denied
Hitler and his advisors complete control of the armaments industry, yet it also denied the
manufacturers a free hand. Perhaps the most significant problem was the role of the army
in determining the technical specifications of the products produced, and the failure of
Hitler and Speer to prevent this interference. Instead of being happy to settle for the
products they were given, the army insisted on sending representatives (almost certainly
unqualified) to the factories to oversee production. These representatives insisted, on
behalf of their branch of the armed services, on trifling improvements which completely
destroyed any possibility of standardisation, with particularly severe ramifications for
the supply of spare parts. Moreover, not only were particular weapons available in a
number of ever shifting permutations, but the number of weapons available was huge, with
further consequences for the supply situations. The USSR dictated to its industry the
number of types to be produced, while in the USA the industry’s divisions of labour
meant that each sector concentrated on its field, and the number of aircraft or tank types
available was relatively small, although not as small as in the USSR. Not so the Germans.
In Why the Allies Won, R.J.Overy cites the example of one German armoured division
which went into battle with 96 different types of personnel carrier, 111 types of truck
and 37 different types of motor-cycle. When compared with the widespread and standard use
of American vehicles like the ubiquitous Jeep, the ramifications for supply and
maintenance become immediately apparent. The Soviet forces too had a much greater degree
of standardisation - one dive bomber, five fighters, two tanks, a handful of trucks and
transport vehicles, and so on, because that was how Stalin dictated it should be. Had
Hitler been in a position to impose this kind of standardisation upon his factories, the
gains in both production speed and military efficiency could have been considerable. What
he failed to appreciate, however, was that soldiers might know a lot about the driving and
deployment of tanks, but that does not mean that they knew anything about making them.
It was not only in terms of the quality of armaments that the Allies
oustripped the Axis by the middle of the war. It was also the quantity. As we have said,
the economic resources of the USSR and USA far outstripped those of Germany and her
allies, and this was obviously important in allowing the armoured build up which led to
Operation TORCH (the invasion of North Africa), the French Riviera landings (Operation
DRAGOON) and Operation OVERLORD by the Western Allies, and in allowing the Soviets the
huge counter offensive which, beginning at Stalingrad and Kursk, forced the Germans back
to their own borders and ultimately beyond. Of course, numerical superiority by itself can
never account for a victory - as the French were to find out when overrun by numerically
inferior German forces in the summer of 1940, it’s not how many men and tanks you
have at your disposal, but what you do with them. However, if correctly exploited,
numerical superiority can be crucial. German aircraft production did not reach its
numerical peak until 1944, nor did the production of tanks and artillery pieces. Had
German industry been capable of producing these quantities at the start of the war, then
the beginnings of a war of attrition would have been less significant. As it was, when the
war of attrition began, with the problems encountered on the drive into Russia and, for
the Luftwaffe, the loss of the Battle of Britain, German industry could not cope
with the demands placed upon it. The result was the gradual depletion of the number of
tanks in each armoured division, of the number of aircraft in each squadron, and so on.
This then had military ramifications - a depleted air force could not simultaneously repel
the strategic bombing offensives launched against industrial targets in Germany and
maintain air superiority over the Eastern Front. This increased both damage to industrial
targets and the chances of failure in combat with the Red Army through lack of new
equipment, and just as importantly, spare parts. Underproduction caused a vicious downward
spiral in the strength of the army and the air defence of the Reich, and it was a circle
that could not be broken, despite the best efforts of Speer, who actually increased the
efficiency of industry and the war economy greatly during his three year tenure at his
post.
Against the decline of the ability of the German war economy to meet
the demands of the military must be placed the way Allied war economies rose to the
challenge of rearmament. We have already heard of the technical innovations which gave
rise to the abilities of the Allied war economies to rise to demands. We must also briefly
examine the raw figures which show the sheer weight of arms and armour stacked against the
Axis :
Military production for major belligerents, 1944
|
Weapon
|
Germany
|
Japan
|
USA
|
UK
|
USSR
|
|
Aircraft
|
39,807
|
28,180
|
96,318
|
26, 461
|
40,300
|
|
Tanks
|
22,100
|
401
|
17,565
|
5,000
|
28,963
|
|
Artillery
|
41,000
|
-
|
33,558
|
12,400
|
122,400
|
|
Total
|
102,907
|
28,581
|
147,441
|
43,861
|
191,663
|
Source : R.J.Overy, Why the Allies Won, 1995
Of course these figures cannot tell us the whole story. They say
nothing of the technical quality of the weapons in question, or of the morale or ability
of the men trained to operate them. They also disregard that part of the military which
constitutes the bulk of any invasion force: the infantry. They do not tell us the state of
their morale, training or equipment, and the Japanese army is a good example of how the
figures above belie the amount of resources America had to devote to defeating its enemy
in the Pacific. The Japanese army had a code of martial honour, the bushido, which
made death preferable to retreat. Whatever the state of their tactical situation, Japanese
troops displayed a fanaticism which Hitler would no doubt have welcomed among his own
soldiery - they frequently fought to the last man defending the islands of the Pacific,
and this, plus their exceptional training in the art of jungle warfare, made them a
particularly tenacious foe. Another example of their devotion was the practice of kamikaze,
attacks on American shipping by suicidal Japanese pilots who had volunteered specially.
When discussing mobilisation of the economy and population for war,
we must also consider the ‘home fronts’ of the countries involved, that is their
use of the home population in the war effort, and the reasons they cited to their citizens
for entry into and continuation of the war. Here, as at the front, morale is a key issue.
In the case of Germany, management of the home-front is crucially linked to issues of
strategic overextension and poor mobilisation. It is perhaps indicative of Hitler’s
insecurity about his hold on power that Germany entered the war with low economic
mobilisation. High levels of consumer goods continued to find their way to the German
public; indeed, Germany’s rate of consumption of consumer goods was the highest in
Europe for much of the war. Several suggestions have been made to account for
Hitler’s generous treatment of his civilian population, which was of course using
resources which could be more productively employed in war production. In terms of its
mobilisation of population, Germany was not a hard taskmaster during the war, even during
the closing stages, preferring to make use of POWs as slave labour, rather than bring
women into the factories or deprive the front of soldiers. Rosie the
Rivetter, the
archetypal image of the woman working in the munitions factories of America, made no
appearance in the Reich, in accordance with Hitler’s beliefs on sexual differences.
The explanation that Hitler felt his hold on power to be insecure is only partially
convincing, given the lack of opposition to Hitler and the Nazis up until 1939. Perhaps he
felt that forcing material deprivation upon the German Volk might provoke unrest,
or contradict the belief that the war was for the greater good of Germany. The second
hypothesis centres around the concept of the Blitzkrieg economy. This proposes that the
German economy was, like the German army, only to be prepared for a lightning war, not a
protracted six year struggle involving three major powers. The third suggestion, which
seems to be in many ways the most convincing, is based on A.J.P.Taylor’s hypothesis
in The Origins of the Second World War that, while Hitler may have had plans for an
aggressive and expansionistic foreign policy in the long term, he did not expect war on a
large scale to break out following the invasion of Poland in 1939. Rather the expectation,
as conveyed to Count Ciano in August 1939, was that it was ‘out of the question that
the struggle can begin war’, (quoted by R.J.Overy in ‘Hitler’s War and the
German Economy: A Reinterpretation’, Economic History Review).
While the importance of morale on the home fronts of all the
protagonists is a major factor in any war, and none more so than this war, this is not the
place to undertake a detailed summary of the differences between the nations’ morale.
The cardinal point for consideration here will be the effect of morale at home and the
treatment of civilians on the economic and military efforts of the countries concerned.
Eventually, both the Germans and the Japanese were defeated by their
own ambitions. Strategic overextension was a common feature of both of their campaigns,
considering the resources they had available. This was the case for two reasons: firstly,
the size of the area into which they expanded forced them to spread their resources thinly
through their area of conquest. Secondly, the size of their expansionism was sufficient to
provoke a significant number of enemies, who were ultimately in a better position to
pursue a war. Hitler’s decision to attack Russia was based on the successful
conquests undertaken during the First World War, while his declaration of war on the
United States was made in the misguided belief that as a democracy, it was fundamentally
weak and would not have any impact on the course of events. What he failed to appreciate
was that democracies are indeed weak in the way he, as a totalitarian, thought of them,
inasmuch as they are guided in many of their actions by public opinion. However, what he
did not realise that by declaring war, he was provoking a shift in public opinion. He
unwittingly played to the strengths of the American system of government, and this was a
vast mistake. Of course it is very possible that American interference would have occurred
sooner or later, but for Hitler, the later the better, as American rearmament could not be
justified to Congress in any significant form until American involvement in a major war.
The invasion of Russia was not quite as misguided, and had Hitler spent longer preparing
it and devoted more troops to its execution, its chances of success would have been
improved. The point is that the extent of expansionism up to that point meant that
hundreds of thousands of troops were required in the occupied territories of Europe. This
is the crux of what we mean by strategic overextension: not having enough to go around.
Barbarossa was not doomed to failure in the form in which it took place, but Hitler made
the fatal mistake of underestimating his enemy; another case of ‘victory fever’,
and failed to allocate resources accordingly. Also, his failure to decide on the prime
strategic objective of the invasion, allocating groups to Leningrad, Moscow and the
Ukraine, made it easier for the Red Army fightback to begin.
Japanese ambitions were ambitious in the extreme: they had plans to
conquer Australia and New Zealand, parts of Alaska and Canada, and exert their influence
throughout China, the Indian subcontinent and the whole of South East Asia. If there is
one phrase which can sum up the problems with Axis strategy, it would a case of expansion
‘too far, too fast’. Lines of supply were stretched to the limit for both sides:
damaged ships had to return to the Japanese mainland to be refitted, and if this meant
travelling back from the Indian Ocean or other far-flung locations, then so be it. This
was particularly problematic after the Japanese lost their naval superiority at the Battle
of Midway. Because of the expanse of oceans which separated their various conquests, the
navy could not be everywhere at once; attempts to make it that way weakened the
battlegroups which encountered American forces, and attempts to keep the fleet together
meant that it might be in the wrong place at the wrong time to counter enemy threats.
Logistical problems relating to the expansion of their frontiers also beset the Germans:
damaged tanks from the Eastern Front had to be taken all the way back to the Reich for
refitting, using an overworked railway system to get them there. These logistical and
strategic weaknesses were the Allies strengths, and one can speculate on the course the
war might have taken if both the major Axis powers had pursued a more focused policy,
taking one objective at a time and ensuring its security before moving on to the next. The
other factor which needs to be borne in mind with regard to the German war is that Hitler
did not intend to create a general European war at the time he invaded Poland, and
although much evidence points to intentions of major wars of conquest at some point, they
were intended to take place in 1943 at the earliest, probably later.
Ultimately, the Axis powers paid the price for attempting to fight
and win against powers far greater than them in terms of human and material resources. The
size of population is not crucial, as the Axis’ initial victories prove, but no
country other than the USSR could have absorbed twenty million casualties and still
mustered an army capable of pushing back the German peril. By failing to begin the war
with fully developed war economies, Germany and Japan eventually condemned themselves to a
worsening spiral of defeat and decline in production, and by failing to make the same
investments as their enemies in military research and development, they allowed themselves
to be outclassed by a new generation of military armament. The Allies may have won the
war, but as we have said, that victory was by no means certain, and there were plenty of
dark hours for Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. It was facilitated in part by some
monumental mistakes and strategical errors on the part of the Axis, of which military
victories can be seen as the just the manifestation. It was also facilitated by some
remarkable positive achievements in the industrial and technological field, and by some
superb strategists, politicians, heads of state and military commanders. We must also
remember the supreme efforts of millions of ordinary infantrymen, pilots, drivers and
seamen. Their stories are too many to tell, their bravery at times exceptional, the
conditions they had to endure sometimes almost unbearable. No war could have been fought,
much less won, without these men, and we should never forget that their achievements, as
well as those of the millions of workers in industry and agriculture, underly the story of
this war.
It sounds like an overly moralistic conclusion to draw, but what is
at the heart of the Axis defeat in World War II is ultimately greed: greed and desire for
new conquests which led to strategic overextension and economic strain, factors which were
exploited by the Allied powers later in the war. The one thing which could have set the
Axis powers on a course to victory, or more likely a negotiated peace, would have been
recognition among their high commands that they were beginning to lose the war as the full
war efforts of the soon-to-be-superpowers got under way. But that was not to be. One only
has to look at this, Hitler’s final war directive, issued on April 15, 1945, to see a
supreme example of the malaise of self-deceit which infected the very heart of the Axis
command structure, in Germany, Italy and Japan, and which eventually led to its downfall :
‘We have foreseen this thrust, and since last January have done
everything possible to construct a strong front. The enemy will be greeted with massive
artillery fire. Gaps in our infantry have been made good by countless new units. Our front
is being strengthened by emergency units, newly raised units, and by the Volkssturm
[home guard]. This time the Bolshevik will meet the ancient fate of Asia - he must and
shall bleed to death before the capital of the German Reich’.
From Hitler’s War Directives,
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed., 1966
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