Why the Allies Won: Part I

As I've mentioned, I'm currently reading Richard Overy's Why the Allies Won. I'm going to blog about a few aspects of the book over the next few days but I should mention right off the bat that choosing which aspects is a difficult task. Virtually every paragraph in the book could be expanded into an essay of its own, or indeed a whole other book. Overy's synthesis of the voluminous archive material is simply masterful, and he cuts through the fog of war, and the conflicting analysis' of the war, with lucid prose and convincing arguments. While I'm no expert, I've read a lot about WWII, and I find much of his argument persuasive. If you're looking for a book explaining why the Allies won - not how, but why - you can't go wrong here. Overy sets up his analysis in the book's first paragraph with this statement:

There was nothing preordained about Allied success.

He then walks us through the German onslaught during 1940-41, stating:

Everyone who visited Hitler's headquarters that autumn [1941] could sense the euphoria. In just two years the political map of the world was torn up.

And a little later:

No rational man in early 1942 would have guessed at the eventual outcome of the war.

Overy's overall concern in this first chapter is to make clear how close the Allies actually came to losing and what events over the ensuing years turned the tide in the Allies favor. He spends the rest of the book explaining those events, which include:

1. The Allied victory on the seas, most specifically the battle of Midway in the Pacific, and the defeat of the U-boat threat in the Atlantic, which allowed the massive build up of American arms, supplies, and troops to the European theatre. Without a victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Normandy invasion would not have been possible.

The victory of the Allied navies was the foundation for final victory in the west and in the Pacific. It permitted Britain and the United States to prepare seriously for the largest amphibious assault yet attempted, the re-entry to Hitler's Europe. It allowed the Allies to impose crippling sea blockades on Italy and Japan....[f]inally, victory gave a growing immunity to Allied shipping so that the disparity in naval strengths and merchant tonnage between the two sides became unbridgeable.

2. The Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk. Stalingrad is often cited as the most obvious turning point in the war. But Overy points out that the victory at Stalingrad did not mean the defeat of the German army was then foreordained. After Kursk, it was. What interested me here was his explanation of why:

The conventional view is to blame Hitler for gross strategic mismanagement, or to ascribe Soviet success to crude weight of numbers....the underlying assumption is not that Soviet forces won the contest in 1943, but simply that the German side lost it.

Overy argues that this view no longer holds up:

From everything now known....such an explanation is no longer tenable. Hitler may well have been a liability to German commanders, but until the failure at Stalingrad, as he told the staff the day Paulus surrendered, "We were always superior..." Moreover for the Citadel operation he left the planning and execution largely to the professionals...[t]he crude weight of Soviet numbers cannot be the answer either. Soviet forces on paper greatly outnumbered the German attackers in 1941, but were cut to pieces; at Stalingrad and Kursk, though the margin in equipment slightly favored the Soviet side, the gap was too small to blame German defeat on Soviet 'masses'.

So what was the reason for the Soviet victory in the east:

The reasons for Soviet victory on such as scale in 1943 are active Soviet reasons, the result of a remarkable resurgence in Soviet fighting power and organisation after a year and a half of shattering defeats. When Marshal Zhukov wrote his reminiscences of the campaign he could point to solid Soviet achievements: better central planning of operations, and their careful supervision by the General Staff; very great improvements in Soviet technology and the tactics for using them, exemplified nowhere more fully than on the prepared defensive ground around Kursk; and the ability to deploy millions of men and thousands of tanks and aircraft, with all their supplies and rearward services, in lengthy complex operations, without losing control of them. To this Zhukov might have added the argument that Soviet planning and central direction, generally viewed unfavorably today, were the final factors that turned the demoralized population and its shattered economy into a great armed camp, providing weapons and food and labour to sustain 'deep war'. No other society in the Second World War was mobilised so extensively, or shared such sacrifices. The success in 1943 was earned not just by tankmen and gunners at the front, but also by the engineers and transport workers in the rear, the old men and the women who kept farms going without tractors or horses, and the Siberian workforce struggling in bitter conditions to turn out a swelling stream of simply constructed guns, tanks, and aircraft.

To his credit, Overy acknowledges that much of the Soviet output was produced by slave labor, 'at the point of a gun and through fear of the Gulag', and he describes in vivid detail the brutal conditions many Soviet citizens worked under. Still, he insists there was more to the effort than that: "The effort was fuelled by the very visible consequences of invasion." It is a hard to argue with this. It seems obvious on the face of it that an invaded people have more to lose, and more to fight for, than the invaders. I believe this factor has been cited by historians of our own War Between the States when assessing the success of the South in the face of such overwhelming disadvantages. (Notice I did not call it the Civil War; I also stopped short of calling it the War of Northern Aggression. I'm going for something a little more neutral here, knowing what a touchy subject it is. Just ask Derb.) I don't find it implausible that it would not be a factor in Soviet victory in WWII, even in the face of near unimaginable repression and terror.

I'll continue my discussion of the book later in the week with perhaps Overy's most controversial position: that the Allied bombing offensive was a decisive element in their eventual victory.