20

Why and What Did the Allies Win?

THE ALLIES WON World War II because in almost all aspects of battle they proved superior. In the air war, they produced the only successful heavy bombers of the conflict and deployed them in vast numbers. British and American fighters were as good as the best of those of Germany and Japan, but were built in far greater numbers. In key areas of pilot training, the production of aviation fuels, navigational aids, and transport aircraft, the Axis powers lagged so far behind their opponents that their occasionally superior—or surprise—weapons of the air, such as cruise missiles, rockets, jets, and kamikaze suicide planes brought no lasting advantage.

The same sort of paradoxes arose at sea. The Axis navies wasted scarce resources by building huge battleships, and yet unlike the Allies found no way to use such powerful gun platforms to support amphibious landings, the chief and perhaps only remaining justification for costly warships in World War II. Carrier war was the future of naval battle; yet Japan was the only one of the three Axis powers to even build an aircraft carrier fleet. It then squandered its prewar advantages in carrier strength by not taking seriously naval pilot training, in part because of chronic fuel shortages that limited both flight time and the range of warships, and in part because of a fossilized admiralty that equated naval power with aggregate battleship tonnage. The Japanese and Germans believed before the war that naval superiority was predicated on summative naval tonnage put to sea, without proper appreciation that it was not just the size and number of ships that mattered, but rather the type of war vessels that went to sea and the nature of the men who commanded them. In all these regards, the British and the Americans began the war with the world’s two largest and most versatile fleets, and only further widened those respective advantages both by battle and by the efficiency of their naval yards and service academies.

German field ground forces may have demonstrated the most effective fighting power in the war, but they were vastly outnumbered by the armies of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and they were sent far abroad to fulfill strategic objectives impossible to achieve, given their finite numbers and shortages of equipment and supplies. In contrast, Allied ground forces were symphonic: the huge Red Army worked in concert with the highly mobile expeditionary forces of the Western Allies, in the former case to grind down, and in the latter to cut off and isolate, the strength and breadth of Axis ground forces.

Under the traditional calculus of siegecraft, Germany’s huge artillery guns, its professional envelopments, and the expertise of its Prussian generals should have led to the capture of key Allied cities and fortresses. Instead, the survival of Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Malta doomed the Axis cause. Germans could certainly capture strongholds like Sevastopol and Tobruk that ultimately did not affect the course of the war, but they could not storm those cites whose capture would have mattered.

Germany revolutionized armored warfare, yet Russia built the most and best tanks while the British and Americans deployed the most effective ground-support fighter-bombers. So great were the Allied material advantages in armor and artillery that the superiority of German tank crews and Panzer generals ultimately was for naught.

The Axis powers had surmised that the poor fighting ability of Allied military forces and the inexperience of their leaders would nullify the indisputable power of their factories. How strange then that they lost the war because their own enfeebled industries and blinkered masters and commanders nullified the spirit and competence of their fighting men.

WORLD WAR II finished with little ambiguity. Unlike World War I, there has never been any doubt as to who caused, won, and lost World War II. Rarely in the history of a major war had such formidable belligerents been so utterly and quickly defeated as were Germany, Japan, and Italy, nor so uniformly blamed for the global destruction that had transpired. All had their homelands ravaged by air or land or both, and occupied. Their bombed and shelled civilian populations paid dearly in blood and treasure for their prior support of their fascist governments. Their political systems were destroyed. Occupying Allied proconsuls determined their futures.¹

Many of the principal German and Japanese leaders and generals who survived the war and did not commit suicide were put on trial for war crimes. Some were imprisoned, shot, or hanged. The terms of unconditional surrender made the prior Versailles Treaty seem innocuous in comparison. Germany, in another defeat, was now to face the fate of Carthage after the Third rather than the Second Punic War. Whereas the victors a generation earlier soon had second thoughts about Versailles, this time around no one believed that the far harsher terms forced on the Axis were at all unfair.²

For all the resources of the belligerents and the terrible costs of the war, the course of World War II was rapid; and for the defeated, obliteration not just capitulation was the result. The former Axis militaries were rendered impotent for well over a half century to follow. The destruction of the Axis states was accomplished in less than five and a half years in the case of Germany. Italy collapsed in little over three years; Japan did not last four after Pearl Harbor. Perhaps the destruction of the Axis is comparable to the end of the Vandals in North Africa or the Aztecs of central Mexico. Both those latter cultures were annihilated and their politics and ideologies mostly extinguished and replaced by those of their victors. The word Prussian, for example, has almost receded into history as a generic rather than a proper adjective, in much the same way as the noun vandal and the adjective Byzantine acquired nonexclusive connotations after both original cultures had vanished. As Fredrich von Mellenthin wrote after the war in homage to his brother, a full general in the Third Reich: “The old Prussians, of whom von Mellenthin was a typical example, are no more. Hardly anyone mentions Prussia these days.” Berlin and Tokyo literally had ceased to exist as viable cities by late 1945.³

The world of 1939 had become scarcely recognizable by 1945. The frenzied research and development of World War II had ushered in a thorough revolution in arms with immediate and lasting consequences. War after 1945 would now have the potential to become far more lethal, even if conflicts remained more localized and never quite again global. Like many of the initial and subsequent belligerents, Germany went to war in 1939 with horse-powered infantry divisions, bolt-action rifles, and piston-driven propeller planes armed with traditional high-explosive bombs. Six years later, along with the Third Reich, Imperial Japan, the last of the Axis, went down to defeat in September 1945 in a brave new world of motorized transport, assault guns, jets, napalm, cruise and ballistic missiles, and nuclear weapons, along with suicide bombers and extermination camps. And because the two greatest wartime producers of military technology and weaponry, the Soviet Union and the United States, almost immediately entered a nearly half-century-long Cold War, their proxy conflicts saw previously relatively unarmed peoples now equipped with a plethora of high-quality arms unimaginable in the past. World War II had not just seen the introduction of radar, sonar, and sophisticated navigation, but also the production of millions of cheap and lethal arms such as stamped-out Sten submachine guns, assault weapons, simple land mines, and Panzerfausts (the precursors of rocket-propelled grenades) that flooded the world, along with the idea that everyone was now fair game in war. The victors believed that they had at least destroyed totalitarian ideologies that had married their absolutist doctrines to new technologies to kill millions. The Allies certainly had accomplished that goal with the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan, but the price was the empowerment of the Soviet Union that spread the fruits of its huge wartime arms industries among national liberation movements the world over.

Because the three major Allies accomplished such a rapid and complete victory, it is easy to forget that the prewar policies of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union toward the Third Reich—respective mollification, nonintervention, and active cooperation—had earned their own terrible ordeal to follow. Of course, in terms of resources, the combined manpower and industrial output of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire rapidly grew far greater than that of the three Axis powers. But their collective advantages accrued also because of the stupidity of the Axis: the surprise attacks on the Soviet Union and then the United States, together with the German and Italian declarations of war against America, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of mainland China, mark the five greatest strategic blunders of the war—and perhaps of any major war in history. The Axis, not the Allies, radically redefined the relative resources of the belligerents of 1939–1941, and in doing so ensured that the Axis powers would have no chance of strategic resolution.⁴

Could the Axis powers then have won the global war they blundered into? After 1941, only a few unlikely scenarios might have nullified the inherent material and demographic advantages of bringing Russia and America in on the side of Britain, at least once the USSR and the United States began their industrial and manpower mobilizations. The Axis had to win the war before the full potential of their Allied enemies was realized. As late as May 1942 that hope seemed briefly possible. With the fall of Singapore and the Philippines, the defeats of the Anglo-Americans in Burma, the stabilization of the Chinese front, and the destruction of many of the capital ships of the Allied Pacific fleet, Japan seemed to have some chance of successfully invading Midway, destroying the remaining American carrier fleet, and achieving a draw in the Pacific war, while cutting off Australia by militarizing the Solomon Islands.

Nazi Germany for a moment was also in sight of its ambitious goals, despite the sputtering Russian counteroffensives of late 1941. By July 1942 Hitler controlled much of what is now the European Union. Nearly one million square miles of the Soviet Union’s most populated and richest land were under German occupation. Hitler’s armies were still poised at the doorsteps of Leningrad and Moscow. Army Group South was barreling forward, seemingly unstoppable on its way to the oil fields of the Caucasus, with few enemies ahead—and fewer supplies behind. Rommel’s advances in North Africa and the fall of Tobruk raised the specter of Afrika Korps Panzers in Egypt and perhaps eventually beyond Suez. In terms of manpower and territory under its rule, the Third Reich, now greater than Rome, stretched from the Arctic to the Sahara and from the Atlantic to two thousand miles east of Berlin on the Volga River. The majority of the key neutral European powers by mid-1942—Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and colonial France—remained either anti-British, or pro-Axis, or were stealthily facilitating the war aims of Germany. Many of the major prewar Allied cities—Amsterdam, Athens, Belgrade, Brussels, Copenhagen, Kiev, Oslo, Paris, Warsaw—were firmly in Axis hands. The few that were not, like Leningrad, London, or Moscow, were either besieged, had been bombed, or remained in dire peril. In contrast, Europe’s other great cultural or industrial metropolises such as Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Istanbul, Lisbon, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Naples, Prague, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna, and Zurich were largely untouched and were either part of the Axis or neutral but often sympathetic to Nazism.

For all of Italy’s failures, the central Mediterranean still remained an Axis lake by mid-1942. Tobruk would fall on June 21. When, not if, Malta was to be invaded was the chief mystery of 1941–1942. The northern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean were in Axis or pro-Axis hands; in Platonic terms, Axis frogs were croaking around a fascist pond. Europe as it had been known since the Napoleonic era no longer existed. Even the Ottomans had never controlled almost all the shores of the Mediterranean.

Then the Axis chimaera abruptly vanished. Just months later, by late autumn 1942, during and after the fighting at the landmark battles of El Alamein, Midway, Stalingrad, and Guadalcanal, the pulse of the battlefield had irrevocably changed. Almost overnight, Axis powers soon found themselves checked, if not outmanned and outgunned, and entering a new conflict in which their terrifying preemption and audacity would not matter as much as steady supply and manpower. The era of surprise German and Japanese attacks was over for good, and those Axis powers quite clearly lacked the air, land, and sea diversity and mobility so necessary to win the Second World Wars that they had prompted across the globe. When an exhausted Wehrmacht neared the Caucasus by late 1942, it still controlled only about one-sixth to one-fifth of the vast landmass of the Soviet Union. After nine months of war, Japan had not taken Midway Island, much less Pearl Harbor, and had lost as many capital ships as it had sunk after Pearl Harbor. Italy was rendered impotent in North Africa without constant succor from the Third Reich; neither power could stop Anglo-American landings in French North Africa in early November 1942.

Was such a rapid and dramatic turning point in the war preordained? Although the Axis powers could not win the war outright by late 1942, there were still ways to nullify escalating Allied advantages in industrial output and manpower and thus maintain some hope for a negotiated armistice. Indeed, for a moment, such salvation seemed possible. Operation Barbarossa had crippled some Russian factory production by early 1942. Over five million Red Army soldiers were either killed or captured. The U-boat campaign had cut off Britain from a great deal of maritime sources of supply. The loss of much of Burma made it difficult to supply China. The new ally, the United States, still inexperienced and not fully mobilized, faced enormous obstacles to delivering its growing human and material assets to the distant Pacific and Atlantic fronts, given German U-boats, the Japanese navy, and frequent Axis superiority in the air. By late 1942 there was only a single US carrier—the damaged Enterprise—operating in the Pacific. Germany under industrial minister Albert Speer was beginning to increase and prioritize its munitions production. Anglo-American bombers had suffered growing losses without yet systematically inflicting damage on the German homeland that might shatter production.

Yet by May 1943, the Axis goal of cutting off Allied supplies once more had proven an illusory episode. The pulse of the Battle of the Atlantic had shifted yet again, and this time permanently in favor of the British. The latter’s productive capacity continued to grow and had not been much affected by the Blitz or the U-boats—or the V-rockets to come. Russia successfully completed the move of its industrial base eastward, thereby making it immune from further German attack—even as the front lines had moved back over one hundred miles westward from Germany’s farthest advances of 1941–1942. The American fleet in a series of battles at the Coral Sea and Midway, and slugfests around Guadalcanal, kept the Pacific sea-lanes of supply open, and fought the Japanese navy to at least a draw. Already by 1943 there were unprecedented expansions in Allied production and the size of their armies and navies.

Still, could the Axis powers have incorporated their winnings, dug in, and made the counterattacks of the ascendant Allies too costly to achieve their ambitious strategic goals of unconditional surrender? In theory, given the resources and populations still under Axis control by mid-1942, there was no intrinsic reason why Hitler, in the Soviet style of 1941, could not have immediately reorganized Axis-controlled Europe from the Atlantic to Moscow to ensure greater industrial production and conscripted armies as large as those of the Soviet Union. The Japanese-held Pacific and occupied Asia, from northern China to Burma and from the Aleutians to Guadalcanal, offered nearly as many natural resources and recruits as were available in North America and the British Dominions.

Several obvious reasons explained why the Axis powers failed to mobilize the assets under their occupation and control—all largely innate to the prewar cultures of Germany, Italy, and Japan themselves. As noted earlier, the craft-based factories of the fascist powers did not quickly enough appreciate basic principles of industrial production, especially the importance of settling on a few practical designs of tanks, planes, trucks, and guns, and then fabricating them in mass and at little cost. Early victories of the Axis countries likewise created a sense of complacency, a “victory disease” that worked against full mobilization of their economies. Not only had Allied bombing hampered German, Italian, and Japanese production, but private industrial fiefdoms, endemic corruption, and bureaucratic infighting and suspicion had as well, all characteristic of nontransparent autocracies. At issue was not whether a B-17, B-24, Avro Lancaster, or B-29 was vulnerable to German and Japanese flak and fighters, and thus was often shot down in great numbers, but whether the Axis powers could stop the production of over forty thousand of these four-engine heavy behemoths that lit up their homelands—or could themselves send comparable air fleets to do the same to the Allied homeland factories. They clearly could do neither.

Between 1943 and 1945 victory hinged on air power, navies, armor and artillery, leadership, and industrial production. And the Allies had established superiority in all these areas by late 1943. Air and naval superiority, with special emphasis on merchant ships and transport planes, gave the Allies mobility to move armies and supplies around the globe. The ability of the Americans and British to devote huge percentages of their military budgets to air and naval power permitted them a global reach unthinkable to the Axis militaries. America could send supplies to Guadalcanal much more easily than Japan could import oil from the Dutch East Indies; Britain could dispatch convoys with a better chance of reaching distant Russia than Italy could across the Mediterranean to Libya. Hitler could reach America or eastern Russia only in his fantasies about an “Amerika” or “Ural” intercontinental or transcontinental bomber. Japan resorted to launching balloons and fantasizing about landing tens of thousands of Japanese “pirates” on the West Coast.⁵

The totalitarian systems of the Axis nations were cruel and unpopular abroad. But there was more than just savagery that hurt the Axis cause—after all, the prewar Soviet Union had been more murderous than Germany and Japan combined. The Axis brands of racist and nationalist ideologies made appeals to the hearts and minds of other Europeans and Asians difficult. Cooperation was predicated only on power and perceptions of success, not professed ideals. When the Axis powers rose, they had reluctant friends and when they receded, they had easily earned obdurate enemies. Hitler’s racial hatreds transcended the Jews:

No sooner do we land in a colony than we install children’s crèches, hospitals for the natives. All that fills me with rage. White women degrading themselves in the service of the blacks.… Instead of making the natives love us, all that inappropriate care makes them hate us.… The Russians don’t grow old. They scarcely get beyond fifty or sixty. What a ridiculous idea to vaccinate them.… No vaccination for the Russians, and no soap to get the dirt off them. But let them have all the spirits and tobacco they want.⁶

Ideology, of course, clouded military judgment. Tens of millions of man-hours were invested in the perpetration of the Holocaust and “reordering” of the East. To the degree that these operations had direct military consequences, the result was only to liquidate some of the brightest minds living within the confines of the Third Reich; many who had fled the specter of the Final Solution put their geniuses in service of the Anglo-Americans. The slave and extermination camps diminished the free European workforce, alienated neutrals, increased hatred of Germany, and drew down manpower and machines from the fighting on the Russian front. Killing sympathetic civilians in the Ukraine, in service of crackpot ideas about an inferior Slavic race, ensured that there was far less chance of tapping into mass popular discontent with Stalinism.⁷

Slave and coerced labor from occupied Europe and Russia illustrated that the workforce of the Third Reich was never as productive as its counterparts in Britain and the United States. From the Nanking to the Manila massacres, the Japanese may well have murdered outright well over fifteen million Chinese, Filipinos, Indochinese, Indonesians, and Koreans—a macabre effort that likewise diverted resources from frontline military fighting, fueled local revolts, and ensured indigenous support for the British and Americans. Asian hatred of the Japanese and their endemic cruelty ensured that a billion Asians favored the non-Asian Allied cause. The Bataan Death March and other early Japanese atrocities shaped the American mindset in a way that logically led to the napalming of Tokyo in March 1945.

The island British were able to make a better argument to win over continental Europeans than were fellow continental Germans and Italians. For all the crude Allied propaganda about the Kraut and Jap, there was never a counterpart to the Nazi Rassenkampf, or race war, that transcended all other considerations. By August 1941, Britain and the United States had already issued the propaganda of the Atlantic Charter, assuring the world that the United Nations sought no territory of their own, and that there would be freedom of self-determination for all after the defeat of the Axis.⁸

When the Allies incinerated masses of civilians at Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, or Hiroshima, the Allies at least did so on the argument—in some cases persuasive, in others dubious—that they were shortening the war by disrupting enemy military production. Even Dresden—where on February 13–14, 1945, British heavy bombers created a firestorm that devoured the historic old city—had some military value as a manufacturing site, communications center, and transportation nexus.⁹

Consequently, it was not just the Axis powers’ strategic blunders, parochialism, ill-preparedness, and cruelty that lost them the worldwide war that followed 1941. The Allies had a vote too, and did almost everything right after 1942 in the manner that they had done almost everything wrong before then. They far more persuasively argued that those noncombatants whom they did kill were more likely to be embedded within the enemy war effort, while the Axis slaughtered far more gratuitously and for reasons irrelevant to combat operations. That fact was not lost on the hundreds of millions of people whose lands often became the battlegrounds between the Axis and Allies.

Another cause of the miraculously rapid Allied victory was close coordination in the alliance, and a de facto specialization of tasks. Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo rarely consulted in the fashion of the Big Three, although ostensibly it was no more intrinsically difficult for them, as the older and more ideologically akin alliance, to do so than it was for the Allies. Yet as fascist dictatorships, the Axis powers had their own selfish and mutually suspicious aims. They were as likely to mistrust as to confer with their partners—sharing a way of doing business reflective of their own rise and hold on power within their own populations. The result was not just a series of Axis strategic lapses, but also of outright harm done to others of the alliance.

Both Germany and Japan fought and made pacts with Russia. And they did so at different times, without coordination, and often to the advantage of the Soviet Union. That opportunism was in sharp contrast to the simultaneous Allied pincers that by late 1944 were squeezing Germany from both east and west and at sea and in the air—with a firm understanding that none of the Big Three was to conduct a separate peace treaty with the Axis powers. Since antiquity, the dilemma of a two-front war has been not two theaters per se, but whether belligerents coordinated and synchronized their attacks for maximum effect against a common enemy.¹⁰

Allied leaders also more readily corrected their earlier flawed thinking; their Axis counterparts largely doubled down on their major blunders. Churchill’s idea of focusing solely on invading Europe through Italy was overridden. He stopped sending battle cruisers and battleships without air cover out to sea under Axis-controlled skies and gave up on a major Aegean front. Even Stalin relented on his suicidal orders of no retreats under any circumstances that had led to the loss of entire Russian armies in 1941. His about-face was not due to the fact that the Soviet Union was any less totalitarian or savage than the Third Reich, but largely because he did not quite live in the same world of fantasy that an increasingly delusional Hitler routinely did by 1942. General Zhukov gained influence in strategic decision-making with Stalin; generals like Manstein or von Rundstedt, who were close to Zhukov’s equal, steadily lost their earlier sway with Hitler.

The onetime assistant secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt and the former first sea lord Winston Churchill proved more open to compromise with their military advisors than did the erstwhile corporal Adolf Hitler with the German General Staff, or the former corporal Mussolini with the Chiefs of Staff of the Italian military. It is hard to see how the Allies, in the strange manner of Hitler, might have deployed nearly four hundred thousand needed troops to garrison duty in places like Norway, when the Third Reich was so short of soldiers on the front lines in Europe. No wonder the Prussian aristocrat Field Marshal von Rundstedt scoffed once of Hitler’s military ideas as fit for “a corporal’s war.” Certainly, the Allies avoided anything like the two great quagmires of the war—the invasions of Russia and China—where the German and Japanese armies were worn down for the course of the conflict and found that occupation of vast swaths of territory proved more costly than profitable.¹¹

Finally, in the historical military tension between the moral and the material, Allied soldiers in the field quickly reached near battlefield parity with more experienced Axis fighters, while German and Japanese industrial production fell ever further behind burgeoning American, British, and Soviet factory output. The Allies learned to fight like the Axis; the Axis never learned to produce like Allies. By 1943 the American 1st Marine Division was every bit as ferocious as any Japanese veteran force, while once-superior Japanese aircraft mostly fell further behind in quantity and quality to American fighters and bombers. Russian soldiers at Kursk may not have been as well trained, equipped, and led as German infantry and Panzer divisions. Nonetheless, they were just as courageous and deadly, and their second-generation tanks, fighters, and rockets were often roughly equal and always more numerous. After 1943, it is hard to find instances where Allied troops lost any major battle due to a lack of martial courage or spirit, at least in the manner of the numerically superior French in 1940.

EARLY ON, THE astute Allies certainly foresaw the means necessary to win World War II. But as victors they could hardly predict how both their idealism and cynicism would lead to a postwar world quite different from what they had anticipated from the defeat of the Axis nations. Indeed, wartime cooperation among the Allies ended before the war itself, as the destruction of large swaths of Europe and Asia raised questions not just about the ideologies that caused the ruin, but also about those that had not prevented it. Entire cities by 1945 were little more than names—Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Leningrad, Sevastopol, Stalingrad, Tokyo, Yokohama, or Warsaw. Amid some of the wreckage, eighteenth-century ideologies like British imperialism vanished as global communism spread.

The United States never envisioned that it would inherit the unenviable responsibility for protecting postwar and unpopular Germany, Italy, and Japan from its former ally, the Soviet Union. Nor did it foresee that its long-term cherished partner, China, would be both communist and at war with America within five years, and soon would inaugurate genocidal policies whose eventual butcher’s bill would probably exceed the toll of World War II itself. America was tainted by the task of rehabilitating fascists, while the Soviets boasted that the war for national liberation continued after 1945 spearheaded by the people’s Red Army. Washington had hoped for a peaceful world overseen by the benevolent United Nations, under its own paternal aegis. By 1946 most of the world was more likely to condemn the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war than the nonaggression pacts that the Soviet Union had signed with both fascist Germany and Japan that had ensured World War II would go global.

Few foresaw the United Nations evolving into an often anti-American organization, its impotence alone mitigating the consequences of its antipathy to the United States. For all Franklin Roosevelt’s inspired leadership, in his last enfeebled months he never quite grasped that his decisions about grand strategy made in 1944–1945 (drawing down US troops in China, not occupying Prague, not entering accessible German territory, inviting the Russians into the war against the Japanese, little worry about a future Russian presence in Korea) would soon have not only postwar implications but consequences that were antithetical to Roosevelt’s own often idealistic views of a postwar permanent peaceful order.¹²

The Borders of Germany in 1937 and 1945

Early in the war Britain had sensed that its eroding empire was doomed, and that its world position was being eclipsed by both the Soviet Union and the United States. But the British never quite anticipated that their postwar economy would soon grow weaker than those of both defeated (though more populous) Germany and Japan, or that some of its former colonies would metamorphose so quickly from independent nations to pro-Soviet belligerents. The Soviet Union had hoped to eliminate a common vulnerable border with Germany, but never quite dreamed that it would do so rather easily by creating an entire belt of client states of the so-called Warsaw Pact.

GIVEN SUCH PARADOXES, were any of the prewar goals of the respective belligerents attained? Certainly not those of the defeated. Germany went to war to expand its borders, create a pure racial state to the Volga River, exterminate the Jews, destroy Bolshevism, reclaim its national confidence, and position Germany as the arbiter of European culture and civilization in the twentieth century. As a result of that megalomania, it shrank to its smallest size since its nineteenth-century birth. The war had guaranteed that between 1943 and 1945 Germany was to be the home to more non-Germans—mostly imported workers and slave laborers—than at any time in its history. Hitler’s destruction of roughly half the world’s Jewish population helped to ensure the birth of the state of Israel, stained and warped German culture for the remainder of the twentieth century, and allowed the Russian liberators of the Eastern death camps their greatest moral capital since the Bolshevik revolution. Only the stigma of the war and the Holocaust guaranteed that Germany, quickly to be the strongest economic nation in Europe, would nonetheless remain non-nuclear and militarily the weakest of the major European powers in the twenty-first century, at times still plagued by self-doubt and guilt about its distant Nazi past.

A defeated Germany was divided first into four parts, then in 1949 reconsolidated into two opposing and antithetical capitalist and communist states, demarcating an entire European fault line between East and West for the next half century of the Cold War. A quarter to a third of the Third Reich’s territory of 1940 was lost to its neighbors.¹³

At least eleven million Germans were ethnically cleansed from German-speaking regions in 1945 by the Soviet Red Army and Eastern European satellite communist governments. None were accorded international refugee status in the fashion of simultaneously displaced peoples after the war. All were incorporated into either West or East Germany. There was not much consideration that their centuries-long ancestral residence in East Prussia, Silesia, Poland, Pomerania, and Czechoslovakia should accord them victim status or reparations for lost properties. There were no permanent refugee camps in Germany analogous to those in the Middle East; and no one expected that there should have been.¹⁴

All that said, Germany did not suffer the fate of its initial defeated victims, such as Poland, which had ceased to exist by 1940 and had its population slaughtered and starved. Under the auspices of the Potsdam Agreement arranged by Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States (July 17–August 2, 1945), the Western Allied occupation of Germany would prove comparatively mild compared to the recent German occupations of other nations’ territory, especially for a country that had killed five to six times more soldiers and civilians than it had lost. The harsher so-called Morgenthau Plan—a trial balloon memorandum of 1944 floated by the American secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr.—called for deindustrializing Germany and was eventually shelved. Western capital and troops poured into the American, British, and French zones of occupation both to help rebuild the cities and to protect the new West Germany from Soviet absorption.

Compliant German postwar behavior was ensured by the Allied destruction of Nazi ideology. West Germany was to be a Western-style democracy, closely monitored by occupying Allied troops. By 1949 it had been brought into the larger fold of Western European nations as the Federal Republic of Germany and by 1955 as a member of the NATO alliance. The permanent loss of large chunks of German-speaking territory, and nearly half a century of partitioning Germany were seen as insurance that Germany would not be at the heart of a new European war for a fourth time.

The West German government paid sizable reparations to many Nazi-occupied nations, this time without deliberately inflating its currency. Still more strategies facilitated that goal, such as a new national German spirit of not yoking economic dynamism to military power, and the postwar anomaly of both an economically weaker France and Britain that stockpiled nuclear weapons while a stronger Germany stayed strategically disarmed. The result was that if Germany was only two-thirds as large as its earlier borders, eighty million German-speakers—roughly the same size as its World War II population—now no longer spoke of the need for more Lebensraum. For the first time in over a century, there were to be almost no blocs of German-speakers in postwar Europe that did not live inside German or Austrian borders—and no German minorities agitating for any sort of Anschluss with the Fatherland.

The Nuremberg war crimes trials had begun well by bringing to justice scores of Nazi criminals. But throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s many of the convicted had their sentences reduced or set aside or simply were never really hunted down. France, for example, handed out more death sentences to its own citizens for collaboration with the Nazis than the Western Allies did to high Nazi officials. So frequent were the charges of working with the Nazis that Time magazine reported a new French definition of collaboration: “Anybody who collaborated more than you did.” None of the Allies quite knew what to do with most high-ranking German officers, given that most denied knowing of the Final Solution and, when clearly culpable of ordering executions, claiming they were only obeying Hitler’s orders. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, many ex-Wehrmacht generals were seen as essential to rebuilding West German defenses and of some value to American and British strategists in analyzing the results of World War II.¹⁵

In the new millennium of a politically united Europe, the German financial powerhouse has dominated a weak European Union (whose own future is problematic), especially in reference to feeble indebted Mediterranean economies. Berlin often set unpopular European Union immigration policy. An underfunded NATO is increasingly marginalized. Germany is united and its military future is uncertain. It seems at times increasingly skeptical of US leadership, advancing all sorts of legitimate and dubious reasons for its growing estrangement from Washington. By 2015, Germany was polling the most anti-American (less than 51 percent approval) of all major European nations. Occasional German historical revisionism plays upon lingering bitterness over either losing the war or, when it was deemed lost, still suffering needless devastation and cruelty at the hands of Anglo-American bombers and the Red Army.¹⁶

JAPAN HAD GONE to war to ratify and expand its new hegemony in the Pacific and Asia, hoping to replace European colonial powers with an empire of its own. But by starting a brutal war against most of Asia and the United States, Tokyo ensured that it would become hated by its neighbors for over a half century, disarmed, pacifist, and completely dependent on America for its security.

Japan had fought the Red Army for only a few months between July 1938 and August 1945. Its ground forces did not suffer quite the fatal consequences comparable to that of the Wehrmacht. The long Japanese occupation of China was mostly a one-sided affair, and the vast majority of deaths were Chinese. Postwar Japan’s growth was even more spectacular than was Germany’s; it was never divided into separate nations or in the months after the war threatened by immediate communist invasion. If Japan had a smaller prewar population than did the Greater German Third Reich by 1939 (roughly 73 million versus 80 million), it vastly outgrew postwar Germany and by 2015 was nearly fifty million people larger, with an annual gross national product $1 trillion greater.¹⁷

In World War II, Japan did to China what Germany had done to Russia in invading and waging a nihilistic war fueled by racial animosity, although it suffered only less than half the casualties of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Again, given its island geography, postwar Japan forfeited much less of what it believed was its native territory than did Germany. The United States was also more likely to hand back Okinawa than liberated Poland or Czechoslovakia were willing to return their German borderlands.

In the last year of the war a great many Imperial Japanese forces in the Pacific were bypassed by the Americans and British. Installations with hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers in Malaya, Korea, China, and Formosa surrendered largely intact at war’s end. All that said, Japan suffered enormous casualties—the fifth greatest toll in the war after Russia, China, Poland, and Germany. The firestorms from area bombing became routine in almost all the major Japanese cities, whose urban cores went up in flames from the incendiaries of the B-29s. Racism and righteous payback—and Japanese fanatical resistance—all explained why napalming Japanese cities did not earn the immediate moral outrage among the Allies that had followed the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden. Of all the Axis powers, Japan remained the only one to suffer the devastation of nuclear weapons. Yet it was also the sole Axis nation whose central homeland was not invaded and fought over on the ground. That paradox may have explained why Japan, despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suffered fewer civilian casualties than did war-torn Poland and Yugoslavia, and why Japan did not as unequivocally as Germany renounce its wartime fascist past. In the Western world far less was known of the extent of Japanese savagery in China than of Germany’s exterminations in the East.

Japan forfeited the south Kuril Islands, Sakhalin archipelago, and neighboring smaller islands to Russia, and lost some Pacific islands awarded from Germany after World War I. But not all these losses were considered traditional sacred Japanese ground. Nor was Taiwan, Manchuria, or Korea (Okinawa was, but by 1971 had been returned to Japan by the United States). Japan was occupied by the Americans and to a lesser extent by the British, but again, unlike Germany, never formally partitioned. Its former major enemies—China, Indonesia, Korea, and Malaya—had far less clout in postwar negotiations with the victorious Anglo-Americans than did Germany’s conquered or occupied neighbors. That fact too may explain greater Japanese reluctance to atone for its wartime sins.

Some of the most capable and infamous of Japanese field generals, such as Masaharu Homma, Iwane Matsui, and Tomoyuki Yamashita, were tried by various Allied courts and either hanged or shot, along with another nine hundred Japanese officers and government officials. There were a few other similarities with the reconstruction in postwar Germany. The Allied occupation forced land and voting reform, and a new constitution promoted Japanese commerce and forbade offensive military operations and a large military. Japan likewise channeled its national energy from its armed forces to economic prowess and soon its fiscal power became to the Pacific what Germany’s had to Europe. Just as the world had grown to accept that Hitler’s “People’s Car” was now the lovable hippie’s Volkswagen Bug, so too Mitsubishi came to be associated not with the deadly Zero fighter but with affordable and reliable compact automobiles; few seemed worried that in 2015 Japan’s second new helicopter carrier was named Kaga, after one of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s flattops at Pearl Harbor that was sunk six months later at Midway.¹⁸

The communist takeover of China and North Korea placed Japan in as vulnerable a geographic position as Germany had found itself with the Soviet Union. Security was found only under the nuclear defense umbrella of the United States. After the victory of the communists in the Chinese civil war and in North Korea, an economically powerful and friendly Japan was felt critical to the Western effort to stop the spread of communist aggression, in the same manner that occupied Western Germany had been enlisted as a military and economic buffer to the Soviet Union. That realist calculus was yet another reason why Japan did not confront its imperial past—a fact that in the twenty-first century still poses more paradoxes for its Asian allies.

BENITO MUSSOLINI DREAMED of a new Mediterranean Roman Empire. The war, however, ensured that there would never again be any Italian presence outside Italy itself. Indeed, Mussolini’s Italy survived only three years of war and was the first of the Axis powers to fall. After huge losses and humiliation in North Africa and in the Balkans, the Grand Council of Fascism and King Victor Emmanuel III deposed the bewildered Il Duce in July 1943, even as the Allies overran Sicily. A new government sought to ingratiate itself with the occupying Allies, as if Italy could go from a being member of the Axis to part of the Allies overnight. In reality, thousands of pro- and anti-fascist partisans roamed the Italian countryside for the next two years, presaging the political tensions and factions that would characterize Italy’s postwar governments for the next half century.¹⁹

Italy on its own in World War II won just one small war against the British in Somaliland in August 1940—and the verdict was overturned in months. The peculiar circumstances of both Mussolini’s brand of incompetent fascism and his downfall, and the subsequent continuation of the war in Italy largely against German forces, led to a quite different and relatively less harsh postwar environment.²⁰

By deposing Mussolini before the official end of the war, the Italians—fairly or not—could better advance claims that they, too, had been his victims. Citizens of none of the other Axis powers would kill their own dictator. Italians were supportive by late 1943 of American and British forces in their stalled drives against successive German lines of resistance. German reprisals and gratuitous barbarity against Italian civilians in Italy, Greece, and Germany likewise helped cement the image that Italy had been more likely victimized by Mussolini than systematically and inherently evil in the manner of the Germans. The Italians pointed to massacres of their soldiers by Nazi troops in 1943–1945 as proof that they now stood apart from the Axis that Mussolini forced them to join.²¹

Despite Mussolini’s racism and cobbled-together fantasy talk of razza and spazio vitale, Italy never quite developed the savage racist ideology that had led to the Holocaust or Japan’s widescale atrocities against the Chinese. For all its mythopoeic talk of twentieth-century modernism, Mussolini’s ideology was reactionary, harkening back to reviving the grandeur of Rome as much as promoting a new racially superior civilization, as was the case for Germany and Japan.

Although Italy waged a brutal and inhumane war in Africa—with more than one million poorly equipped Ethiopian, Somali, and Libyan soldiers and civilians killed—the Eurocentric Allies were less likely to equate Italian savagery against Ethiopians and Somalis with the German crime of slaughtering European civilians. Sizable Italian minorities in the United States also were more influential politically than the earlier and mostly assimilated nineteenth-century German immigrants and, as Europeans, did not suffer quite to the same degree the racial prejudices accorded the West Coast Japanese. The wartime Vatican had remained the center of Catholicism, and it was soon easier for many Allies to equate Italianism with the Pope than with Mussolini. Jews usually fared better in Italy and its occupied areas than was true under the Third Reich.

Italy, moreover, was an entirely Anglo-American theater. The Russians did not enter the Italian Peninsula even belatedly, as in the case of the war against Japan. The British and Americans were free to adjudicate the fate of Italy as they saw best. Strangely, the Soviets only halfheartedly advanced the argument that the Italians, despite their surprisingly large presence on the Eastern Front (over 80,000 of their soldiers would never come home), had ever really been at war against the USSR.

Finally, the Italian homeland, bombed constantly, was also fought over far longer than was true of Germany: two years on the ground in comparison to less than four months. It took the Americans over three years to reach the German frontiers, but about half that time to land in Italy. The destruction to Italy wrought by American, British, and German armies—and Italian partisans—was substantial, even as Italy entered a quasi–civil war between fascist diehards and communists eager for reckoning. As a result, Italy was felt to have suffered enormously without the need for subsequent partitioning, especially given its maritime and Austrian buffers from the Red Army. The complete loss of its vast overseas empire in the Adriatic, Africa, the Aegean, and the Balkans was apparently considered punishment enough without additional territorial concessions.

IN SUM, DESPITE paradoxes that followed the war, the Allies certainly achieved at least some of their collective prewar aims. All the conquered territory absorbed by the Axis between 1939 and 1944 was liberated from German, Italian, and Japanese control, albeit with large chunks absorbed by the Soviet Union and its new satellite clients. The complete destruction of European Jewry was stopped, but only after over half of the murderous agenda of Hitler was already completed. Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism were not just destroyed as ideologies, but their most influential adherents were humiliated and hunted down as well. None exists as a viable movement today. Despite reprieves, commutations, and pardons, many of those most responsible for starting the war and committing crimes against humanity were put on trial and punished, in a way unique in some 2,500 years of Western military history.

The fear of such a postwar accounting led many like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler to commit suicide rather than face postwar reckoning and hanging. The Axis Big Three—Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini—all died violently as a result of their defeat. Allied leaders passed away peacefully of old age and infirmity. Successful democracies replaced Axis dictatorships. Germany, Japan, and Italy became model global citizens. Central Europe and the South China Sea for over a half century were no longer to be the powder kegs of war. Another world war was averted.

More long-term, utopian goals were only half realized. Nuclear weapons, the NATO alliance, and the fear of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War more likely prevented World War III than did the moral censure of the war-born United Nations. The totalitarian absorption of Eastern Europe that had proved a catalyst for World War II was institutionalized by 1945—albeit with Stalinist puppet governments replacing their earlier Nazi-dominated counterparts, an outcome that was not overturned until 1989 and afterward.²²

In the ensuing decades perhaps some sixty to seventy million were eventually to perish from Mao Zedong’s unending paranoid revolutions, a far greater death toll in relative peacetime than inflicted by the wartime Japanese. The immediate American postwar dream of a like-minded world governance of free-market democracies proved no more lasting than the British notion of an evolving empire turned into a close-knit commonwealth organized by enlightened British military and economic leadership.²³

Of all the six major belligerents of World War II, the Soviet Union, despite suffering the worst losses of the war, best succeeded in its war aims: the defeat of the Axis powers, the reincorporation into the Soviet Empire of the Baltic states and occupied eastern Poland, followed by the establishment of huge buffer zones on the borders of the Soviet Union, all characterized by Eastern European communist dictatorships in fealty to Moscow. Most of what Stalin had stolen through his partnership with Hitler, he had retained by the time of the latter’s death. The communist takeover of all of Eastern Europe, China, and much of mainland Asia realized Stalin’s wartime visions. Finland and Austria were neutralized.

The embrace of and help to the Soviet Union after June 1941 by the United States and Britain explain many of these anomalies. Yet the partnering with such an odious ally, while morally repugnant, was militarily defensible. Helping Stalin was probably preferable to standing aloof and simply allowing tens of millions of Russian and Eastern European civilians to be wiped out or to commit millions of additional British and American infantry forces to neuter another two hundred of Hitler’s divisions.²⁴

Still, the necessary partnership with Russia blurred the focus on the prior mass murders by Stalin and the enslavements of Eastern Europeans to follow. The millions exterminated by Stalin before the war were overshadowed by the over twenty-seven million Russian war dead, who heroically perished to destroy National Socialism and helped to stop the final completion of the Holocaust. The postwar world seemed to have forgotten that Stalin had killed almost as many of his own Russians as did Hitler.

Meanwhile, the Soviets, erstwhile abettors of Hitler and partners in a nonaggression pact with the Imperial Japanese, broadcast that they continued to be “democratic” and thus the true liberators, now freeing colonial peoples from the fascist yoke in the fashion they had during the war. The Roosevelt administration’s naiveté that Stalin might be a fellow anti-imperialist (and thus would share an American distrust of the British Empire) was perhaps the most embarrassing of all the American assumptions about the war, given that the Soviet Union’s aggrandizement was ongoing, brutal, and always predictable.²⁵

It was tragically ironic that shortly after the Yalta Conference of February 1945—when the Soviet Union at last conceded to British and American entreaties to enter the Pacific war against Japan within ninety days of the defeat of Hitler—the Allies would learn that Russia was mostly unneeded in the Pacific. Indeed, the Soviets’ opportunistic entry into the Pacific war could only have deleterious effects on postwar China, Korea, Indochina, and Japan. Stalin had grown increasingly convinced after the Normandy landings and bombing campaigns that the democracies, in fact, were adept in war making and were winning back as much Axis territory as the Soviets, but at far less cost. Yet had Yalta perhaps taken place months later, when the full effect of the American fire raids on Japan of March 1945 were calibrated, when it was almost certain that an atomic bomb could be successfully tested by July 1945, when Harry Truman was president, and when the Allies had more evidence of Stalin’s perfidy as he entered Eastern Europe, the Soviets might not have been lobbied to join in against Japan and thus might have had less postwar Asian influence in areas that would plague the West for the next half century.²⁶

AT HOME, THE Allied wartime propaganda of fighting for the freedom of the individual was a chit that had to be redeemed, if only superficially, when hostilities ended. The ensuing movements for civil rights for African-Americans and other minorities, and for greater equality for women, began not just from vast changes in the wartime social and commercial fabric of America—among them a growing economy—but also from the arguments that a victorious American democracy had advanced in justifying its cause.

The war led to a new American engagement abroad. The United States spearheaded NATO and its lesser Pacific imitations, and began to intervene routinely around the world to shore up anticommunist and sometimes authoritarian regimes, as if engagement in the 1950s would not repeat the mistakes of what followed from the isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s. If stopping the Axis had saved the world, so too halting Stalinist communism was seen as crucial to rebuilding it. American isolationism of the prewar era was a victim of victory. So too was chronic worry about the resurgence of economic depression. Much of the world after 1945 lay in ruins. All the old industrial powers of France, Germany, Japan, and Russia had been bombed, looted, or occupied. The new economic Tigers of the twenty-first century—China, South Korea, and Taiwan—did not yet exist. America’s only major competitor, Great Britain, turned inward, nationalizing much of its economy at home and dismantling its presence abroad. In such a commercial and security void, the United States for two decades after the war supplied the world with food, material and industrial goods, capital, and new products, and thus grew economically as never before. From 1945 to 1970, the United States usually ran a surplus balance of payments, but almost never after that.

The claims of the high-minded success of World War II were often juxtaposed to the complexity of the Cold War. The hardships of a Depression-era and war-fighting generation often were forgotten or underappreciated amid the postwar affluence and leisure of its progeny, an incongruity of outlooks labeled a “Generation Gap” in the decades following the war. To a more-affluent generation, that America had once fought the good fight seemed to suggest that it somehow could and should have waged the perfect fight in World War II.

In the end, Americans, who could not settle on much else, agreed that in World War II its greatest generation of leaders—Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Stimson, Omar Bradley, George Patton, Chester Nimitz, Douglas MacArthur, and others—saved the country and perhaps civilization as well from the Axis, and created democracy in the political systems of Germany, Japan, and Italy, the countries that had once set the world on fire.

GREAT BRITAIN’S GREATEST contributions to the Allied effort were moral as well as material. Without its successful solitary resistance against Germany and Italy from June 25, 1940, until June 22, 1941, the war would have either been lost or not waged at all. Alone of all six belligerents, it fought the war from its very beginning in September 1939 to its final end in September 1945. That said, the various blitzes and German rocket attacks that hit the homeland killed over fifty thousand British subjects as the earlier violence of the trenches had not. The United States bore the greater financial and material cost in the struggle against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Yet in key areas—cryptography, radar, antisubmarine tactics, strategic bombing, and grand strategy—Britain’s earlier experience in the war saved the Americans thousands of lives. Winston Churchill’s refusal to deal with Hitler—when the Third Reich ruled Europe, allied itself with the Soviet Union, and was not at war with America—kept resistance to Nazism alive. Great Britain’s defiance would eventually turn Hitler eastward to commit the greatest blunder of the war.

For a variety of reasons, wartime British industry, which had so often outproduced both German and Japanese munitions, in the postwar era gradually lagged behind both rebuilt economies, not always out of necessity but also due to poor economic policy. Countries of the old Axis found advantages in restarting their postwar economies ex nihilo. Britain was stuck with the consequences of victory.²⁷

During the 1944 and 1945 Allied summits, American diplomats, especially in the case of Roosevelt during the Yalta Conference, occasionally played Churchill off against Stalin to tweak the British. American generals resented being treated in condescending fashion by British political and military leaders, as if they were playing Roman centurions to their British would-be Athenian-robed philosophers.²⁸

The State Department felt that astute British worries about Stalin’s plans for Eastern Europe were mostly nineteenth-century Great Game melodramas. Roosevelt, for example, unlike Churchill, was determined to suppress the truth of the spring 1940 Soviet massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, worried that Polish-Americans might draw the incorrect conclusions about the wartime alliance with the USSR. He also assumed that there was a moral equivalence between British imperialism and Soviet communism, and perhaps even thought that the former was by design exploitive but the latter was an idealism gone wrong. The British ethos after the war was perhaps best summed up (oddly in the midst of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis) by the British ambassador to the United States, Sir David Ormsby-Gore: “In the end it may well be that Britain will be honored by the historians more for the way she deposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.”²⁹

American postwar military and economic aid, while generous to both friends and former enemies, focused as much on the defeated in Europe and Asia as on the exhausted British ally. The postwar appraisal of Stalin’s aggression lagged behind in the United States and needed Winston Churchill’s landmark 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, to begin to see the realities of the ideological struggles ahead. Perhaps not until the United States inherited the British responsibilities of a global watchdog in the late 1940s did America fully appreciate Britain’s paradoxes as a former global power between keeping order and promoting justice.³⁰

Soon the Americans, with the zealotry of converts, pushed Cold War containment far more vigorously than the less materially equipped British. World War I had ended the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires. World War II finished Britain’s and birthed new Soviet and American successors. For all its worries of preserving imperial majesty, Britain nonetheless fought World War II to destroy Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese militarists rather than to attempt to accommodate fascism with its own imperial agendas.

In terms of combined air, naval, land, and industrial power, the smallest of the three major Allies proved stronger than any of the Axis powers. If Britain lost its global role in the postwar years, this was as much due to social changes as to the consequences of blood and treasure lost in World War II.

THE SOVIET UNION was both the biggest loser and the greatest winner of the war. It suffered the most dead—somewhere near twenty-seven million lives—of any Axis or Allied power. Much of its land and many cities from occupied Poland to the Volga were ruined, even as the Soviet Union reached its apex after the war, with acquisitions in the Baltic states, in southern Finland, and its vast new protectorate in Eastern Europe.

Millions of postwar Russians were without basic housing and secure food supplies. Soviet industry remained warped by wartime exigencies. The Great Patriotic War saved the reputation of Stalinism for another generation, but with catastrophic consequences for the millions who survived the war and were forced to live under it. As a result of the Cold War and the odious nature of Stalinism, the Soviet war effort was often not given full credit in the anticommunist West for its near-virtuoso destruction of the German army. But on balance, the wartime alliance also tended to downplay the fact that the horrific waste of Russian manpower was often due to the savagery of Stalin’s leadership or the incompetence in 1941 of his generals.

The war, then, left both the Russians and the world at large confused by the Soviet Union’s record of both heroism and duplicity. Stalin had once been both Hitler’s greatest asset and his worst enemy, the salvation of the West during war and its existential enemy in peace. No other country lost so many of its own to Germany or killed so many Germans. No nation’s army fought so ineptly and so brilliantly, and sacrificed millions of its own to kill millions of Germans.

In the postwar world, the country that had produced Katyusha rockets and the T-34 tanks that bested the Wehrmacht’s Tigers and Panthers could never create anything for its own consumers approaching the craftsmanship or quality of a Mercedes-Benz or BMW automobile, much less millions of quality GE refrigerators and ranges. The Allies had won the war in part because the industrial might of the Soviet Union equipped a vast army of millions with thousands of simple, durable, and superb tanks, artillery, and rockets. After the war, these munitions flooded Cold War battlegrounds from Korea to Budapest and ensured that they were as much a bane to the West as they had once been a boon.

The human paradoxes were even greater. Russia helped to save the Allied cause by its great sacrifices. Yet the Allied war effort to defeat Germany saved communism. The Soviet cities of Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad—unlike Amsterdam, Athens, Brussels, Copenhagen, and Paris—were never taken by the Germans, but they suffered more death and destruction in their survival than all of those in the West had in their capture. All of these incongruities logically followed from the most profound irony: the war against fascism was won only with the help of the greatest totalitarian power of all. After 1945, attempting to reason with Stalin to allow national self-determination and autonomy made about as much sense as trying to convince Hitler to stop at the Anschluss or with Czechoslovakia.

WITH THE ATLANTIC Charter, the rationale of the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, and the promise of a United Nations, the Allies had created exalted moral expectations. Yet keeping to the highest moral ground in World War II had proved impossible for at least two reasons—aside from the inclusion of the totalitarian Soviet Union on the Allied side—that have complicated most moral appraisals of the war for the last eight decades.

First, the demand for unconditional surrender—a historically rare objective of most wars—required a level of violence unforeseen in the modern era, given the zeal, resources, and combined population of over 200 million in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Area, incendiary, and atomic bombing largely killed civilians. Indeed, far more German and Japanese noncombatants died than their British or American civilian counterparts. The logical argument that a belligerent’s civilian casualties were tied to the savagery of its own military resonated only during the war.

Later, self-critical, affluent, and leisured citizens of the democracies asked why their fathers had killed more German and Japanese civilians than the latter had killed noncombatant British and Americans. A new postmodern idea of “proportionality” arose in the West (but certainly not in China and Russia), suggesting that in war the defender should seek to pay back aggressors with no more lethal force than was originally used against it. The classical idea that invaders are only permanently stopped by military defeat, occupation, humiliation, and a forced change in their politics appeared Roman and at odds with the evolving ethical professions of the West. The old unapologetic classical defenses of disproportionality—“they started it; we finished it” or “we killed more of them, to save more of us and ours” or “they will never try that again”—seemed vacuous to generations that had not survived a torpedoed Liberty ship in the icy Atlantic, parachuted out from a flaming B-17 over Schweinfurt, seen the ovens at Buchenwald, or fought at Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa. Stranger still, in discussions of Allied bombing, few note that the losing Axis powers inflicted 80 percent of the fatalities of World War II—the vast majority of them unarmed civilians.

Second, the postwar Allies became captive of their own self-professed idealism. Britain fought as an imperial power that sought to liberate Nazi-occupied nations and give them free elections, a liberality it had not yet extended to its own restless colonies from India to Africa. The United States went to war to extinguish fascist racism and brutality unleashed against those not considered members of the various Axis master races. Yet, the US military itself was a semi-apartheid force, in which blacks could not serve as equals to their white fellow citizens—a reflection of the segregation that plagued much of contemporary America in the 1940s, most prominently in the Old South.

The Anglo-Americans did not present well the more nuanced argument that they were evolving democratic societies, whose natural postwar trajectories would lead to greater self-determination abroad and political equality at home. Such subtleties are difficult to articulate at any time and perhaps impossible in the middle of existential wars. But the resulting reticence to deal with these issues set up the victors as easy targets of national liberationist invective in the decades that followed 1945 and have still fueled constant revisionism about the moral foundations of World War II.

THE PROPER MORAL appraisal of World War II is not as nuanced as we sometimes are led to believe. Aggressive fascist powers began hostilities with unprovoked assaults during peace as the logical consequence of their own ideologies; the only common bond that held together the diverse Allies was that almost all had been surprise attacked at some point by Axis powers. As a general rule, during the war the Axis were far more likely to commit genocide and institutionalized savagery and brutality than the Allies. All other things being equal, third parties by 1943 had preferred to be liberated by the Allies than to continue to be occupied by the Axis. The attacked Allies responded with terrible retribution masked in liberationist idealism, aimed at destroying, not defeating, fascism, without much worry what the likely consequences of their disparate alliance would mean for the postwar world. For the victors, the way the war was fought and ended was not perfect, but just good enough, given the alternative world of a horrifying Axis victory.

World War II was novel in its industrial barbarity and unprecedented lethal consequences, but it was also a traditional Western conflict in that it broke out when the Allies in the late 1930s and early 1940s lost a sense of the power of deterrence. The Axis then gambled that they had more to gain than to lose in an otherwise unwise aggressive war, and that they could defeat or intimidate into submission their stronger enemies before they could unite, rearm, and mobilize. The ensuing conflict could only end when the aggressors were beaten in every respect, occupied, and humiliated—and they were in fact so defeated due to brilliant Allied leadership, wise industrial policy, technological ingenuity, and the morale of righteously aggrieved peoples.

Peace of a sort returned, as it always had in the West, when the fog of death cleared. Deterrence, a balance of power, and alliances more or less kept the global postwar calm in a way that supranational bodies tragically could not. As General George Patton publicly lamented during the last days of the war in Europe in his desire to keep the US military well equipped, “nobody can prevent another war. There will be wars as long as our great-great-grandchildren live. The only thing we can do is to produce a longer peace phase between wars.”³¹

The tragedy of World War II—a preventable conflict—was that sixty million people had perished to confirm that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain were far stronger than the fascist powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy after all—a fact that should have been self-evident and in no need of such a bloody laboratory, if not for prior British appeasement, American isolationism, and Russian collaboration.