Conclusion
The Second World War left deep wounds. Fifty million perished, twenty-eight million of whom were civilians. Russia and China together accounted for thirty million killed; their principal enemies, Germany and Japan, another nine million; Poland, caught between two towering ideological foes, suffered civilian losses of about four to five million.
The distinction between civilians and combatants, the rear area and the front line, had been erased in the minds of many long before the first trigger was pulled. The high proportion of civilian deaths was testimony to the boundless violence with which the war was conducted, as well as to the power of the ideologies that millions fought and willingly sacrificed their lives for. Nothing epitomized this more than Nazi Germany's systematic murder of six million Jews. To put this crime against the idea of a common humanity into context, one should recall that the Final Solution claimed one-third of the world's total Jewish population in 1939. In Poland alone, Hitler and his followers murdered more than two and a half million Jews, or 90 per cent of all the Jews in pre-war Poland.The suffering did not end with the dead or those who knew and loved them. Millions staggered as refugees over the gutted remains of European civilization. Mobs meted out justice to collaborators and many more besides. Millions were forced to flee. In the wake of the conflict people were being shifted en masse to fit the new frontiers. ‘We must expel all the Germans,' exclaimed one Polish communist, ‘because countries are built on national lines and not on multinational ones.' The Germans were not alone in suffering this fate. Much of Eastern Europe witnessed the expulsion of ethnic and religious minorities. Europe's nightmare ended in a brutal peace. The old European game of Great Power competition was now over, and the continent was set to become one battlefield (albeit the most important one) in a wider Cold War world, with a divided Germany as its epicentre.
Debating why the Allies won the Second World War
At what point did the Allies win the Second World War? Was the outcome predetermined from the weight of Allied economic resources? Was victory always beyond the reach of the Axis states? In the view of many military and economic historians, the outcome of the war was no longer in any doubt after December 1941. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the United States brought together a coalition of Great Powers that could not fail to win so long as they continued to fight long enough. As R. A. C. Parker put it in The Second World War (Oxford, 2001), ‘the Allies must win if they stayed together'.
The statistics make Parker's case persuasive. Even in the year most favourable to the Axis in fighting performance and strategic advantages, the Allies still possessed a healthy margin over their foes in wealth, exploited and untapped resources, weapons and manpower. After 1942, the superiority grew at an astronomical rate. Mark Harrison, a leading historian of the economics of the Second World War, argues in The Economics of World War II (Cambridge, 2000) that once the initial Axis attacks petered out,the 'economic fundamentals' reasserted themselves: 'The greater Allied capacity for taking risks, absorbing the cost of mistakes, replacing losses, and accumulating overwhelming quantitative superiority now turned against the Axis. Ultimately, economics determined the outcome.'
Richard Overy, in his Why the Allies Won (London, 1995), rejects the large dose of determinism in explanations based on statistics alone. He locates the war's turning point much later than the end of 1941. 'On the face of things,' he writes, 'no rational man in early 1942 would have guessed at the eventual outcome of the war.' A rich account of why the Allies won, Overy asserts, must consider a whole series of contingent factors. The war was as much a moral, political, technical and organizational contest as it was a race to stockpile resources.
Scholars must explain why Germany, Italy and Japan failed to exploit their full productive potential in 1942 and thus lost their operational and strategic momentum. If the organizational weaknesses had been overcome by the aggressors, allowing them to realize their potential, then 'the Axis by 1942 might well have proved the irresistible force'. Quantity of men and arms, moreover, tells us little about quality. Remarkably quickly, the Allies managed to close the qualitative gap and rally their peoples to fight the long hard battles required to destroy the Axis. Even so, the critical campaigns of 1942 were won by the Allies by slender margins.Recommended reading
Many of the books cited in the recommended reading of Chapter 7 also cover 1940—41. On the United States, students will find Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War Two (Oxford, 1988) indispensable. For Italy, see MacGregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed 1939—41 (Cambridge, 1982). For a survey of the period before the coming of global war, see John Lukacs, The Last European War, September 1939—December 1941 (New York, 1976).
On the Phoney War, see Thomas Munch-Petersen, The Strategy of the Phoney War: Britain, Sweden and the Iron Ore Question, 1939—1940 (Stockholm, 1981), Talbot Imlay, ‘Allied Economic Intelligence and Strategy during the “Phoney War”’, Intelligence and National Security (1998), vol. 13, pp. 107—32 and his excellent Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain and France, 1938—40 (Oxford, 2003). On France and 1940, see Martin S. Alexander, ‘The Fall of France 1940’, Journal of Strategic Studies (1990), vol. 13, pp. 10—44 and Joel Blatt, The French Defeat of1940: Reassessment (Oxford, 1997). For an account of 1940 that stresses the role of intelligence, read Ernest R. May’s superb Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest ofFrance (London, 2000). For the official German histories, see Bernd Stegemann et al.
(eds), Germany and the Second World War, vol. II: Germany’s Initial Conquests in Europe (Oxford, 1991) and Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West (Annapolis, MD, 2005).The best analytical study of the British decision to fight on in the summer of 1940 is Chapter 6 of Christopher Hill, Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1991) and the most readable is John Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940 (London, 1994). See also Philip M. Bell, A Certain Eventuality: Britain and the Fall ofFrance (Farnborough, 1974) and David Reynolds, ‘Churchill and Britain’s Decision to Fight on in 1940’, in Richard Langhorne (ed.), Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War (Cambridge, 1985). For an essential study of the politics of Lend-Lease, consult Warren F. Kimball's The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease 1939—1941 (Baltimore, MD, 1969). For a panoramic and insightful view of the consequences of the French defeat, see David Reynolds, ‘1940: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century', International Affairs (1990), vol. 66, pp.325-50.
For the origins of Operation Barbarossa, a good place to start is the official German history by Horst Boog et al. (eds), Germany and the Second World War, vol. V: The Attack on the Soviet Union (Oxford, 1996). The finest book on Stalin's policy is Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (London, 1999). Also see Constantine Pleshakov, Stalin’s Folly: The Secret History of the German Invasion of Russia, June 1941 (London, 2005). There are also two valuable essay collections: David Dilks and John Erickson (eds), Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies (Edinburgh, 1994); and Bernd Wegner, From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939—1941 (Oxford, 1997).
On the course and conduct of the war, students will be grateful to I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot for editing The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford, 1995). It offers well over a thousand pages of mini-essays on every aspect of the war, as well as plenty of maps, tables and illustrations.
General surveys vary in length and detail. R. A. C. Parker, The Second World War: A Short History (Oxford, 2001) is the best of the short books. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World in Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 1994) is considerably longer and the best of them all. On the origins of the Holocaust, see Gotz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder ofEuropean Jews (London, 1999) and Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays in the Launching of the Final Solution (Cambridge, 1992). Omar Bartov offers a fascinating and provocative analysis of the relationship between National Socialism and the German army in Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and the War in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1992). On the course and conduct of the Pacific War, read Ronald H. Spector, Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan (London, 1984) and John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986).This chapter relied extensively on Richard J. Overy's tour deforce, Why the Allies Won (London, 1995). For an account which stresses the role of economics, see Mark Harrison's essay in The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge, 2000). The essays in David Reynolds, Warren F. Kimball and A. O. Chubarian (eds), Allies at War: The Soviet, American and British Experience, 1939—45 (London, 1994) are also valuable. On intelligence, the literature is huge and growing. Two overviews of the subject are Ralph Bennett, Behind the Battle: Intelligence in the War with Germany (London,
1994) and Ronald Lewin, The American Magic: Codes, Cyphers, and the Defeat of Japan (New York, 1982). See also John Ferris, ‘Ralph Bennett and the Study of Ultra', Intelligence and National Security (1991), vol. 6, pp. 437-86.
On the collapse of the Grand Alliance, there is a short introduction with documents by Martin McCauley, The Origins of the Cold War, 2nd edn (London,
1995) and an excellent collection of essays by leading scholars, Ann Lane and Howard Temperley (eds), The Rise and Fall of the Grand Alliance, 1941—1945 (Basingstoke, 1995) (including an excellent chapter on the atomic bomb by David Holloway). Studies that begin with the wartime diplomacy of the Big Three include Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ, 1991), Keith Sainsbury, The Turning Point... the Moscow, Cairo and Teheran Conferences (Oxford, 1985) and Vojtect Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941—1945 (New York, 1979). More generally on the coming of the Cold War, see John L. Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford 1997) and Vladislav M. Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA, 1996).