World War II: Victors, Losers and Reasons

Those who know me will tell that I am very much an academic dabbler, I rarely stay within one subject. A consequence of this is that I frequently find myself having rather abstract and or unexpceted converstaions. In one of these recently, I was asked by my interlocutor about my views on the reasons for the Allied victory in World War II.

The only logical conclusion I could sensibly arrive at was that the outcome of the war was indeed a joint effort. However, not in the common sense of the phrase.
Permit me to explain: The most commonly held view is that the victory was earned by large-scale cooperation between allied powers. My conclusion was that, in the European theatre at least, the outcome was the result of an unwitting and unforseen joint effort between The Allies and Axis forces.

It is very true to say that the Alliances (on both sides) of WWII produced international cooperation the likes of which had never been known. The relationship that Britain and America forged during those four years of US involvement paved the way for what is probably still the strongest international friendship on earth. Many people have argued, with varying degrees of success, that the war would have been lost without US involvement. I don’t believe that, after winning the “Battle of Britain” struggle for channel air superiority, and breaking the German Naval Enigma cipher, Britain was in a very good position to be able to ‘hold out’ almost indefinitely against a Nazi Europe. What Britain could not do was liberate occupied Europe from Nazi control. Thus I can conclude that American intervention was a necessary component in actively winning the war, as opposed to simply not losing it.
Having decided that US intervention was a necessary condition for Allied victory in Europe, the question remains as to whether it was a sufficient condition, that is to say, is the situation such that if this condition and only this condition is met, is that outcome then assured?
That call is much harder to make. I do not believe it would do justice to the men who planned and fought the campaign against Hitler and Nazi Germany to say that their efforts were insufficient to win the conflict in question. With the Enigma broken and all Axis movements known, the intelligence edge would have been enough to secure victory by allied effort… eventually.
However, the twin factor at work in ending the war by 1945 was not Allied effort, but Axis mistakes. In other words, it wasn’t just that the Allies won the war, but also that Hitler lost it. The first major blunder of Hitler’s military campaign was a strategic one. Late autumn is not a good time to order an army to Moscow. Lack of appropriate equipment to deal with the extreme cold and the catastrophic stalling of Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics into attrition warfare at Stalingrad resulted in the elimination of nearly half of Germany’s standing army before the Allied invasion of occupied Europe even began.
Another elementary mistake made by Nazi Germany was the over-confident use and treatment of the Enigma Machine. The German High Command was so confident that the code could not be broken that they introduced measures designed to make life easier for operators, that, cryptographically speaking, are nothing short of sloppy practice. Measures like ‘double-tapping’ the day’s setting entry… thus creating code duplication. Each of these giveaways on their own are not much, but when combined they rendered the Enigma vulnerable to decryption. (Similar mistakes and arrogance also allowed the breaking of the more complex Lorenz cipher used for internal High Command communication.) It is estimated that the decryption work done by the Allies shaved two years off the runtime of the war, but this work could not have been completed without substantial German mistakes.
One final Wehrmacht blunder worth mentioning is the continued use of blitzkrieg tactics beyond the opening battles of the war. As the number of vehicles available to an army for use as transports decreases, so does the effective range of any blitzkrieg operation. This is because the primary limit on blitzkrieg is the risk that assaulting forces may outrun and outreach their supply lines, thus stranding themselves on the front line with no fuel, food, water or ammunition… not a good way to fight. After the Allied invasion, supply lines were significantly shortened by a lack of vehicles and broken pipelines. This was not taken into account when planning blitzkrieg counter-attacks, and a result of this was that panzer divisions simply went too far too fast, and ran out of the four essentials listed above.

When these military misjudgements are combined with Germany’s erroneous decision to channel funding and resources into research and development of far-from-completion experimental projects such as rocket powered fighters, the result is a wehrmacht that is fighting an Allied invasion with one hand tied behind its back. A conflict on the scale of WWII requires more than a winning side to resolve, it also requires a losing one, and Nazi Germany fulfilled that role very well indeed.

The argument above is applicable to the European theatre, However the Pacific theatre was a very different story. It is much harder to argue the case for catastrophic individual mistakes in the Pacific. The closest one can come is to argue that Admiral Yamamoto’s wrong decision about aircraft payloads and landing priorities at the battle of midway was responsible for the loss of Japan’s carrier fleet, which was a key turning point in the campaign. However I don’t believe that his decisions were flawed in the same way Nazi Germany’s decisions were, Nazi Germany should have known better. Admiral Yamamoto could not, he took a gamble and lost, plain and simple.

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