World War II, 1939–45

War once again broke out over nationality conflicts in east-central Europe, provoked in part by a German drive for continental hegemony, and it expanded, once again, into a global conflict whose battle zones touched the waters or heartlands of almost every continent. The total nature of World War II surpassed that of 1914–18 in that civilian populations not only contributed to the war effort but also became direct targets of aerial attack. Moreover, in 1941 the Nazi regime unleashed a war of extermination against Slavs, Jews, and other elements deemed inferior by Hitler’s ideology, while Stalinist Russia extended its campaign of terror against the Ukrainians to the conquered Poles. The Japanese-American war in the Pacific also assumed at times the brutal aspect of a war between races. This ultimate democratization of warfare eliminated the age-old distinction between combatants and non-combatants and ensured that total casualties in World War II would greatly exceed those of World War I and that civilian casualties would exceed the military.

Once again the European war devolved into a contest between a German-occupied Mitteleuropa and a peripheral Allied coalition. But this time Italy abandoned neutrality for the German side, and the Soviet Union held out in the east, while France collapsed in the west. Hence Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin took France’s place in meetings of the “Big Three,” together with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The Japanese chose to remain neutral vis-à-vis the U.S.S.R., while the Grand Alliance of anti-Fascist states simmered with conflicts over strategy and war aims. World War II, therefore, comprised several parallel or overlapping wars, while the war in Europe became a kind of three-way struggle among the forces of democracy, Nazism, and Communism. As soon as German and Japanese power were effaced, the conflicts among the victors burst into the open and gave birth to the Cold War. World War II completed the destruction of the old Great Power system, prepared the disintegration of Europe’s overseas empires, and submerged Europe itself into a world arena dominated by the Soviet Union and the United States.

The last European war, 1939–41
Poland and the northern war

At first glance Germany might have seemed the underdog in the war launched by Hitler. The Wehrmacht numbered 54 active divisions, compared to 55 French, 30 Polish, and two British divisions available for the Continent. But the combination of German Blitzkrieg tactics, French inactivity, and Russian perfidy doomed Poland to swift defeat. The German army command deployed 40 of its divisions, including all six panzer (armoured) divisions and two-thirds of its 3,500 aircraft in the east. The so-called Siegfried Line in the west, manned by 11 active divisions and reserve units as they became available, sufficed to block a French advance. Beginning on September 1, 1939, General Fedor von Bock’s northern army corps pinched off the Polish Corridor from East Prussia and Pomerania, while General Gerd von Rundstedt’s more powerful southern army corps drove across the border from Silesia and Slovakia. Polish Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz tried vainly to defend Poland’s industrial regions along the frontier, increasing his army’s vulnerability to Blitzkrieg. German tanks quickly burst into the rear, while dive-bombing Stukas disrupted Polish supply and reinforcements. The Polish air force was destroyed in 48 hours. Within a week two panzer corps advanced 140 miles to the outskirts of Warsaw and the Bug River line to the south. Śmigły-Rydz’s order for a general retreat on the 10th came too late; most Polish forces were already outflanked on the north by General Heinz Guderian’s rapid thrust to Brest-Litovsk and on the south by Paul von Kleist’s panzers advancing from Lvov. On September 17 the pincers closed, the Soviet army invaded from the east, and the Polish government fled to Romania, whence it made its way to London as the first of many European governments-in-exile. The Warsaw garrison surrendered on the 27th.

In a protocol of May 15, 1939, the French had promised to take the offensive two weeks after mobilization. Instead, General Maurice Gamelin contented himself with a brief sortie into the Saar, after which the French withdrew to the Maginot Line. The regime most upset by the German walkover in Poland was Hitler’s new ally, the Soviets. On September 10, Stalin ordered partial mobilization and loudly boasted of the Red Army’s “three million men.” Since a callup of reserve troops was scarcely needed merely to occupy Moscow’s share of Poland under the German-Soviet pact, this maneuver must have reflected Stalin’s fear that the Germans might not stop at the prearranged line. Stalin told the German ambassador on September 25: “In the final settlement of the Polish question anything that in the future might create friction between Germany and the Soviet Union must be avoided.” Three days later Molotov signed a new agreement granting Germany a somewhat larger share of Poland as well as extensive Soviet trade in return for a free hand in Lithuania. Only after this second German-Soviet pact did Communist parties in the West fully embrace their new Nazi ally and oppose Western military resistance to Hitler. Henceforth, Stalin was a fearful and solicitous neighbour of the Nazi empire, and he moved quickly to absorb the regions accorded him. By October 10, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had been forced to accept Soviet occupation. When Finland resisted Soviet demands for border rectifications and bases, Stalin ordered the Red Army to attack on November 30. He expected a lightning victory of his own that would impress Hitler and increase Soviet security in the Baltic. Instead, the Finns resisted fiercely in this “Winter War,” holding the fortified Mannerheim Line in the south and cutting off the road-bound Soviet columns in the north with their mobile ski troops. The disorganized Red Army, by contrast, showed the effect of the recent military purges. In some cases only the machine guns of NKVD (political police) units kept the soldiers at the front. Soviet military prestige suffered a devastating blow.

No major fighting broke out in the West during this period, sardonically dubbed the “Sitzkrieg,” or “Phony War.” After the fall of Poland, while hope still existed that a repetition of World War I might be avoided, Hitler sought to persuade Britain to renege on its commitment to Poland’s defense. In secret contacts and in his “Peace Address” to the Reichstag of October 6 he even hinted at the possibility of restoring a rump Polish state. The Chamberlain Cabinet, betrayed so often by Hitler, refused to acknowledge the demarches, however, and Hitler ordered preparations for an attack in the west by November 12. The army high command protested vigorously against a winter campaign, and bad weather did force a postponement first to January 1940 and then to the spring. Since the French and British were loath to take initiative, the Phony War dragged on. Gamelin’s lame proposal of an advance through the Low Countries was moot given the Dutch and Belgian commitments to neutrality. Combat occurred only at sea. In 1939 alone Germany’s U-boats sank 110 merchant vessels as well as the aircraft carrier Courageous (September 17) and the battleship Royal Oak (October 14). The battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and pocket battleship Deutschland eluded British pursuit and returned safely to port. The Graf Spee, however, caught in the South Atlantic, sank nine merchantmen before sustaining damage from British cruisers. It then put in at Montevideo, Uruguay, causing a diplomatic crisis for the South American states. The naval situation, therefore, came quickly to resemble that of World War I, with the British fleet maintaining a distant blockade in the North Sea and the Germans waging a submarine war against British shipping.

The Russo-Finnish War, however, suggested that Scandinavia might provide a theatre in which to strike a blow at the German-Russian alliance. Beyond the feckless expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations on December 14, Britain and France contemplated helping the brave Finns—even at the risk of war with Russia—and perhaps cutting the flow of Swedish iron to Germany. The French wanted to send several divisions to Narvik in Norway and thence by land to Finland. The British demurred at such a violation of neutral rights, but Churchill, now first lord of the Admiralty, insisted that “humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.” In the event, the Allies dithered (as did the United States, which debated granting a loan to Finland, the only nation to pay interest on its World War I debt) until a massive Soviet offensive broke the Mannerheim Line in February. Stalin had given a hint of the future by setting up a Finnish Democratic Republic during the war, under the Comintern agent Otto Kuusinen, but he settled for a treaty with Helsinki on March 12, 1940, in which Finland ceded the Karelian isthmus and leased a naval base to the U.S.S.R. on the Hangö peninsula.

The Finnish fiasco toppled Daladier’s government in favour of a Cabinet under Paul Reynaud. He and Neville Chamberlain hoped at least to deny the Germans possible U-boat bases by mining or occupying Norwegian ports. But the German navy, too, had persuaded Hitler of the strategic importance of Norway, and on April 9, the day after British minelaying began, the Germans suddenly seized the ports from Oslo to Narvik in a brilliant sea and air operation, and occupied Denmark by Blitzkrieg. British troops contested Norway and managed to capture Narvik on May 27, but by then greater events were unfolding on the Continent. The British evacuated Narvik on June 6, and Vidkun Quisling’s collaborationists assumed control of Norway.

The Western front

The Allies’ bungling in Scandinavia lost Chamberlain the confidence of Parliament, and King George VI selected Winston Churchill to head the War Cabinet. In the first of many ringing speeches that would sustain the British spirit, Churchill told his nation: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

In eight months of warfare all the belligerents had vastly expanded their frontline strength. In May 1940 the German army concentrated 134 divisions on the Western front, including 12 panzer divisions, 3,500 tanks and 5,200 warplanes. The French army totalled 94 divisions, the British 10, and the neutral Belgians and Dutch 22 and eight respectively. The French army possessed some 2,800 tanks, but less than a third were concentrated in armoured units. The French air force, disrupted during the Popular Front, was in any case antiquated, and 90 percent of the artillery dated from World War I. More important, French morale was low, sapped by the memory of the first war’s carnage, by political decadence, and by over-reliance on the Maginot Line. Britain’s Royal Air Force had become a prodigious force thanks to 1,700 new planes, but commanders were loath to deflect them from home defense to the Continent. The German plan of attack in the west, meanwhile, had evolved since the previous autumn. Originally favouring a Schlieffen-type attack with the mass concentrated on the right wing in Belgium, the Führer had been won to General Erich von Manstein’s scheme for a panzer attack through the rugged Ardennes Forest of southern Belgium and Luxembourg. Either route bypassed the Maginot Line, but the latter plan took advantage of the panzer army’s ability to pierce French defenses, disrupt the enemy rear, and split Allied forces in two. The concomitant risk was that Allied counterattacks might pinch off and destroy the armoured spearheads at a blow.

The German offensive struck with devastating effect on May 10. Within days the Dutch surrendered. Göring’s Luftwaffe did not get the message and proceeded to devastate the central city of Rotterdam, killing numerous civilians and sending a signal to the city of London. Meanwhile, General Gerd von Rundstedt’s panzer army picked its way through the Ardennes and emerged in force at Sedan. By May 20, German tanks reached the coast at Abbeville and cut the Allied armies in two. On the 28th, King Leopold III instructed the Belgian army to surrender, while the British government ordered Lord Gort, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, to make for Dunkirk and prepare for evacuation by sea.

As the Blitzkrieg in Poland had shocked Stalin, so the German victory in France shocked Mussolini. For 17 years he had preached the necessity and beauty of war, believing that a neutral Italy would cease to be regarded as a Great Power and that he needed war in order to fulfill his expansionist fantasies and permit the full triumph of Fascism at home. Yet in August 1939 he demanded from Germany 6,000,000 tons of coal, 2,000,000 tons of steel, and 7,000,000 tons of oil before he could honour the Pact of Steel. In fact, war preparations under the corrupt and incompetent Fascists remained feeble, and during these months of nonbelligerence, Mussolini himself took sick and at times even considered joining the Allies. On March 18 he met Hitler at the Brenner Pass and was told that the Germans did not need him to win the war but that he would be allowed to participate and thus escape second-rate status in the Mediterranean. Still Mussolini tried to have it both ways, telling his military chiefs that Italy would not fight Hitler’s war, but a “parallel war” to forge “a new Roman Empire.” In reality, he would enter the war only when it seemed clear the Allies were finished and his regime would not be put to the test.

That moment seemed to arrive in June 1940. With French defeat assured, Mussolini declared war on France and Britain on the 10th. “The hand that held the dagger,” said President Roosevelt, “has struck it into the back of its neighbor.” As Mussolini put it to Marshal Pietro Badoglio, “All we need is a few thousand dead” to win a place at the peace conference. The Italian offensive on the Alpine front met contemptuous resistance from the French—Italy’s gains were measured literally in yards—but Mussolini was right about the proximity of victory. With German forces streaming east and south, the French government fled on the 11th to Bordeaux and debated three courses of action: request an armistice; transfer the government to North Africa and fight on from the colonies; ask Germany for its terms and temporize. The choice was complicated by a French promise to Britain not to exit the war without London’s consent. Churchill, concerned that the French fleet not fall into German hands, went so far as to offer Anglo-French political union on June 16. Reynaud wanted to continue the war but was outvoted. He resigned on the 16th, whereupon the ancient Marshal Pétain asked for an armistice. From London, General Charles de Gaulle broadcast a plea to the French people to fight on and set about organizing Free French forces in France’s sub-Saharan colonies. But the armistice was signed at Compiègne, in the same railway car used for the German armistice of 1918, on June 22. The Germans occupied all of northern France and the west coast—60 percent of the country—and the rest was administered by Pétain’s quasi-Fascist collaborationist regime at Vichy. The French navy and air force were neutralized. In another meeting of dictators on the 18th, Hitler disappointed Mussolini with his talk of a mild peace lest French forces be driven to defect to Britain. Instead, Pétain broke relations with London on July 4, following a British attack on the French fleet moored at Mers el-Kebir in Algeria. Hitler at once toyed with the notion of winning the Vichy French to an active alliance, thrusting Mussolini farther into the background.

Britain’s refusal to give up frustrated Hitler, especially since his ultimate goal—Lebensraum—lay in the east. The chief of the army general staff quoted Hitler on May 21 as saying that “we are seeking contact with Britain on the basis of partitioning the world.” But when the carrot failed, Hitler tried the stick, authorizing plans on July 2 for Operation Sea Lion, the cross-Channel invasion. Such an operation required complete air superiority, and Göring promised that the Luftwaffe could smash British air defenses in four days. The Battle of Britain that followed in August 1940 was a massive air duel between Germany’s 1,200 bombers and a thousand fighter escorts and the RAF’s 900 interceptors. But the British Hurricanes and Spitfires were technically superior to all the German fighters except the Me-109, which was restricted in its range to the zone south of London. The British radar screen and ground control network permitted British fighters to concentrate on each German attack. On September 7 Göring made the fatal error of shifting the attack from airfields to London itself (in retaliation for a September 4 raid on Berlin). For 10 days the blitz continued night and day over London, the climax coming on the 15th when nearly 60 German planes were shot down. Two days later Hitler granted that air superiority was not to be had and postponed Operation Sea Lion.

For a full year—June 1940 to June 1941—the British Empire fought on alone (though with growing U.S. aid) against Germany, Italy, and the threat of Japanese action in Asia. Frustrated on sea and in the air, Hitler pondered how his overwhelming land power might be used to persuade Britain to call it quits. A Mediterranean strategy based on the capture of Gibraltar, Malta, and the Suez Canal, did not seem likely to be decisive, nor did it satisfy the Nazis’ Blut und Boden (“blood and earth”) lust for Lebensraum. To be sure, the Germans raised the prospect of an occupation of Gibraltar numerous times with Franco, but the latter always found an excuse to remain neutral. In fact, Franco knew that the Spanish were exhausted after their civil war and that Spain’s Atlantic islands would be lost to the British if it joined the Axis. A Catholic authoritarian, he was also contemptuous of the neo-pagan Fascists. After their last meeting, Hitler confessed that he would rather have his teeth pulled than go through another bout with Franco. Hitler also negotiated with Pétain in July and October 1940 and May 1941, in hopes of enticing France into alliance. But Pétain, too, played a double game, pledging “genuine collaboration” with Germany but reassuring the British that he sought a “cautious balance” between the belligerents.

Hitler’s troublesome ally Italy, however, ensured that Germany would be involved in complications to the south. On July 7, 1940, Ciano visited Hitler seeking approval for an expansion of the war to Yugoslavia and Greece. The Führer instead encouraged the occupation of Crete and Cyprus, which would further the war against Britain. But three days later Italy’s inability to chase the British out of the Mediterranean became apparent when a British convoy off Calabria bumped into an Italian force that included two battleships and 16 cruisers. The Italian commander broke off the action after one hit on one of his battleships, whereupon the Fascist air force arrived to bomb indiscriminately friend and foe alike, doing little damage to either. Frustrated in the Balkans and at sea, Mussolini ordered his Libyan army to cross the Western desert and conquer Egypt. This adventure soon turned to disaster.

The Eastern front

The end of hostilities in western Europe also provoked a jockeying for position in eastern Europe, where Stalin’s fear of the all-conquering Nazis had grown apace. In 1940 Germany signed a pact with Romania for oil and arms transfers. Stalin then forced the Romanian government to hand over Bessarabia and northern Bukovina (June 26, 1940), and annexed Estonia, Latvia (July 12), and Lithuania (August 3) to the U.S.S.R. Hungary and Bulgaria now demanded Romanian territories for themselves, but Hitler intervened to prevent hostilities, lest Stalin see the chance to occupy the Romanian oil fields around Ploieşti. The Treaty of Craiova (August 21) awarded the Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria, and the so-called Vienna Award by Hitler and Mussolini ceded northern Transylvania to Hungary. Romania’s King Carol II abdicated in protest, General Ion Antonescu took power, and a German military mission arrived in Bucharest on October 12.

The Romanian coup provoked Mussolini’s next rash act. “Hitler always faces me with faits accomplis,” he raged. “This time I will pay him back in his own coin.” On October 13, Mussolini ordered Marshal Badoglio to prepare the long-desired attack on Greece for two weeks hence. He would declare his independence from Hitler and consummate his “parallel war.” On Oct. 28, 1940, seven Italian divisions crossed the Albanian border into Greece, provoking Hitler’s adjutant to record: “Führer enraged . . . this is revenge for Norway and France.” In fact, Mussolini’s impetuous attack, combined with the reversals in Africa, would only ensure his humiliation and utter dependence on his northern ally. For the Greek campaign was predictably disastrous, given Italy’s bare numerical superiority and lack of planning and equipment, the rough terrain, and the determination of the Greeks. On November 8, General Alexandros Papagos counterattacked, and within a month the Greeks had turned the tables, occupying one-third of Albania. Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas refused to let the British into Greece for fear of provoking the Germans; indeed, he hoped to drive Italy out of the Balkans before German help might arrive, and to induce Yugoslavia and Turkey to make common cause with Greece against the Fascists.

The Balkan situation seriously interfered with Hitler’s evolving continental strategy. Ribbentrop still hoped to persuade him that Britain could be induced to relent through diplomacy, and his last achievement was the Tripartite (or Axis) Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan on Sept. 27, 1940. Presumably, this alliance would deflect U.S. attention from Europe, threaten the U.S.S.R. with a war on two fronts, and thus drive the British to despair over the prospect of facing Germany alone. But London stood firm, and Hitler grew impatient to get on with his real chore of seizing a Ukrainian empire for the German master race. Upon his return from unsuccessful conferences with Franco at Hendaye (October 23) and Pétain at Montoire (24th), Hitler played host to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov in Berlin (November 12–14). Though Stalin had meticulously observed his pact with Hitler, their rivalry in the Balkans strained relations. Hitler and Ribbentrop tried to persuade the Soviets to pursue their “natural tendency” to expand in the direction of the Indian Ocean, but Molotov repeatedly interrupted to ask the Germans why they were sending troops to Finland and Romania. These conversations confirmed Hitler’s intention to turn his idle military machine to the east. Conquest of the U.S.S.R. might serve now as both means and end, convincing the British of the hopelessness of their situation, allowing Hitler to realize Nazi racist fantasies, and forging a territorial basis for global empire. On December 18 he ordered the army to prepare Operation Barbarossa by May 15, 1941.

This latest timetable, however, fell victim to Mussolini’s folly and the need to secure Germany’s flank in the Balkans. German troops entered Romania on Jan. 7, 1941, and Bulgaria on February 27. But Italy’s disasters brought into question the very survival of the Fascist regime. Mussolini made Badoglio a scapegoat and in November 1940 issued the first of his pitiful appeals to Hitler to bail him out. At their Berghof meeting on Jan. 20, 1941, Hitler informed Mussolini of his plans to invade Greece. The death of Metaxas in the following days, in turn, led the Greeks to accept a British expeditionary force. Accordingly, Hitler pressured Yugoslavia to permit the passage of German troops, but air force officers in Belgrade staged a coup on March 27 and signed a treaty with Moscow. Furious over such defiance, Hitler ordered a Blitzkrieg for April 6 that broke Yugoslav resistance in five days and overran Greece by the 22nd. Crete then succumbed to a spectacular German airborne assault (May 20–31). Hitler set up puppet regimes in Serbia and “Greater Croatia” and partitioned the rest of Yugoslavia among his client states.

The Balkan campaign postponed “Barbarossa” for six weeks. This did not overly perturb Hitler, who promised his generals victory within a month and denied the need to prepare for cold-weather warfare in Russia. But some generals were skeptical of Blitzkrieg in the vastness of Russia, while others debated whether to force narrow spearheads deep into Russia, emulating the campaign in France, or fight classic battles of envelopment close to the frontier. Hitler’s “infallible intuition” dictated the latter, lest his armies, like Napoleon’s, be sucked too deep into Russia before enemy forces were destroyed. In the spring of 1941 the Wehrmacht assembled 4,000,000 men—the greatest invasion force in history—including 50 Finnish and Romanian and 207 German divisions armed with 3,300 tanks. They faced a Red Army of some 4,500,000 men and perhaps 15,000 tanks. German success depended heavily on surprise, but preparations of such magnitude could scarcely be hidden. Stalin seemed alive to the danger when he signed a neutrality pact with Japan on April 13 (knowing of Japan’s preference for a southern strategy from the espionage of Richard Sorge in Tokyo), then pleaded with Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke: “We must remain friends and you must now do everything to that end.” Yet Stalin also redoubled his efforts to assure Hitler of his good intentions and discounted British warnings of a German attack (they had been making such predictions since June 1940, and even the British thought a German strike against Turkey or England more likely). Stalin may also have dismissed the warnings as attempts to poison his relations with Germany. In any case, the Germans achieved complete tactical surprise, while the Soviets’ forward deployments exposed them to the full force of Blitzkrieg.

The Germans struck on June 22, 1941, along a 2,000-mile-front. Three army groups drove deep into the Soviet Union, occupying vast territories and capturing huge numbers of Soviet troops. But gradually the momentum deserted the invaders. Many myths surround the 1941 campaign. It is said that the Germans were wrong in making for Moscow like Napoleon. But Moscow was of far more military value in 1941 than in 1812; it was the hub of Soviet railroads, communications, and government, and its capture might have crippled the Soviet effort to reinforce the front from the Asian hinterland or have undermined the Communist regime. It is also said that winter defeated the Germans. But they would have had ample time to reach Moscow before winter had they not wasted almost two months in diversions and debate. It is also said that the size of the Soviet Union made swift German victory impossible. But the endless Russian plain actually aided the panzer armies by giving them limitless room to maneuver and form the huge pockets that cost the Red Army 2,500,000 men in the first six months. What did stop the Germans was their own dilatoriness, the mud and unpaved roads, their underestimation of Soviet reserves and resilience, and the Nazis’ own brutality, which alienated a population otherwise hostile to Stalinism.

By December 1941 the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. and the latter’s survival had confirmed precisely that British hope which Hitler had meant to quash. The entry into the war of the United States that same month made German defeat virtually certain—and also brought to a close the last purely European war.

Origins of American belligerence
From neutrality to active aid

The outbreak of war brought a swift change of mood to the United States. While isolationism was still widespread, the vast majority of Americans were sympathetic to Britain, and Roosevelt did not follow Wilson in asking Americans to be neutral in thought as well as deed. Instead he set out to lead public opinion and gradually expand his ability to aid the Allies. On Sept. 21, 1939, his brilliant speech to Congress laid the groundwork for passage of the Pittman Bill, which became law on November 4 and repealed the arms embargo on belligerent nations. Henceforth, the United States might trade with Britain and France, but only on a “cash and carry” basis. Senator Arthur Vandenberg rightly noted that the United States could not “become the arsenal for one belligerent without becoming the target for another.” Still, the President made clear to Churchill (with whom he struck up close relations by correspondence) his desire to aid Britain in every way consonant with the American mood. Only once did Roosevelt make a feint at mediation: In March 1940 he sent Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to Europe on a fact-finding mission that revealed “scant immediate prospect” of peace. When Hitler’s Western offensive followed, even that dubious prospect disappeared, and Churchill assured his House of Commons that Britain would fight on “until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.”

In January 1940, Roosevelt asked for a mere $2,000,000,000 in defense spending, a slight increase over the year before. But the fall of France pushed the pace of U.S. rearmament up to $10,500,000,000 by September. Opinion polls showed the American public heavily favouring a policy of “all aid short of war” to Britain. On May 15, Churchill sought to capitalize on the shifting sentiment with an emergency request for 40 or 50 overage destroyers with which to counter German U-boats. Roosevelt hesitated because of the legal complications, while continuing his efforts to shape opinion by encouraging William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America to foster the idea that “Between Us and Hitler Stands the British Fleet!” On September 2 the United States transferred 50 warships to Britain in return for long-term leases on British naval bases in the Western Hemisphere. Despite Roosevelt’s public relations, isolationist sentiment remained strong. On September 4 the America First Committee arose to challenge Roosevelt’s deceptive campaign for intervention, and Wendell Willkie charged during the presidential campaign that Roosevelt’s reelection would surely mean war. The president responded that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” gliding over the fact that if the United States were attacked, it would no longer be a foreign war.

The next step in U.S. involvement stemmed from Churchill’s warning of Dec. 9, 1940, that Britain was near bankruptcy. Roosevelt responded with lend-lease, a plan to “eliminate the dollar sign” by lending, not selling, arms. If your neighbour’s house is on fire, he argued, you do not sell him a hose, you lend it to him until the fire is out. “If Great Britain goes down,” he warned, “all of us in the Americas would be living at the point of a gun. . . . We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” Churchill added his own ringing appeal on Feb. 9, 1941: “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” Willkie asked Republicans to back lend-lease, which became law on March 11.

Unknown to the public, Roosevelt authorized joint U.S.–British staff talks. The two countries also collaborated on how to meet the U-boat menace. Admiral Karl Dönitz’s wolfpack technique, by which eight to 10 U-boats would strike a convoy from the surface at night (thereby avoiding the British Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee device [ASDIC sonar]), cost the British and Americans 320,048 tons of shipping in January 1941 and 653,960 tons in April. American Admiral Harold R. Stark considered the situation “hopeless except as [the United States] take strong measures to save it.” In Hemispheric Defense Plan No. 1 (April 2) Roosevelt authorized the navy to attack German submarines west of 25° longitude and by executive agreement with the Danish government-in-exile placed Greenland under American protection (April 9). U.S. marines also occupied Iceland in July.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union posed the problem of whether to extend lend-lease to the U.S.S.R. Only 35 percent of Americans polled favoured underwriting the Communist regime, but Roosevelt, supporting his acting secretary of state, Sumner Welles, said “Of course we are going to give all aid we possibly can to Russia,” on the theory that anything that contributed to the defeat of Germany enhanced the security of the United States. Aid to the Soviet Union began in July, and a formal agreement followed on August 2. But the initial supplies were too meagre to affect the battles of 1941. Roosevelt meanwhile pressed for amendments to the Selective Service Act to remove the ceiling of 900,000 men on U.S. armed forces and the ban on use of troops beyond the Western Hemisphere and to permit the president to retain draftees in service. This provoked the last great Congressional debate on isolationism versus interventionism; the House passed the bill by a single vote on August 12.

It was during this debate that Roosevelt and Churchill met secretly off the coast of Newfoundland and drafted a manifesto of the common principles that bound their two countries and all free peoples. In this eight-point Atlantic Charter (announced on August 14), reminiscent of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the signatories renounced territorial aggrandizement and endorsed the restoration of self-government to all captured nations and equal access to trade and raw materials for all. According to Churchill, Roosevelt also promised to “wage war but not declare it” and to look for an incident that would justify open hostilities. When the Congress voted on November 7 to arm merchant ships and allow them into the war zone, it seemed that submarine warfare would again be casus belli for the United States. U-boats had already torpedoed the destroyers Kearney and Reuben James (the latter was attacking the submarine, but sank with 115 hands on October 31). But in fact it took dramatic events in another theatre altogether to make Roosevelt’s undeclared war official.

Japan’s challenge

When war broke out in Europe, the Japanese occupation of China was nearing its greatest extent, and there was no sign of Chinese capitulation. Japan was understandably incensed when its ally in the Anti-Comintern Pact, Germany, joined with Moscow at a time when the Japanese were fighting the Soviets in Manchuria and Mongolia. On the other hand, the German victories of 1940 made orphans of the French and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia, including mineral-rich Indochina and oil-rich Indonesia. These sources of vital raw materials were all the more tempting after the United States protested Japan’s invasion of China by allowing its 1911 commercial treaty with Japan to expire in January 1940. Thereafter trade continued on a day-to-day basis while U.S. diplomacy sought peaceful ways to contain or roll back Japanese power. But the territorial and trade hegemony that Japan would come to term the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” in 1941 increasingly appeared to be a cover for brutal imperialism and exclusionist trade policies. In June 1940, as France was crumbling, Japan insisted that the new Vichy regime cut off the flow of supplies to China over Indochinese railways. The beleaguered British, fearful of simultaneous war in Asia and Europe, also agreed to close down the Burma Road to China for three months, isolating Chiang Kai-shek. Japanese militarists then arranged a new government in Tokyo under the weak Konoe Fumimaro, expecting that Foreign Minister Matsuoka and War Minister Tōjō Hideki would dominate. On July 27 the Cabinet decided to ally with the Axis and strike into Southeast Asia even as it sought to resume normal trade with the United States.

Japanese assertion posed a dilemma for Washington. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., believed an embargo on oil and scrap iron would cripple the Japanese war machine, but Secretary of State Cordell Hull feared an embargo would provoke Japan into seizing Southeast Asia. On July 26, 1940, after lengthy debate, the United States banned export of high-grade scrap iron and aviation fuel to Japan. On August 1, Japan forced Vichy to permit a limited occupation of northern Indochina, and the following month it signed the Tripartite (Axis) Pact in which Germany, Italy, and Japan pledged aid to each other should any be attacked by a power not at present involved in the Pacific War (i.e., the United States). But this act of defiance only stoked American indignation. In November, Roosevelt approved a loan of $100,000,000 to the Nationalist Chinese and began to allow American pilots to volunteer for Chinese service in Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers. In December and January all forms of iron, copper, and brass were added to the embargo.

Civilian government had eroded in Japan until censorship, propaganda, and intimidation overwhelmed moderates and placed policy in the hands of militarists devoted to traditional Japanese exclusivism, xenophobia, and the Bushidō code of combat. Of the latter mentality Americans had barely a clue, just as the Japanese looked upon Western notions of self-determination and the Open Door as so much hypocrisy. But although reciprocal misunderstanding and racialist thinking inhibited the quest for peace in the Pacific, Japan’s determination to carve out an Asian empire was clearly the source of the crisis, while American policy was essentially reactive.

The latest U.S. trade restrictions sparked the final peace initiative of the moderate faction composed of Konoe and leading Japanese industrialists. Two American Catholic missionaries served as intermediaries for an alleged Japanese offer to evacuate China and break the Tripartite Pact in return for normal trade with the United States. This was exactly what Roosevelt wanted, and he urged that the offer be placed in writing. A new Japanese ambassador, Nomura Kichisaburo, then arrived in Washington and met privately with Hull 40 times after March 1941. On April 9 the Catholic missionaries delivered a written offer, but it contained no promise of troop withdrawals and instead asked the United States to cut off aid to China. Hull clearly informed Nomura that any accord must be founded on four principles: respect for territorial integrity, noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries, commercial equality, and respect for the status quo in the Pacific. Nomura unfortunately failed to understand and reported that the United States had accepted the April 9 proposal. The Tokyo Cabinet then drafted an even tougher note as a basis for negotiation, prompting Hull to conclude that the Japanese were incorrigible.

Meanwhile, the Japanese military debated the merits of a northern advance against the Soviet Union’s maritime provinces or a southern advance against the French, Dutch, and British colonies. The Russo-Japanese neutrality pact of April 1941 indicated a southern advance, but the German invasion of the Soviet Union indicated a northern one. The course of the war—and the survival of the U.S.S.R.—hung in the balance. Heretofore, Hitler had been at pains to keep Japan out of his Soviet sphere of influence, but at the height of German success in the Soviet Union, Hitler suggested to Ambassador Oshima Hiroshi that the two join forces to liquidate the Soviet empire, a plan endorsed by Matsuoka. If Hitler meant it, he was too late, for the Cabinet in Tokyo decided again after the invasion of the Soviet Union (June 22) to exploit German victories rather than take part in them. The Japanese army and navy would move south and establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Emperor endorsed the plan on July 2, and the Americans, having broken the Japanese code with the MAGIC process, knew of the decision at once. On July 26, Japan occupied all of French Indochina, and the United States impounded Japanese assets. On September 5, Hull sanctioned a complete embargo on petroleum.

Japan now faced a choice of abandoning all the conquests made since 1931 or seizing the necessary war matériel to defend its empire. Konoe tried desperately to reverse the tide and requested a summit meeting with Roosevelt. But Roosevelt, on Hull’s advice, insisted on prior Japanese acceptance of the four principles. Konoe was obliged on September 7 to make a deal with his militarists: He could try once more for an agreement, but if the United States did not relent by early October, Konoe would then support the military solution. When the deadlock was confirmed Konoe in fact resigned on October 16, and Tōjō became prime minister. The veteran diplomat Kurusu Saburo then flew to Washington with two final options, Plan A and Plan B. The latter held out some hope, since in it Japan at least promised to make no military moves to the south. But MAGIC deciphered a cable revealing the secret deadline of November 29, while the British, Dutch, and Chinese vetoed any modus vivendi that left Japan a free hand in China. On November 27, American warnings of war were dispatched to the Pacific, and on December 1 a Japanese Imperial conference ratified Tōjō’s conclusion that “Japan has no other way than to wage war . . . to secure its existence and self-defense.”

The final diplomatic exchanges were superfluous, but they included a 10-part American note of November 26 and Roosevelt’s personal appeal to the Emperor on December 6. That same day a 13-part Japanese reply arrived in Washington, which MAGIC deciphered even before the Japanese embassy did. That war was imminent was clear; where the first blow would fall was not. On Sunday, December 7, a 14th part arrived, which the Japanese embassy was slow in translating and typing. By the time the diplomats arrived at Hull’s office at 2:00 PM, news of the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, had already arrived. Hull delivered his opinion of Japanese diplomacy in vitriolic terms and told the ambassadors to get out. The following day Roosevelt named it “a day which will live in infamy” and asked Congress for a declaration of war.

Revisionist historians have argued that Roosevelt should have known of the danger of Japanese attack from the secret intercepts and reports of Japanese fleet movements, or that he did know and purposely suppressed the information so that the United States might enter the European war, unified and irate, “through the back door.” To be sure, American blunders marked the final years of neutrality, and a cover-up of those blunders may have occurred. But certainly no one forced the Japanese to make a direct attack on U.S. territory, nor did anyone expect an attack so bold as that on Hawaii. Nor did the Congress even take that opportunity to enter the European war. That was accomplished on December 11, when Hitler and Mussolini, honouring the Tripartite Pact, declared war on the United States. Hitler considered the “half-Judaized and half-negrified” Americans to be of little military account, especially since, he believed, the Japanese war would prevent U.S. intervention in Europe. His gratuitous declaration of war was in fact a folly surpassing Ludendorff’s provocations of the United States in 1917.

Japan’s war plan was marked by operational brilliance but strategic folly. The notion that Japan could take on the British Empire and the United States at the same time, and win, was the equivalent (in the Japanese simile for courage) of “jumping with eyes closed off the veranda of Kiyomizu Temple.” Still, Admiral Yamamoto devised a bold campaign to destroy Allied striking power for the foreseeable future, whereupon the Americans would presumably sue for peace. He assigned all six of his aircraft carriers to a surprise attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor. The rest of the navy—eight battleships, four auxiliary carriers, 20 cruisers, and 112 destroyers—was earmarked for the south, together with 11 infantry divisions and 795 planes. The first force struck at dawn, its dive-bombers penetrating Pearl Harbor’s defenses through the mountain passes of Oahu. They sank four of eight U.S. battleships, damaged four others, sank or disabled 10 other ships and 140 planes, and killed 2,330 troops. By chance, the three U.S. aircraft carriers were at sea and escaped destruction. A second Japanese force destroyed 50 percent of the U.S. aircraft in the Philippines, landed on Luzon on December 10, took Manila on Jan. 2, 1942, and drove the remaining U.S. and Filipino forces into redoubts on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island. The Japanese also bombed Hong Kong on December 8, took the British outpost from the mainland on the 25th and occupied Bangkok on December 9 and southern Burma on the 16th. Most damaging to the British were the Japanese landings in Malaya after December 8 and the advance through the jungle to Singapore. This mighty fortress, considered impregnable, was the keystone of British strategy in Asia, and Churchill had ordered out the battleship Prince of Wales and battle cruiser Repulse in the expectation of intimidating the Japanese. Instead, Japanese aircraft sank the two ships on December 10. On Feb. 9, 1942, three Japanese divisions overran Singapore, whose defenses were directed seaward, and captured the 90,000-man force. The fall of Singapore crippled British communications and naval power in Asia.

Supporting the assault on the Philippines, the Japanese bombed Wake Island on December 8 and overcame fierce resistance from the tiny U.S. garrison on December 23. By February 10, Guam and Tarawa in the Gilberts and Rabaul and Gasmata on New Britain were occupied. Japan was now master of a vast empire stretching from Manchuria to the East Indies and the border of India deep into the western Pacific.

The turning point, 1942

Within a year after American entry into the war Axis power crested and began to ebb, for critical battles were fought in 1942 in every major theatre. The year also saw the forging of a Grand Alliance among the United States, Britain, and the U.S.S.R. and the first sign of disagreement on strategy and war aims.

After Pearl Harbor, Churchill requested an immediate conference with Roosevelt. The two met for three weeks at the Arcadia Conference in Washington after Dec. 22, 1941. They reaffirmed the “Europe first” strategy and conceived “Gymnast,” a plan for Anglo-American landings in North Africa. They also created a Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee and issued, on Jan. 1, 1942, the United Nations Declaration in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter. But Sir Anthony Eden had traveled to Moscow in late December and returned with troubling news: Stalin demanded retention of all the territory gained under the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact and grumbled that the Atlantic Charter was apparently directed against him, not Hitler. The Soviets also first made what was to become their incessant demand that the Allies open a second front in France to take the pressure off the Red Army. Roosevelt sent Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to London to argue for a cross-Channel invasion by April 1943, but the British deemed it impossible. London reassured Molotov by concluding an Anglo-Soviet alliance (May 26, 1942) to last for 20 years. In late June, Churchill and Roosevelt met again in Washington, D.C., and confirmed plans for a joint operation in Africa despite the misgivings of American generals, who suspected the British of being more concerned for the defense of their empire than the rapid defeat of Hitler. In the end the British won, and on July 25 the Allies approved the renamed operation “Torch”—a combined invasion of North Africa planned for the autumn. Churchill then traveled to Moscow in August 1942, where Stalin berated him for postponing the second front and suspending Arctic convoys because of German naval action. Despite his suspicions and fears, Stalin could take grim satisfaction from the events of 1942, for by December of that year the German advance into the Soviet Union had been stopped, though at enormous cost.

The Allied landings in North Africa, where British forces had finally turned back General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at el-Alamein, were targeted for Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. (Hence, the first American initiative in the war was to be an unprovoked and undeclared attack against neutral territory.) Vichy France promptly severed diplomatic relations with Washington and ordered French forces in North Africa to resist. Brief but serious fighting resulted at Oran and Casablanca. The allies had been seeking a French leader with the prestige and willingness to rally French Africa against the Axis, but the nominal commander was Admiral François Darlan, an ardent collaborationist in the Vichy Cabinet. The Allies preferred General Henri Giraud, a heroic escapee from a prison camp, but he insisted on being given command of the whole Allied invasion force. When Darlan surprisingly turned up in Algiers, U.S. Ambassador Robert Murphy negotiated a deal whereby Eisenhower recognized Darlan as political chief of North Africa in return for Darlan’s ordering French forces to cease resistance. The Americans soon escaped the embarrassment of having bargained with a leading Fascist when a French royalist shot Darlan on December 24. De Gaulle was able to outmaneuver the vain but inept Giraud to become de facto leader of Free French forces.

In the Pacific, the naval Battle of Midway in June, the landing of U.S. forces on Guadalcanal in August, and the creation of an “island-hopping” strategy against Japan’s sudden and far-flung empire similarly blunted the string of the Axis’ early victories. Meanwhile, General Douglas MacArthur rallied Allied forces in Australia in anticipation of fulfilling his departing promise to the Filipinos: “I shall return.” A Japanese invasion force landed near Gona at the southeastern end of New Guinea in July 1942 and drove Australian troops back to within 32 miles of Port Moresby. But MacArthur executed a series of landings behind the Japanese and secured the entire Papuan coast by late January 1943. Thenceforth Japan, too, went on the strategic defensive.

The economic and scientific wars

How could the Axis powers have imagined that they might win the war, given their narrow base of land area, population, and production, and the size and strength of the enemies they themselves forced into the war? The answer was Blitzkrieg, which involved more than simply a set of tactics for mobile combat but was rather an encompassing theory of total war. The theory posited a strategically mobilized and organized economy meant to avoid a repetition of the war of attrition that wore Germany down in 1914–18. By overrunning their neighbours one by one in swift assaults, the Germans constantly added to their own manpower and resource base while shrinking that available to the enemy. In addition, armament in breadth rather than depth provided the flexibility necessary to shift production from one set of weapons to another depending on the needs of the next campaign, and it permitted constant innovation of weapons systems. Most tellingly, Blitzkrieg shifted the burdens of war from Germany to the conquered peoples. By June 1940 the British were unable to budge a Nazi empire that drew on the resources of the entire continent. But Hitler also realized by late 1940 that all the resources of America would eventually be made available to Britain; hence his decision to break the stalemate by unleashing Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. Soviet survival, however, turned the Blitzkrieg into a gigantic war of attrition after all, one in which Germany could never prevail.

The German economy and the Jews

Cut off from foreign sources of capital, Germany paid for World War II through taxes and ruthless exploitation of occupied regions. Levies on conquered peoples amounted to 40 percent of the income raised by internal taxation, and 42 percent of that tribute came from France. The number of slave labourers deployed by various arms of the regime peaked at 7,100,000 in 1944; this figure included prisoners of war and “racial enemies” condemned to slavery until death in SS camps.

Seen only in cold economic terms, Nazi genocide against Jews and other groups, racially or ideologically or otherwise defined, was the height of irrationality. As early as January 1939 Hitler gave vent to his pathological hatred and fear of the Jews before the Reichstag: “If the international Jewish financiers . . . succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war the result will be the obliteration of the Jewish race in Europe.” The war gave Hitler the opportunity to seek a “final solution.” In 1939–40 the Nazis considered using Poland or Madagascar as dumping grounds for Jews. But the invasion of the U.S.S.R. emboldened Hitler, Göring, and SS leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich to decide instead on mass extermination in camps at Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. Large numbers of SS troops, as well as railroads and rolling stock, were absorbed in capturing, transporting, and putting to death as many as 12,000 Jews per day. The total by war’s end would reach 6,000,000, almost half from Poland, and some 2,000,000 others including Gypsies, clergy, Communists, and other resisters. SS troops accompanied the regular army into the Soviet Union in 1941 and made racial war on the Slavs as well in order to prepare the farmlands of the Ukraine for German settlement.

News of the Holocaust reached the West slowly but surely, although Auschwitz was able to keep its monstrous secret for more than two years after the first gassings in May 1942. Richard Lichtheim of the Jewish Agency in Geneva served as a conduit for information about what was occurring in Nazi Europe, but his and others’ efforts to promote action on the part of the Allies broke against political and practical barriers. The British, worried by the prospect of Arab revolt, limited Jewish emigration to Palestine, while quotas elsewhere in the world meant that even those Jews who managed to escape Europe sometimes had nowhere to go. Reports appearing in Western newspapers inspired the Allies to make a declaration on Dec. 17, 1942, condemning “this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination,” and on Jan. 22, 1944, Roosevelt established a War Refugee Board “to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews and other minorities.” But the Allies were unable to take direct action of any sort until the capture of Italy brought Allied bombers within range of the camps. Jewish leaders were then misled by hints that the Germans might negotiate about the Jews. Finally, after June 1944, when escapees confirmed the existence and nature of Auschwitz, the World Jewish Congress requested bombing of the gas chambers. But the Allied Bomber Command judged that its efforts should be directed only at military targets and that the best way of helping the Jews was to hasten the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Strategic bombing

Allied strategic bombing was the most deadly form of economic warfare ever devised and showed another side of the indiscriminateness of industrial war. But in mid-1941 the British Chiefs of Staff soberly concluded that morale, not industry, was Germany’s most vulnerable point and ordered Sir Arthur Harris of the RAF Bomber Command to concentrate on “area bombing” of cities. Churchill’s scientific adviser Professor L.A. Lindemann of Oxford (later Lord Cherwell) concurred in April 1942 that one-third of all Germans could be rendered homeless in 15 months by strategic bombing of cities. The Royal Air Force accordingly assigned its new Lancaster four-engine bombers to a total war on German civilians. After attacks on Lübeck and the Ruhr, Harris sent a thousand planes against Cologne on May 30–31 in an attack that battered one-third of the city. In 1943, after an interlude of bombing German submarine pens, the Lancasters launched the Battle of the Ruhr totaling 18,506 sorties and the Battle of Hamburg numbering 17,021. The fire raids in Hamburg killed 40,000 people and left a million homeless. The Royal Air Force then hit Berlin (November 1943 to March 1944) with 20,224 sorties, avenging many times over all the damage done by the Luftwaffe to London.

By early 1943 the U.S. 8th Air Force joined in the air campaign but eschewed terror bombing. Its B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators conducted daylight precision bombing of industrial targets. As a result, they suffered heavy losses that climaxed in October 1943 over the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plants, when the United States lost 148 bombers in a week. The Army Air Forces suspended daylight sorties for months until the arrival of a long-range fighter, the P-51 Mustang. Bombing then resumed and concentrated on the German oil industry, creating a serious shortage that virtually grounded the Luftwaffe by the time of the D-Day invasion. The effectiveness of strategic bombing is a subject of great debate, since German war production actually increased over the years 1942–44. German engineers became masters at shielding equipment, restoring it to operation in a matter of days, or even moving plants underground. Nor did the German people crack under British devastation of their towns and homes. But the air offensive did force the Germans to divert as many as 1,500,000 workers to the constant task of rebuilding and established the Allied mastery of the air that permitted the success of the Normandy landings.

Allied economic management

Britain was only in the early stages of rearmament when the war broke out, but after the fall of France the transition to a World-War-I-type command economy was precipitous. Churchill replaced some 60 interdepartment committees for war economics with the single Lord President’s Committee under Sir John Anderson. Within 18 months Anderson organized the most centralized and complete war mobilization of any nation. It included controls on trade, foreign exchange, wages and prices, and raw materials. The National Service Act of December 1941 outdid even the U.S.S.R. by making every man under 50 and every woman under 30 liable to government assignment. Of the 2,800,000 new war workers, 79 percent were female. The state also cut consumer production to a minimum: 67 percent of the work force was employed in war-related jobs. Once again, the British exercised financial responsibility by raising taxes, deferring wages, and compelling savings.

Even before the war, and despite the Depression, the American gross national product (GNP) of $88,600,000,000 dwarfed that of any other country. Under the impulse of war it increased by 1944 to $135,000,000,000, of which 40 percent was directed to military purposes. About 60 percent of all the munitions used by the Allies in 1944 was made in the United States. In addition to arming its own immense air and sea forces, the United States provided $32,500,000,000 in lend-lease support, including $13,500,000,000 to Britain and $9,000,000,000 to the U.S.S.R. Total U.S. production included 300,000 aircraft, 51,400,000 tons of shipping, 8,500,000 tons of warships, and 86,700 tanks. The government financed this phenomenal buildup largely through war bonds in the early years and later through taxation.

The American war effort was also achieved without the rigid centralized control of Britain. In January 1942 the War Production Board emerged, staffed with “dollar-a-year” volunteers from business, while the Office of War Mobilization (May 1943) under James F. Byrnes served less as a dictator than an umpire in matters involving labour, business, and the military.

The Soviet Union also made a stupendous economic effort in the war despite conditions as difficult as the American ones were favourable. Within a few months in 1941 the U.S.S.R. lost to the enemy over half its industrial capacity and richest farmland and countless skilled workers. Yet the Soviets rebounded quickly, relocating over 1,300 factories to the Urals region in an effort that involved perhaps 10,000,000 people. Coal, oil, electricity, and food never regained prewar levels, but arms production boomed. The Soviets managed to turn out 136,800 aircraft and 102,500 tanks by 1945, surpassing the Germans in both. The centrally directed Gosplan and party apparatus, of course, had initiated a ruthless command economy as early as 1928, and Soviet appeals to patriotism (as opposed to Marxism), the network of forced-labour camps, and severe austerity made the effort possible. Despite punishing taxation and subsistence wages (40 percent of the 1940 level) state income covered only half the budget over 1941–45, laying the basis for the inflation that would lead to postwar devaluation. The Soviet war economy, however, like that of the United States, prepared the country for postwar superpower status.

Japan’s strategy was similar to Germany’s Blitzkrieg in that the swift conquest of isolated territories was designed to create a self-sufficient empire capable of withstanding any blow from without. Once again, precise operational planning permitted Japan to increase weapons production steadily from the inception of a full war economy in 1942 to early 1945, when U.S. bombing intensified. By 1944, naval ordnance production was more than five times that of 1941 and aviation more than four and a half times. The Japanese, like the Nazis, exploited their conquered peoples and even more than the Nazis subjected prisoners of war to slavery or death. But the fact that attacking Pearl Harbor would “awaken a sleeping giant” was lost on Japanese planners. By 1944 military expenditures absorbed 50 percent of the Japanese GNP, a degree of concentration second only to that of the Soviet Union. Yet the United States, with half its effort diverted to Europe, still overwhelmed the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Science and technology in wartime

Of the many wartime innovations, those in macroeconomics and management techniques were among the most important, for the rapid increase achieved in labour productivity would make possible the economic miracles of many nations after the war as well. U.S. merchant vessels that took 35 weeks to build before the war were being launched in 50 days by 1943. The Soviet Ilyushin II-4 airplane absorbed 20,000 man-hours before the war and 12,500 in 1943. By the end of the war the British government was choosing contractors on the basis of management, rather than technical, experience. The industrial world was reaching a new plateau of efficiency.

World War II was unprecedented in the fillip it delivered to science and technology and the maturation of planned research and development (R and D). What Churchill called “the wizard war” between scientists to devise new weapons and electronic countermeasures for air and sea combat began before 1939 in the R and D laboratories of German and British firms and institutes. The Soviet Union had since 1919 made the “scientific pursuit of science” a pillar of the regime, and the 1,650,000,000 rubles budgeted for R and D in 1941 was far and away the largest effort in the world. The Fascist regimes also made a fetish of technological progress. Mussolini established a National Council of Research in 1936 under the famed radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. Hitler took for granted the preeminence of German science, and he showed a lively interest in new weapons technology. The totalitarian regimes’ insistence on “Communist science” or “Fascist science,” their secrecy, persecutions, and suppression of intellectual freedom, however, meant that their R and D investment yielded less than that of the liberal states. Stalin’s fear that technical experts might turn to political opposition led him to consign thousands of scientists and engineers to the Gulag, where they worked under the eye of the secret police. Nazi persecution chased dozens of brilliant Jews and others (especially nuclear physicists) out of Europe, thereby enriching the brain pool of Britain and the United States. The dictators’ personal interventions in matters of weapons research and deployment, while sometimes breaking bottlenecks and ending jurisdictional feuding, more often skewed the work of scientists in less productive or dead-end directions. In short, World War II made planned R and D a permanent and mighty tool of state power while demonstrating that too much state control or ideological content in research inevitably brought diminishing returns.

The liberal states, by contrast, responded quickly and effectively to the scientific challenge. Nowhere was this more evident than in cryptanalysis and espionage, in which the Allies repeatedly bested the otherwise secretive and devious Axis. As early as 1931, Captain Gustave Bertrand of French intelligence procured documents from a German traitor concerning the cryptographic rotor device Enigma. The brilliant Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski cracked Enigma by 1938, only to have the unsuspecting Germans add two rotors to the machine. Britain’s scientists in the Ultra project then worked on methods to generate keys for Enigma until they devised the cumbersome Colossus machines, which some consider the first electronic computers. Ultra not only compromised every German spy in Britain but also provided the British with decryptions of German directives and deployments for the whole of occupied Europe for the entire war.

Following the Battle of Britain, to which radar made such a vital contribution, Churchill established a Scientific Advisory Committee under L.A. Lindemann. He and his rival Sir Henry Tizard helped to direct the research programs that discovered various means of jamming the German bombers’ radio navigation systems. By autumn 1940 the Germans countered with their X-Gerät, which broadcast its signal on several frequencies, but this was overcome in turn by British airborne radar that allowed fighters to home in on bombers individually. A similar situation occurred in the air battles over Germany and inspired the development of devices that guided night bombers to their targets despite jamming, the H2S system that permitted crews to “see” through cloud cover, and the use of billows of aluminum strips dropped from bombers to confuse German radar. Microwave radar helped search planes locate submerged U-boats after March 1943.

Roosevelt entrusted the American effort to Vannevar Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which channeled contracts of $1,000,000 or more to over 50 universities during the war. The OSRD, the Naval Research Laboratory, and army arsenals produced such innovations as the antitank bazooka rocket, the proximity fuse, the DUKW amphibious vehicle, the first use of DDT to combat malaria, and mass production of the antibiotic penicillin for war wounds (1943). Soviet researchers, despite the handicaps imposed by invasion and their own regime, developed the devastating Katyusha rocket-cluster (its launcher was called the Stalin Organ), the sturdy T-34 tank, and, by war’s end, a prototype jet fighter. The Germans eased their shortages of vital materials through processes for coal gasification (5,700,000 tons’ worth in 1943) and for producing synthetic rubber. They were also first with an operational combat jet aircraft, the Me-262, but the Nazi regime instead chose to allocate steel and fuel to submarines, ending any chance that Germany might regain control of the skies.

The four technological developments that would come to define the postwar strategic environment were radio-electronics, the electronic computer, the ballistic missile, and the atomic bomb. The medium-range ballistic missile A-4 (called the Vengeance weapon, V-2, by Goebbels) was the brainchild of German rocket engineers who had first come together as amateur spaceflight enthusiasts in the 1920s. The German army began funding their research in 1932 and built a large test range at Peenemünde after 1937. There, Commander Walter Dornberger and Chief Engineer Wernher von Braun developed and tested the A-4 by 1942. The program did not receive top priority until 1943, however, at which time a British air raid on Peenemünde forced construction of an underground factory in the Harz mountains to construct the rockets. The V-2s, of which 4,300 were fired (half of them at Antwerp) after September 1944, did considerable damage until the Allies captured the launch sites in the Netherlands.

Nuclear physics had advanced to the point by 1938 that the German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were able to demonstrate nuclear fission. Scientists in Britain, France, Germany, the U.S.S.R., and the United States all speculated on the possibility of building an atomic explosive device, and in 1939 Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt personally, urging a crash program to perfect such a bomb before the Nazis. The resulting Manhattan Project absorbed $2,000,000,000 of the $3,850,000,000 spent by the United States on R and D in World War II. Churchill, too, approved a nuclear program, code-named the Directorate of Tube Alloys, in Britain’s dark days of 1941. But by 1943 the Americans had built up a sizeable lead and agreed at the Quebec Conference to share results with the British. German atomic research depended on heavy water from Norway, but British commandos and the Norwegian underground sabotaged the plant in 1943. The scientists also failed to press for top priority, which went instead to the missile program. Soviet atomic research kept abreast of the West until the invasion, and in June 1942, Stalin authorized a crash program that by war’s end had begun to produce fissionable uranium in quantity. In no country was much official thought apparently given to the moral and long-range consequences of this potentially devastating invention.

A final, though lesser known, scientific breakthrough of World War II was the application of methods from the physical and social sciences to problems of production, logistics, and combat. Known as “operational research,” this application of science to practical problems was a major step in the process by which military men in the 20th century lost primacy in their profession to civilian specialists. Whether in the scientific study of various antisubmarine tactics, the selection of targets for strategic bombing, or the optimal size and pattern for naval convoys, operational research completed the mobilization by governments of the world’s intellectual community.

Strategy and diplomacy of the Grand Alliance
Allied strategy to the fall of Italy

In the wake of Operation “Torch,” Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca (January 1943) to determine strategy for the coming year. Once again Roosevelt conciliated Churchill, agreeing to put off opening a second front in France in favour of more modest operations against Sicily, Italy, and the “soft underbelly” of Europe after the liberation of North Africa. General George Marshall and Admiral Ernest King succeeded in winning approval for offensives in Burma and the southwest Pacific. The French rivals, de Gaulle and Giraud, were persuaded at least to feign unity and later to create a French Committee of National Liberation under their joint chairmanship (May 1943). But the main event was Roosevelt’s parting announcement that “peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese military power . . . (which) means unconditional surrender.” This surprise declaration was not spontaneous, as Roosevelt claimed; it was a considered signal to Stalin of Allied resolve, especially necessary after General Eisenhower’s ignominious “Darlan deal.” But it also rashly committed the United States to a power vacuum, rather than a balance of power, in postwar Europe, and may have discouraged Germans from attempting to oust Hitler in hopes of escaping utter defeat.

Stalin’s reaction to Casablanca was predictably sour. In March he expressed great anxiety about repeated postponement of the second front in France. On the other hand, the Battle of Stalingrad had more or less assured eventual Soviet victory. Would it not have served Soviet interests more to delay the Allied presence in Europe as long as possible? It is likely that Stalin’s continued pressure for a second front was a function of his perennial fears for internal Soviet security. Stalin may have wanted to recapture his lost ground, especially the Ukraine, as quickly as possible lest anti-Soviet movements take hold there or in neighbouring countries. At this time Stalin also began to denounce the London Poles as reactionaries and sponsored a new Union of Polish Patriots in Moscow as a rival government-in-exile. The final breach between the London Poles and Stalin followed in April 1943, when the Germans uncovered a mass grave in the Katyn forest containing the corpses of over 4,000 Polish officers captured by the Russians in 1939. (Another 10,000 Polish officers were killed in Soviet secret police concentration camps.) Churchill advised Władysław Sikorski, prime minister in the London government-in-exile, not to pursue the issue out of deference to Stalin, who blamed the massacre on the Germans. But the Poles invited an International Red Cross investigation that strongly suggested the Soviets had committed the crime in the spring of 1940, presumably to exterminate Poland’s non-Communist leadership class. Stalin’s seemingly benign dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943 was likewise inspired by postwar planning. The party purges and the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico (August 1940) placed foreign Communists so securely under Moscow’s thumb that the formal apparatus of control was no longer needed, while the appearance of independence on the part of Communist parties would ease their participation in coalition governments after the war.

At the Trident Conference in Washington (May 1943) Churchill and Roosevelt finally projected a 29-division invasion of France for May 1944. The long delay was the consequence of the need to build up troop strength, landing craft, and supplies, and to ensure complete command of air and sea. But Stalin again castigated Allied bad faith and initiated a series of vitriolic communications with Churchill.

The final defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps opened the way for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. The Allies’ rapid success there gradually undermined Mussolini’s eroding Fascist regime. Badoglio, Ciano, and Grandi had all denounced Mussolini’s leadership and had been sacked by February 1943. Other Fascist leaders insisted on convening the Grand Council in July and after violent debate voted 19 to 8 in favour of restoring “the prerogatives of the King and parliament.” Mussolini resigned the next day, and Badoglio took power in the face of a complex dilemma. Italy wanted peace, but to break the alliance with Hitler might provoke a German attack and condemn Italy to prolonged fighting. Thus, while feigning continued loyalty to Germany, Badoglio made secret contact with Eisenhower in the hope of synchronizing an armistice and an Allied occupation. But the Americans insisted on August 11 that Italy give an unconditional surrender and would not promise to land as far north as Rome. With tension and German suspicions mounting—and two British corps crossing the Straits of Messina—Badoglio agreed secretly to invite Allied occupation on September 3. The armistice was announced on the 8th, and Allied landings followed that night in the Bay of Salerno south of Naples. Four days later Hitler sent a crack team of commandos under Otto Skorzeny to rescue Mussolini and set him up as a puppet dictator in the north of Italy.

The new Italian government, far from exiting the war, was obliged to do a volte-face and declare war on Germany on October 13. The Allies did not take Naples until October 1 and made no dent in the Germans’ reinforced Gustav Line until 1944.

Early war-aims agreement

The Quebec Conference (Aug. 14–24, 1943) was the first in which Roosevelt and Churchill spent more time discussing the Pacific War than the European. They gave green lights to General MacArthur to fight northward toward the Philippines and to the U.S. Navy to drive straight across the Pacific to the Ryukyu Islands. The British even reluctantly accorded the U.S. Navy program top priority. The Allies also confirmed the invasion of France for May 1944, and thenceforth the American strategy of concentration would take precedence over British peripheral strategy. Eden and Hull then journeyed to Moscow (October 19–30), where they assured Stalin of the date for a second front. They also won his approval of the arrangements made for Italy, according to which the interallied commission requested by Stalin would merely advise the Anglo-American commanders on the spot rather than govern on its own. When Soviet armies later entered eastern European states, Stalin would point to the Italian precedent to justify unilateral Soviet military control.

At the Cairo Conference (November 22–26), Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang discussed the Burma theatre and made the Cairo Declaration, which prescribed as terms for ending the Pacific War the Japanese surrender of Manchuria, Formosa, Korea, the Pescadores, and Pacific islands acquired since 1914. It also established Chiang as one of the Great Power allies, a point that did not please Churchill.

The first Big Three summit meeting followed in Tehrān from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1, 1943. From the Soviet point of view, the results could only have been satisfactory, for Stalin saw with his own eyes the conflicts that Communist theory predicted must erupt between the “imperialist” powers. In fact, Roosevelt and Churchill displayed the inevitable divergences between a moralizing democracy recently forced out of isolation and a world empire committed for 250 years to preserving the balance of power. What was more, Churchill had no illusions about the Soviet dictator, whereas Roosevelt preferred to believe that he could reason with “Uncle Joe” if only he could allay Soviet suspicions. Roosevelt made a point of chiding Churchill in Stalin’s presence and advocating an end to European colonialism after the war. For his part, Stalin again demanded his 1941 frontiers, and the Baltic coast of East Prussia as well, and the others acquiesced in the restoration of the Curzon Line frontier, provided Poland was compensated with territories taken from Germany in the west. As to Germany itself, the Western powers had discussed breaking up the country and turning the Danubian regions of Austria, Hungary, and Bavaria into a “peaceful, cowlike confederation,” while Churchill spoke of similar federations for eastern Europe. Stalin viewed such notions with suspicion, since they were reminiscent of the cordon sanitaire idea of 1918 and in any case would interfere with the piecemeal communization of the small states. His plan was to Balkanize eastern Europe, punish France for her surrender and strip her of her colonies, and keep Poland and Italy weak. As U.S. diplomat Charles E. Bohlen recorded at Tehrān: “The result would be that the Soviet Union would be the only important military power and political force on the continent of Europe.” Roosevelt did win an agreement in principle on formation of a postwar international organization to be led by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China. Whether unity among them would survive victory was a question Churchill and others brooded on in silence.

The defeat of Nazi Germany

In 1944 the German forces in Soviet territory shrank from attrition and transfers to the west, while geography and Hitler’s reluctance to authorize retreats gave his generals no prospect of shortening the front. Soviet advances were limited only by their own supply capacity. A three-pronged offensive in March squeezed the Germans out of the southern Ukraine. Only the Carpathian Mountains kept the Red Army from the Hungarian Plain, and on March 20 Hitler ordered German occupation of Hungary to prevent the regent Admiral Miklós Horthy from defecting to the Allies. The Red Army entered Bessarabia and northern Romania in April. In the south, Odessa fell on April 10, and Sevastopol on May 9. In the far north, German forces withdrew from Leningrad to Lake Peipus, relieving that city after more than two years of siege and combat that killed 632,000 civilians, mostly from starvation. A two-month pause followed in the Soviet Union, during which the western Allies finally opened the second front in France.

The Allied invasion of Europe

While preparations for D-Day reached their final stages the Allies made a fateful decision to campaign vigorously on the Italian front in hopes of drawing off German reserves from France. But German resistance was fierce, and by October autumn rains curtailed Allied attacks, ending their dream of bursting into Austria from the south.

By spring 1944 the Germans had mustered 59 divisions in France and the Low Countries, but only 10 were motorized and almost 30 were in static defense positions. As the Allied buildup in England reached huge proportions, the Germans tried to divine where the blow would come. Hitler and Rommel thought Normandy; the theatre commander, Rundstedt, believed Calais. Their deployments reflected a compromise. Meanwhile, Roosevelt and Marshall chose Eisenhower to command Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), and he managed the preparation of “Overlord,” the cross-Channel invasion, with tact and skill. More than 3,000,000 men crowded into southern English bases and ports, anxiously awaiting a D-Day on which 176,475 soldiers, 20,111 vehicles, 1,500 tanks, and 12,000 planes would move by air and sea across the Channel. Eisenhower described them as being “as tense as a coiled spring.” Elaborate deceptions kept the Germans guessing about the point of attack, and Normandy was chosen in part because it was not the easiest or nearest French beachhead. On June 6, American, British, and Canadian forces went ashore, but seven tense and bloody weeks passed before the Allies broke out of the Norman peninsula. The initial campaign, thanks to Allied courage and matériel and German blunders, removed more divisions from the Wehrmacht’s order of battle than even the great Soviet offensive of June 1944.

As Allied armies raced westward and northward to liberate France, Eisenhower faced the problem of what to do with Paris. He had no desire to interrupt the drive for a difficult urban battle, nor to undertake the chore of feeding 4,000,000 inhabitants. But the Parisian police went on strike on August 19, and de Gaulle secretly ordered French forces to seize the capital. Meanwhile, Hitler had ordered that the landmarks of Paris be blown up before the Germans retreated. But garrison commander Dietrich von Choltitz refused to carry out the order and negotiated a surrender that opened the city to Allied forces on the 25th. Eisenhower gave the honour of leading the parade to de Gaulle and General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc.

Soviet advances in the east

In five months from D-Day the Western Allies liberated France and Belgium and advanced 350 miles. In the midst of the Normandy campaign, on June 22, the Red Army launched its summer offensive. Armoured spearheads chased German remnants to the East Prussian border and the banks of the Vistula by July 31, an advance of 450 miles in five weeks. By October the Baltic coast was cleared of Germans. These massive victories carried the Red Army to the borders of nine states that had been independent before 1939, making possible the sovietization of eastern Europe. The first episode in that process stemmed from an uprising by the Polish Home Army in Warsaw, underground allies of the London Poles. Expecting momentary liberation from across the Vistula, the Home Army rebelled against the German occupation and seized control of the city. But Stalin called it a “reckless venture,” and the Soviets sat idly by while Hitler ordered in SS divisions to crush the resistance and flatten the ancient city. To be sure, the Red Army had just finished a huge advance that stretched its supply lines to the limit. But Stalin shed no tears over the slaughter of the non-Communist Warsaw Poles, who held out bravely for eight weeks, and even hindered U.S. and British planes from supplying Warsaw by denying them landing rights in Soviet territory. On August 22, Stalin simply dismissed the Warsaw Poles as “criminals” and set up his Moscow Poles in Lublin as the acting government of “liberated Poland.” In the north, the Finns sued for peace in early September, accepting their 1940 losses and giving up in addition the Arctic port of Petsamo (Pechenga), and a $300,000,000 indemnity, terms confirmed in the treaty of peace concluded in 1947. The U.S.S.R. allowed the Finns self-rule so long as Helsinki coordinated its foreign policy with that of the U.S.S.R. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, however, were reannexed.

The Soviets unleashed another major offensive in August through Bessarabia, even though the Balkan front was irrelevant to the quick defeat of Germany. King Michael concluded an armistice with Moscow on September 12. Citing the Italian precedent, Molotov brushed aside the Western Allies’ attempts to win a share of influence over Romanian affairs. Bulgaria, which was not at war with the U.S.S.R., tried to establish its neutrality, but the Red Army occupied it anyway and set up a “Fatherland Front” in which Communists were predominant. When Soviet and Romanian troops invaded Hungary in October, Horthy tried to extract his country from the war. But the SS arranged his overthrow, and fighting continued until the fall of Budapest on Feb. 13, 1945. A foolish waste of troops for the Nazis, the battle of Budapest was equally irrational for Stalin unless his true goal was political. Meanwhile, Yugoslav partisans under a local Communist, Josip Broz Tito, captured Belgrade on Oct. 20, 1944, and evicted the Germans.

One by one the states of eastern Europe were falling to Communist forces in circumstances prejudicing their future independence. When Churchill arrived in Moscow on Oct. 9, 1944, he tried to contain the march of Communism into central Europe by making a deal with Stalin on spheres of influence: Romania to be 90 percent Soviet; Greece 90 percent British; Yugoslavia and Hungary 50–50; Bulgaria 75 percent Soviet, 25 British. While apparently a realistic response to Soviet ambitions—and presence—in contrast to Roosevelt’s reliance on vague principles, Churchill’s proposal was in fact rather silly. Stalin was unlikely to grant Western influence in countries under Soviet occupation (like Hungary), while the meaning of such numbers as “75–25” was unfathomable. Poland was not mentioned at all. On the other hand, Churchill did forestall Soviet aid to the Communist partisans in Greece and may have helped to shield the crucial Mediterranean from Soviet influence for years after the war.

The final Allied agreements

In February 1945 the Big Three held their last summit conference, at Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula. It was a last chance to forestall the disintegration of the alliance upon victory or, conversely, for the British and Americans to take firm measures against Soviet control in eastern Europe. Roosevelt was now mortally ill and exhausted by the strenuous journey. Controversy later raged over his decision to attend the conference at all, his eagerness to conciliate Stalin, and the sinister presence in his entourage of Communist agent Alger Hiss. Postwar critics would charge that Roosevelt had been duped at Yalta and had “sold out” eastern Europe to the Communists. Doubtless if Churchill’s advice had been followed, the policy of trust might have given way to one of hard bargaining and clear haggling over boundaries and governments in Europe and Asia. But in fact there was little the Western powers could have done to frustrate Stalin other than threatening a new world war. Nor could Churchill and Roosevelt have openly relinquished any liberated states to Stalin without abrogating the principles on which the war had been fought and alienating the millions of U.S. voters of eastern European descent. As for Asia, the United States was yet facing a campaign that might cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. Purchasing Soviet help against Japan seemed both realistic and humane. Roosevelt could not predict that the atomic bomb would render Soviet aid superfluous.

Of the three great allies Britain was the weakest and most interested in restoring a balance of power in Europe. Churchill, a keen critic of Bolshevism since 1919, had lobbied all throughout the summer of 1944 for an Italian campaign in hopes that the Allies might reach the Danube before the Red Army, and in October he had made the “spheres of influence” deal with Stalin. But the war map—and Roosevelt’s unwillingness to strain the alliance—defeated all these tactics. On the eve of Yalta, Churchill wondered whether “the end of this war may well prove to be more disappointing than was the last.” American war aims, by contrast, were nebulous to nonexistent, except for a reprise of Wilsonian internationalism. There is little evidence of economic motives in U.S. policy and, incredibly, no contingency plans for a breakdown in relations with the U.S.S.R. While Roosevelt feared another American retreat into isolationism, he also believed in the possibility of a postwar Great Power condominium. He was prepared to show Stalin that the Anglo-Saxons were not ganging up on him and wanted Soviet participation in a United Nations Organization. But Stalin pursued the old-fashioned way of postwar security: military and political control of eastern Europe to create a buffer for the U.S.S.R. and to ensure Soviet domination over its own repressed nationalities.

At the Yalta Conference, Big Three unity seemed intact, but only because the participants resorted to vagueness or postponements on the most explosive issues. A joint European Advisory Commission, it was decided, would divide Germany into occupation zones, with the Soviet zone extending to the Elbe and a French zone carved out of the Anglo-American spheres. Berlin would likewise be placed under four-power control. The Western Allies repudiated the extreme plans broached at Quebec for the pastoralization of Germany and favoured German industrial recovery under international control. But the Soviets insisted on the right to strip Germany of $20,000,000,000 worth of machinery and raw materials. The issue was assigned to a reparations commission. As for the political future of Germany, Stalin revived earlier Big Three talk of breaking Germany into several states, but the Western Allies now perceived the danger of further Balkanization in central Europe in light of Soviet power. This matter, too, was left for study.

Poland was, as always, a most difficult problem. The Western Allies reiterated their Tehrān approval of the Curzon Line, now modified slightly in Poland’s favour, as the Soviet–Polish border. But the assignment of 2,700,000 Germans to Poland in the West worried Churchill: “It would be a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it died of indigestion.” Hence Poland’s western frontier would be left to a peace conference. As for the Polish government, the most the Western Allies achieved was a vague promise from Stalin that he would reorganize the Lublin Committee and permit free elections among “non-Fascist elements” within a month after peace. But Stalin reserved the right to decide who was “Fascist” and rejected international supervision of the elections. Roosevelt proposed a Declaration on Liberated Europe, by which the Big Three promised to help all liberated peoples “to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems” through “free elections of Governments responsive to the will of the people.” Stalin signed, probably considering this more high-flown American rhetoric meant for domestic consumption. In the Communist lexicon words like democratic and free implied conditions virtually the opposite of what Roosevelt intended. Since Roosevelt also announced (to Churchill’s despair) that the United States would evacuate its troops from Europe within two years, Stalin may have felt that he could safely ignore the Declaration on Liberated Europe.

Stalin did prove conciliatory on the United Nations, which had already been discussed at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference between Aug. 21 and Oct. 7, 1944. The Soviets had demanded that all 16 constituent republics of the U.S.S.R. be represented (ostensibly to balance the British Empire nations that would vote with London) and that permanent members of the Security Council retain a veto on all issues, not just those involving sanctions or threats to peace. At Yalta, Stalin settled for three seats in the General Assembly and a limited veto. Like Wilson at Versailles, Roosevelt put great stock in international organization and was prompted to remark, “The Russians have given in so much at the conference that I don’t think we should let them down.” Finally, Stalin promised to declare war on Japan within 90 days of the German surrender in return for southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, retention of Outer Mongolia, and a promise of U.S. support for Soviet rights at Dairen (Lü-ta) and Port Arthur (Lü-shun)—all the old objects of Russian imperialism in east Asia. Within a month news from the various commissions established at Yalta indicated that the Soviets did not intend to meet Western expectations. When Molotov announced on March 23 that most of the London Poles were disqualified from Polish elections, Roosevelt reportedly banged his fist on his wheelchair: “Averell [Harriman, ambassador in Moscow] is right. We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” Roosevelt then retreated, disillusioned, to Warm Springs, Ga., where he died on April 12.

The Allied advance from the west was stalled for six weeks by the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last offensive, but by February 1945 German resistance was near its end. Some Soviet and Western leaders were openly describing the last campaigns as a “land-grab” directed as much against their distrustful allies as against the Germans. But the commanders in the West still took steps to prove that they were supporting the Soviet advance. The worst product of this policy was the Allied bombing of Dresden on Feb. 13–14, 1945, allegedly to destroy a key communications centre for Germans facing the Red Army. The two-day incendiary raid created a firestorm, however, that consumed the medieval city and killed up to 25,000 civilians, to virtually no military purpose.

Another product of Western efforts to reassure Stalin was the refusal to order British and American armies to race the Soviets to Berlin. On March 7, 1945, General George Patton’s tanks broke through weak German lines and the 1st Army infantry captured intact a Rhine bridge at Remagen. Churchill pleaded for a rapid thrust in order to secure Berlin and Prague: “Highly important that we shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible.” Stalin, in turn, tried to lull his allies by saying that “Berlin has lost its former strategic importance,” while in fact ordering his generals to make for it as soon as possible. Eisenhower, backed by Marshall, confined himself to military considerations alone, however. The Allied armies would close the Ruhr pocket, then advance in breadth in case the rumours were true of a Nazi “Alpine redoubt” in the south. When the Western armies exceeded the limits of their occupation zones in April, Eisenhower even called them back. Soviet forces, meanwhile, captured Vienna and Königsberg on April 9 and encircled Berlin by the 25th. Five days later a despairing Hitler declared that Germany had proved unworthy of him and committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. Hitler’s successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, opened negotiations with the Western powers, hoping to save as many troops and refugees as possible from Soviet reprisals. But the U.S.S.R. refused to recognize the surrender ceremony at Eisenhower’s headquarters on May 7, necessitating a second surrender, and a separate Soviet V-E Day, in Berlin on May 8. The war in Europe was over.

The defeat of Japan
The encirclement of Japan

By January 1944 the American buildup in the Pacific permitted both the army and navy commands to accelerate the rollback of Japanese power. Indeed, the United States had by then deployed as many men and planes and more ships in the Pacific theatre as in the European. The army under General MacArthur aimed at the liberation of the Philippines, thereby cutting Japanese communications with the East Indies and the sea route to Southeast Asia. The navy under Admiral Chester Nimitz moved up the Marshall and Mariana chains to bring U.S. bombers within range of the Japanese home islands. In both cases the Americans employed the tactic of island-hopping and relied on superior firepower to inflict appalling casualties on fanatical Japanese defenders who preferred death to the shame of surrender.

In the central Pacific, the navy’s material superiority allowed Nimitz to pierce Japan’s “absolute national defense sphere” almost at will. By 1943 the United States was producing 100,000 planes per year, compared to Japan’s total of 63,000 for the entire war. By the summer of 1944 the United States had nearly 100 carriers of all types in the Pacific, compared to Japan’s total of 20 for the war. The Japanese also lost more than 80 percent of the 6,000,000 tons of shipping with which they had begun the war (half to U.S. submarines) and were forced to expose their proud navy to destruction in a vain effort to supply their far-flung garrisons. The U.S. advance was limited only by its own supply lines, which stretched 5,000 miles from Pearl Harbor and 8,000 from the continental bases of California.

The bombing of the Japanese home islands achieved a new plateau of horror when the U.S. Army Air Forces adopted Britain’s European tactics of low-level nighttime raiding on urban areas. On the night of March 9–10, 1945, napalm area bombing of largely wooden Tokyo stoked fire storms that destroyed a quarter of the city, killed 80,000 civilians, and left 1,000,000 homeless. Similar devastating fire raids were launched against Ōsaka, Kōbe, Yokohama, and other cities.

The atomic decision

By April, Japan lay open to direct assault by land as well as air and sea. How could the United States bring Tokyo to surrender? Three means suggested themselves: invasion, inducement, and shock. The first would involve a lengthy, brutal campaign in which, it was estimated, hundreds of thousands of American and perhaps 2,000,000 Japanese lives would be lost. Yet the Joint Chiefs had no choice but to prepare for this eventuality, and by May 25 they had instructed MacArthur to plan Operation “Olympic,” an invasion of Kyushu, for November 1. The second means, inducement, was clearly preferable, and on May 8, the day after the German surrender, President Harry S. Truman tried it. Unconditional surrender, he said, would mean “the termination of the influence of the military leaders who have brought Japan to the present brink of disaster,” but did not mean “the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people,” who would be free to “return to their families, their farms, their jobs.” Unfortunately, Truman did not include (as the State Department advised) a promise that the Japanese might retain their emperor, the god-king of their Shintō state religion. On the other hand, the Japanese government foolishly dismissed Truman’s appeal as propaganda and began to mobilize the home front to resist an invasion.

The third means of achieving a surrender—by shock—had become a possibility on Dec. 30, 1944, when General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, reported that it was “reasonably certain” that a gun-type atomic bomb equivalent to 10,000 tons of TNT and an implosion-type bomb would be ready for testing by the summer of 1945. On April 25, soon after Truman’s accession to the presidency, Secretary of War Stimson impressed on him the significance of this development: “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.” He then formed an Interim Committee of statesmen and scientists to debate how the bomb should be employed. On May 31 and June 1 the committee received scientific briefings and held discussions on whether to share the secret with the Soviets, how long it would take other nations to develop their own atomic bomb, how international control might be achieved, whether the U.S. monopoly might help Washington in its relations with Moscow, and whether the bomb would be a universal blessing or a Frankenstein’s monster.

In the matter at hand, however, the committee concluded that the bomb should be used to end the war as soon as possible; that it should be dropped on a military-urban target so as to demonstrate its full force; and that a demonstration or warning should not be made beforehand, lest the bomb lose its shock value. The scientific panel under J. Robert Oppenheimer concurred on June 16. As he later said, “We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan. . . . We did say that we did not think exploding one of these things as a firecracker over a desert was likely to be very impressive.”

The first atomic test near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945, yielded an explosion equivalent to that of 15,000 tons of TNT and stunned Oppenheimer and his colleagues with its elemental power. At that moment Truman was attending the final Big Three meeting at Potsdam, and he casually mentioned to Stalin that the United States had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin said that he was glad to hear of it and hoped that the United States would make good use of it against the Japanese. Though little else was agreed upon at Potsdam, the Big Three did jointly invite Japan on July 26 to surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.” When no surrender was forthcoming, Truman gave the Army Air Forces on Tinian Island the green light. He wrote later that he never lost a moment’s sleep over his decision.

A specially equipped B-29, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the military port of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. The heat and blast effaced everything in the vicinity, burned 4.4 square miles, and killed upwards of 66some 70,000 people , and injured 70,000 more(lingering injuries and radiation sickness brought the death toll past 100,000 by the end of the year). Two days later the U.S.S.R. declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. On August 9 the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, killing 39,000 people. On that day the Voice of the Sacred Crane—the emperor’s command—summoned the Cabinet to an audience. Hirohito expressed his wish that Japan accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration on the sole condition that the emperor remain sovereign. To continue the war, he said, would be suicidal. And then, perhaps realizing the irony of that remark, he turned to the military men and noted that their performance had fallen rather short of their promises. Even at that late date some fanatical officers attempted a coup on the palace grounds rather than submit. On Sept. 2, 1945, however, General MacArthur received the Japanese surrender on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, and the greatest war in history came to a close.