VE and VJ Day

By 1945, the planned-for “Thousand-Year Reich” and “Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” were as ruined as the major cities of Germany and Japan. It did appear that victory in both Europe and Asia was not a matter of “if” but of “when.” The question, therefore, is trying to understand how the Allies, despite great superiority, faced such continuing obstacles to victory, and the reason the Axis, despite such hardships, continued to fight with such fanaticism. In examining the end of the war both in Europe and Asia, parallels as well as differences can be drawn between the end of the conflict and a larger assessment of why the Allies won over their Axis opponents.

After the successful opening of the long-called-for Second Front in France, the Germans found themselves in a vice of their own strategic making. In the east, the Soviet Forces, after destroying the German forces at Kursk, proceeded to dictate events for the remainder of the war. Lend-Lease enabled the Soviet forces to implement deep operations in which massed armored thrusts shattered the German lines. The power of Soviet operations was best shown through Operation Bagration. This operation, which began only 16 days after D-Day in France, shattered the German forces in the Baltic and Polish states. By the end of the operation, which saw the destruction of much of Army Group Centre, the Soviets had positioned themselves for the final thrust into the heart of Germany and the capture of Berlin. Soviet success was so total that it had the ability to dispatch forces to invade the Balkans and destroy the Fascist regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia and threaten Hungary. Soviet successes in the east were matched by Allied successes in France. After a successful landing at D-Day, the combined British and American forces slowly pushed outwards from the hedgerows of Normandy and captured Paris.

By the end of 1944, the Allies were poised to cross the Rhine into Germany itself. At this point, the offensive in the west seemed to peter out. While this pause, much like the “delay” of the Second Front, has been presented as a sign of the West’s hope that the Nazis and Soviets would continue to kill one another, there are more, and less nefarious, reasons for this pause. First, much of the offensive strength of the Allies had been used up in the attempt to fulfill Operation Market Garden. After the failure of the operation, there was a need to pause and refit and reform units. Second, the Allies were suffering under a critical logistical failing. Despite the incredible success of supplying so many men so far from forward bases—indeed, the unheralded but critical factor in Allied success was Operation Pluto (Pipeline Under the Ocean), which carried oil across the English Channel and even up to the Rhine—the Western allies had reached the limits of their own logistical system. The slowdown was a necessity based on the supply needs of the Western allies absent another available and functional port such as Antwerp. At the same time, part of the slowdown was also in Western Allied commanders underestimating the abilities of their opponents. Many American and British commanders felt the Germans were beaten and it was only a matter of a quick offensive in 1945 that would bring complete victory.1 It was this failure to perceive the German willingness to fight that enabled the initial success of the Battle of the Bulge.

The Battle of the Bulge was akin to Operation Zitadelle on the Eastern Front. As in the east, the Germans assembled new tanks and a limited force in an attempt to recreate earlier success. In this case, the Germans hoped a similar dash through the Ardennes, as in 1940, would enable the Germans to cut off the Allies from the coast and force another masterful victory on the Western Front. The hopes of the offensive are depicted in the map below.

Like Operation Zitadelle, however, the limited nature of the engagement underscored how far German fortunes had fallen. Rather than a massive sickle-thrust involving almost the entirety of Panzer forces in the German army, Hitler was pinning his hopes for success on two Panzer armies that only had enough fuel to reach halfway to Antwerp.3 Despite these failings, the German operation (Operation Wacht am Rhein) had seemingly all the necessities for success. They possessed advantages in tanks as well as manpower, and Allied air superiority would be neutralized by the poor winter weather. They would also possess the advantage of surprise due to the command failings of the Allied leaders. Taken together, these should have guaranteed far more success than was achieved by German forces in the actual campaign. The explanation for German failure puts the lie to the myth, propagated post-war by German generals and even today through bad History Channel documentaries, that the Germans were the superior combatants. While not believing in German racial attitudes towards the superiority of their race, military commentators have seemingly internalized the belief that the German forces were filled with übermenschen, each of whom were worth 4–5 allied soldiers.4 As underscored in A War to Be Won, the Bulge “was a victory for the U.S. soldier.”5 Despite the odds, the Germans were stopped by the tenacity, ingenuity, effectiveness, and bravery of the American forces opposing them.6

Parallels with Zitadelle continue in the aftermath of the battle as the German defeat destroyed the ability of the Germans to dictate events in the West as the offensive used up what remained of their strategic reserve. The real issue, however, was the continued German resistance on all sides. Even after the clear defeat in the Ardennes, the Germans continued to fight and fight tenaciously. In April 1945, 10,677 Americans died in Europe, which was almost the same number as had died during the month of the D-Day invasion itself.7 Despite the vast superiority in men and material, the Soviet offensive to take Berlin would still cost the lives of 361,367 Soviet and Polish soldiers.8 While any sensible person could see the writing on the wall, it appears “as long as the Germans had guns and ammunition, they died for the Führer and took all too many American, British, and Soviet soldiers with them.9

This fanaticism on the part of German soldiers must be explained if we are to understand the end of the war in Europe. Labeling the Nazis as “evil” as an explanation for their fanaticism does little to advance our understanding. Further, this explanation does not reveal why German allies, such as Hungary, continued to fight—even going so far as to depose its own leader in order to continue fighting.10 Ultimately, the explanation must involve answering what the German soldier was fighting for, and our answer demands going back to the very beginning of this course. As noted in Module One, there were those who, like Ernst Jünger, believed World War I had promised the way forward in the development of the “new man.” Fascism took this “front identity” and built an ideology around it. Fascism promised a “Third Way” separate from the bankruptcy, both figuratively and literally during the Great Depression, of democratic liberalism and from the horrors of Bolshevism. It was not simply that Fascism promised a way forward amidst a period of chaos in the West; the Fascists argued against the very principles of bourgeoisie liberalism and capitalism. While happy to use the products of industry, fascists opposed the principles of capitalism that reduced every person to a vote and an income. They considered this just as limiting as the views of communism that reduced everyone to a class identity. In contrast, Fascists felt the Western Front had exposed how the “new men” of will could transform society and put it on a new and better path. As Roger Griffin, a scholar of Fascism, explains it:

In the inter-war period [Fascism] manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.11

In Germany, Hitler promised to create a new culture where man would not be defined by his class or income level but could join a Volksgemeinschaft (“People’s Community”) where they would become part of a classless but integrative society. In a society centered on racial purity and the centrality of the state, the German people could find freedom from the problems of modern society.12 It is critical to understand this positive reason for which they fought even as we can clearly delineate the negative reasons (a desire to protect their homes, fighting to ensure more Germans could flee the Soviet forces) for German constancy in fighting. This view also explains why allies continued to fight, as they also saw a vision for the future under the grand rubric of Fascism.13

Additionally, it is helpful to be mindful of the broad unifying power of anti-communism, as it was not simply allies but nationalities from across Europe that fought against the Soviets. The best indicator of this broad-based fear of communism was in the foreign divisions created to serve in the Waffen-SS. Germany was able to recruit from across the globe, drawing in foreign recruits from allied and defeated nations and even recruits from Britain, India, and the United States.14 Thus, it was not simply that the Germans and their allies were defending their homes; they felt as though they were resisting and fighting for a vision of the future. Indeed, for some adherents of National Socialism, it was not a vision for the future but the only possible vision for the future. As the Third Reich collapsed, many of these adherents saw the only outlet being suicide. A rash of suicides took place, from the very top of the Nazi hierarchy, such as Joseph Goebbels and his wife killing their six children and then themselves, to the lowest levels. For these Nazis, the collapse of the Third Reich meant the destruction of their hopes for a racially pure society and the descent into a Bolshevik-dominated future. Certainly, fear of judgment and punishment for their crimes motivated some of the suicides, but some, such as Hitler himself, saw it in racial terms. As he prepared to take his own life, he saw the war as proof that the Slavs had shown themselves to be a superior race to the Germans and deserved to take control. He did not wish to live in such a world and ended his reign at his own hand on April 30, 1945. While it is correct to see the motives varying among individuals, it is only with this broader understanding of German motivation that one can successfully explain the horrible costs of the end of the war in Europe.

The end of the war in Japan was no less costly. As indicated in Module Six, the turn towards kamikaze attacks was borne both of fanaticism and desperation. By the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the U.S. Navy had fundamentally destroyed the operational power of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Additionally, the Japanese were beginning to suffer under the combined might of the U.S. Navy’s submarine force and the B-29s of XXI Bomber Command. The destructive power of the bombers was on greatest display during Operation Meetinghouse when, in March of 1945, over 300 bombers incinerated Tokyo in the largest and most destructive raid of the Second World War.15 Despite these losses, which were crippling to both the military effectiveness of the Japanese forces as well as their civilian population, the Japanese government was prepared to continue to fight. The fanaticism of Japanese defense was driven by hope and honor. In addition to fighting to protect their homeland, most of the military believed that they could never submit to the Allied terms of unconditional surrender. The Allied terms would imperil the position of the Emperor, and that was unacceptable to the Japanese leadership. Hopes were still pinned on a belief that the Japanese could inflict such casualties that the Allies would be forced into a negotiated peace that would preserve the position and status of the Emperor. It cannot be said that the Japanese did not have a firm grasp of their capabilities in defense, as the death tolls of Iwo Jima and Okinawa would make clear. Dug in and committed, Japanese troops were able to exact an incredibly heavy price for losing these two islands. Despite being given the moniker “Bloody Tarawa,” the losses of taking that island totaled roughly 3,000 of the 35,000 engaged, while Iwo Jima cost more than 6,000 deaths and nearly 30,000 casualties.16 The losses only escalated in the occupation of Okinawa. The tenacious resistance of the Japanese on the island was matched by the ferocious onslaught of aerial and naval units against the supporting U.S. naval assets. Wave upon wave of massive kamikaze raids were sent against U.S. ships, leading to devastating losses. This aerial assault was matched by the commitment of the remaining Japanese surface fleet in suicidal raids in an attempt to destroy more allied shipping and to increase the costs for the Americans.17 The toll on the U.S. navy was telling.

Even before landing, five American carriers had been so badly damaged that they had to withdraw. Admiral Spruance lost one flagship . . . Admiral Marc Mitscher . . . shifted his flag three times in four days . . . As the campaign slogged on, the number of ruined carriers climbed: Bunker Hill, Franklin, the new Wasp, the new Yorktown, and Enterprise.18

By the end of the three-month Okinawa campaign, the U.S. Navy had suffered more casualties than it had suffered during the previous two years in the Pacific. These horrific totals were more than matched on land, with over 7,000 killed and 56,000 casualties.19 It were these figures that gave the Japanese leadership hope that they could inflict even worse totals in defending the Home Islands of Japan. On the reverse, the United States was filled with dread as it saw the death tolls on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Planning for Operation Downfall and Operation Olympic suggested casualties near 260,000 for U.S. forces.20 Only in light of these horrific casualty figures can the thought process behind the dropping of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki be adequately understood. Limitations on space compels only a cursory glance at this hotly debated issue, but these casualty figures, more than any view of a post-war world, motivated the military and political leadership of the United States.21 This leaves aside the moral question of dropping the bombs but, as made especially clear in “The Bombing of Japan, June 1944 – August 1945: Targets” on page 195 of the Routledge Atlas, dropping the atomic bombs may have saved Japan a further year of the devastation of conventional bombing.

Regardless of the rationale for dropping the atomic bombs, it is telling, as is made clear in your readings, how little an effect it had on Japanese decision makers. Even after the destruction of two Japanese cities, and the invasion of Soviet forces in Manchuria, it still took the personal intervention of the emperor to force a fractured government to accept Allied surrender terms. Furthermore, even after the emperor’s personal intervention, there was an attempt to capture the emperor’s recording to prevent it from being published, which underscores the fanatical commitment on the part of some to continue to resist.22 The greatest reason for dropping the bombs may, ironically, be life. The atomic bombs prevented the invasion of Japan. The lack of an invasion prevented military and civilian casualties, only hinted at in Iwo Jima and Okinawa, on an unfathomable scale.

Additionally, the end of the war prevented an even graver threat that was hidden in the haze of military calculations. The years 1945 and 1946 saw incredible famines wrack Japan as the end result of the failing strategy and economy of the Japanese Empire. With peace and the imposition of a government under General MacArthur, the Japanese were able to survive this famine with copious food aid brought in by the United States. Absent peace, the death toll for continued Japanese resistance through 1946 could have reached staggering heights. One can continue to debate the morality of the atomic bombs, but if Robert J. Oppenheimer (lead scientist on the Manhattan Project, which created the Atomic Bomb) shattered the world that existed, his bomb at least preserved the mass of the Japanese people in that world.

While the costs of this war, and its legacy, will be more fully examined in the next module, it is helpful to assess a crucial question for the conflict as a whole: Why did the Allies win? These overviews have striven to document the strategic calculation of the Axis powers and underscore their successes and failures. Regardless of Axis deficits in strategic calculations, it is also necessary to assess why the Allies were ultimately successful in the face of the powerful Nazi and Japanese armed forces.24 In his book Why the Allies Won, Richard Overy attempts to free readers from the hindsight bias of assuming Allied victory was a foregone conclusion. He emphasizes the dangers posed by the Axis powers and argues that it was only Allied success in eight crucial factors of the war that ensured their success. Overy does not suggest any one factor was the “war winner” but that it was the interrelated nature of all of these “fronts” that enabled Allied victory in the end. In place of having you read the book, his main arguments are summarized below and should be utilized in your discussion assignment within the module.

  1. The Battle for the Seas: Overy argues that the victory on the seas was “the foundation for final victory in the west and the Pacific.”25Victory in the Battle for the Atlantic enabled not only the successful invasion of Europe but also provided the supplies necessary to sustain Great Britain and the Soviet Union in their war against Germany. In the Pacific Theater, the importance of winning control of the seas is more apparent. The Battle of Midway was followed by continued U.S. naval successes, which fatally weakened the ability of the Imperial Japanese Navy to resist. Ultimately, Overy argues this is the result of the bravery, skill, and technology utilized by the Allies as the weight of material forces only really overwhelmed the Japanese and Germans by 1944–1945.
  2. Stalingrad and Kursk: While it is easy to see Operation Barbarossa, or any effort by the Germans on the Eastern Front, as an act of unmitigated hubris, the Eastern Front cannot be fully explained as a line of uninterrupted German mistakes. In the battles for Stalingrad and Kursk, the failings of German strategy are fully on display as well as the development of Soviet operational and strategic prowess. In these two massive battles, the Soviets ultimately came into their own. The revival of Soviet patriotism, closely melding the people to Stalin’s government, as well as improvements in military command and organization, enabled theSoviets to defeat the Germans both in terms of mass and skill. Kursk was, Overy argues, “the most important victory of the war,” as it passed the initiative to the Soviets who would not relinquish it until they reached Berlin. 26Overy’s contention is that the Soviets should not be seen as a power that simply withstood, but one that overcame its deficiencies and actively took part in achieving victory.
  3. The Bombing Offensives: The strategic bombing campaign never lived up to the warwinning hopes of its proponents, but it was integral to success on all fronts. Overy notes that the bombing campaign proved critical to placing “a strict ceiling” on the capabilities of the German economy and forced valuable men and materials to be kept at home rather than at the front.27The bombing was, in many ways, the original second front, whose destructive effects ensured success on the ground.28 Bombing was critical to the success of Allied aims in both Europe and Asia, the most spectacular impact of the bombing campaign being the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
  4. Invasion of France: Overy underscores that it was only by success in factors 1 and 3 that the Allies were even in a position to attempt an invasion of France in 1944. Even the successful invasion itself was a short-run affair depending on allied intelligence successes, including deceiving the Germans on the location of the invasion, and allied mastery of the air to destroy any German counterattacks. The ultimate importance of the invasion of France was to place Germany in a vice, which dashed any German hopes of winning the war in the East before turning to the West. The invasion of France forced the Germans to confront a truly allied effort to bring an end to the Nazi regime.
  5. “A Genius for Mass-Producing”: Some have argued that the Allied victory was preordained based on a simple ledger where Soviet, American, and British productive capacities are laid against the more limited output of the Axis powers. Overy, in contrast, notes that it was not until well into the war that the Allies started to benefit from the preponderance of their productive capacities. He argues that it was only the successful mobilization of the Soviet and U.S. wartime economies that enabled allied success.29He also argues that it was the “simplicity” of allied efforts, sometimes distained in the face of the sophistication of German weapons, which enabled their ultimate victory.30 While German weapons such as the Tiger tank might be suitable fodder for future documentaries, it was the decidedly unsophisticated M4 Sherman and Soviet T-34 tanks that would be produced in massive quantities and win the war for the Allied forces.
  6. Technology and Military Power: Ironically, it was not simply in munition production that the Allies proved superior, but also in technological development. Although both Germany and Japan had developed sophisticated and highly efficient weapons, they only retained their edge until 1942. By the end of the war, the Allies had not simply out-produced but outdeveloped their opponents. In the case of Japan, its industry was incapable of keeping up with U.S. production, which could not only produce ships but also develop new and better carriers and airplanes. The Zero was a masterful fighter, but in the face of increasing quantitative and qualitative U.S. superiority, the Japanese were forced to resort to suicidal attacks as an equalizer for their technological failings. In the case of Germany, the Germans were “too modern for their own good.”31Their fixation on developing “super-weapons” was an attempt to use science to solve their deficits in industry. Unfortunately, in trying to do so, the Germans committed vast resources to projects that provided little military utility. Fusing with the previous factor, the Allies did not simply out-produce their opponents; they also produced the modern forces necessary to win a modern war.
  7. Allied Unity: The last two factors Overy identifies are no less critical, though they cannot be charted on a map. He holds up the Allied system of decision making, involving inter-Allied decisions on both the political and military level, as a masterful example of cooperative leadership. Despite the Soviets, United States, and Britain possessing highly different cultures and divergent aims for the war and the peace, these forces were able to function as a combined unit to defeat the German and Japanese forces. Further, despite the centralized control over forces and political decision-making, the Allies did not create a singular authority on which everything else depended. In the case of Germany, the Führer’s direct leadership led to poor decisions on the Eastern Front and an inability to create a workable defensive plan at Normandy. In the Pacific, the Japanese were unable to decide on coherent strategic aims as feuding typified the relationship between the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. Beyond an ability to create a coherent domestic system of national defense, the Axis powers never worked as a cohesive allied unit, which could have maximized their military power across the globe.
  8. The Moral Contest: The last element Overy describes is an intangible factor he still feels was critical to Allied success. Forgoing issues of segregation in the United States, the continued desire for empire in Britain, and the horrors of the Stalinist system, the Allies were able to present a belief they served the forces of progress against the barbarism of the Nazi and Japanese regimes. He argues that this moral certainty, such as a hatred of Hitler, lent “moral cement” to the entire Allied war effort which percolated down to the lowest levels of the population. The Axis were never able to take the moral high-ground and suffered from being depicted as, at least, the aggressors on peaceful neighbors or, at worst, agents of “evil” regimes. This moral certainty provided the Allies a critical element in their ability to continue fighting until they achieved the unconditional surrender of their opponents.32

Based on the reasons provided in the overview, what is your assessment as to why the Allies won? Do you agree with one of Overy’s arguments more than the others? In your assessment, provide at least two cited examples from the conflict (from any of your readings, not just this module) that substantiate your argument.