In his book The Second World Wars, Victor Davis Hanson takes a holistic approach with a high level parsing of the myriad “wars” contained within the worldwide conflagration. He attempts to extricate various aspects of the war that will make the case that anyone looking at the military capacity, strategy and myriad talents of the Allies could have and should have concluded that they would win from the beginning.
The many weaknesses of the Axis powers are also considered. Specifically, what Hanson clearly believes is Hitler’s most debilitating error, deciding to attack the Soviet Union and bring about the dreaded “war on two fronts”. It’s not clear from Hanson’s reckoning whether he believes the war could have been won in the absence of Operation Barbarossa, but once that operation began, and there was territory to be defended in both the West and East, the Germans at were not going to win the war.
Hanson does justice to the well trod paths of those writers who came before in highlighting the strengths of the Allies – unprecedented US production capacity, the lack of airstrikes on the US mainland, British Naval superiority, the sheer numbers of Soviet ground troops that were able to be spent for the cost of beating the Nazis and actual strategic coordination between the Allied powers. It remains true that these were all indeed strengths.
Yet Hanson does tend to downplay some of the more severe weaknesses of the Allies that could have led to an Axis victory. While he highlights the aerial bombardment of Axis controlled cities as a strength, historians like Richard Overy have reassessed the bombings as having not made much of a practical difference to production capacity and morale. Overy even went so far as to argue that it caused a lack of funding and materiel that could have lost the Allies the war had other factors not intervened, claiming this strength was actually a great weakness.
The “many wars” of the Second World War that Hanson reviews were fraught with peril. There are too many counterfactuals that could have changed the course of the entire conflict had one event, detail, or individual been different. Imagine the unprecedented mobilization for production on the staunchly isolationist US homefront taking place had Pearl Harbor not happened. Imagine Britain standing up to the Nazis alone under Chamberlain. Imagine if FDR’s stroke taking place in 1942 instead of 1945. Enough of these things are contingent, not on the strengths that Hanson talks about, but on chance, luck and random timing.
Pointing out these events it is not to detract from the very real successes and strengths of the Allies, but to guard against Hanson’s deterministic view of the eventual outcome of the war. Contrary to being outright “strengths” or “weaknesses”, many events simultaneously held great promise while also containing elements of potential peril. The strategic coordination between Allied powers, an undoubted strength when compared with the chaos of the Axis powers, was often difficult, with disagreements, egos and tempers all thrown into the mix when arguments broke out over strategy. Not only this, but what Hanson sees as a strength of “democratic powers” reaching consensus came close to being a disaster due to the necessity of consensus instead of the single direction allowed by dictatorial command.
An example of this is the approach to the “Second Front” longed for and petulantly demanded by Stalin in the aftermath of being attacked by his erstwhile ally Hitler. Churchill and the British strongly insisted that a “soft underbelly” approach was the key to taking back Western Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean. The Americans preferred and pushed strongly for a direct invasion across the English Channel and into France. Hanson highlights these differences, but they were, by some contemporary accounts, anything but minor and risked serious rupture in the strategic alliance of the Allied powers. The necessity of working with one another meant unilateral action was not possible and bad or wrongheaded decisions could be made as a result of concession instead of what the best strategy actually was.
This was not the only time that a strength was also a weakness.
Roosevelt’s deference to Stalin was born of the same impulse that allowed him and the American people to respond to the British call to help save the world from fascism and adopt a “Europe First” policy when it would have been more reasonable to first focus on the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor. It was this same trust in his Allies and strong internationalist streak that led FDR to consider Stalin to be eminently reasonable and to underestimate his ruthlessness. It’s difficult to imagine the US having adopted the “Europe First” policy without FDRs internationalism and desire for world reconciliation. It’s equally hard to imagine FDR suddenly turning on Stalin and the Soviet people due to that same streak once it was clear victory in Europe was assured. It is to Churchill’s credit that he was more of a realist than FDR and rightfully recognized the Soviet threat to Europe for exactly what it was. However, it was too late for the US and the Soviet Union, who were to be on opposite sides of the Cold War for the next fifty odd years.
It is because of these dichotomies that the Second World War, despite the strengths of the Allies in many areas, could have gone either way. While Hanson’s deterministic view of the war’s outcome should be approached with caution, nevertheless The Second World Wars is well researched, easy to digest, highly informative and worth your time.
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