Why the Allies Won

Why the Allies Won is a strong, if somewhat repetitive book, that tells the story of the great Allied victory, while also somewhat contradicting its stated thesis. Overy tries to argue against Whiggish triumphalism and point to the contingency of key battles, and the costly process of learning to fight that lead to turning point victories in 1943, rather than simply gesturing at the immense material imbalance in favor of the Allies and the weaknesses of the Axis command structure. Yet in closing, those two factors are determinate.

The major campaigns are the Battle of the Atlantic, Stalingrad-Kursk, the combined bomber offensive, and finally the invasion of Normandy. In each of these, the Allies went from taking hefty loses, to parity, show more to eventually achieving an attrition that ripped the heart out of Axis resistance, leading to a long, bloody, and yet inevitable conclusion.

The basic fact is that the Allies outproduced the Axis by an order of magnitude in all the key inputs of modern warfare: ships, tanks, artillery, aircraft. Certainly, numerical parity wasn't enough to lead to victory. The Allies often had parity in disastrous early battles. But when the US is launching hundreds of major warships in a year versus a few dozen for the Japanese, well, there's only one way that struggle will go. Overy also gives the majority of credit to the resilience and sacrifice of the Russian people, who gave most of the blood that defeated the Nazis. Though this was not a simple matter of unending hordes, the Red Army skillful concentrated force and used misdirection to achieve local supremacy with each offensive, in classic Clausewitzian style.

Most surprising to me in terms of new info was the shocking inefficiency of the Nazi war machine. The Nazis were perhaps 25% to 50% efficient at turning the same amounts of raw materials into tanks and planes as the Allies. This is especially impressive, given that the Soviet Union had to evacuate most of its heavy industry and rebuild east of the Urals. The Nazis attempted to rationalize production in 1943, but by then the combined bomber offensive added enough friction to ensure that numbers would never meet their necessary targets.

On the political side, only opposition to Hitler held together the odd bedfellows of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. Hitler's megalomania and refusal to delegate or take advice meant that German strategy became haphazard and poorly coordinated. The MilHist thread on the SomethingAwful forums uses the phrase "gay black Hitler" to describe the necessary conditions for a Nazi victory. A reasonable Hitler with reasonable war aims would simply have not had started the war. Imperial Japanese high command knew the war was lost by 1943, 1944 at the latest, but were unable to coherently advance a position for surrender that might have avoided the mass destruction of Japanese cities via strategic and nuclear bombing.

Certainly, there were points that hinged on the smallest things, yet would a reversal have changed things? The Battle of Midway hinged on ten bombs hitting Japanese carriers. But the mass of Essexes would have sailed into the Pacific in 1944 even if Enterprise and Hornet had joined Yorktown on the bottom, and the Kido Butai had triumphed. A victory at Stalingrad or Kursk would have seen another defensive line a few hundred kilometers back. The Battle of the Atlantic and the strategic bomber offensive were both fundamentally attritional, and while new weapons and doctrine turned the tide in both cases, it was the production margain that ensured the Axis never got back up after. Normandy was the chanciest one. Eisenhower's decision to have D-Day proceed on June 6 was a daring break in bad weather. If he'd picked the next opportunity on June 19th, the shocking storm of that day would have wrecked the landing. Perhaps political will for a second landing would not have been there, but I'm skeptical that one more defeat would have broken the Allies. show less

Challenges the idea that American resource superiority made victory inevitable, given the barriers that had to be overcome and the need for Britain to survive long enough for the US to enter the war in Europe. (There is, I think, no mention of India in the book.) Russian suffering and persistence was a primary part of what made the world safe for democracy (and also made communism look workable to many).

Richard Overy makes some interesting points in this book beyond what most histories give for winning the war. I thought the most compelling were the Allies having the moral high ground and what he calls the de-modernization of the Axis powers. While the book and points were well organized and systematically discussed, I didn't feel like there was much of a common thread running throughout his supporting arguments.

Overy is British so Americans reading this book will experience the occasional odd turn of phrase, spelling or sentence construction. His writing is very readable however, not like John Keegan's style at all.

Well worth reading for history buffs as it gives food for thought when reading other histories of the second world war. show more As is usually the case, a well written history magnifies current events and shows that even though the cast of characters has changed, human nature remains the same. show less

Áhugaverð tilraun til að rannsaka hvort sigur Bandamanna var jafn sjálfsagður líkt og oft er látið í veðri vaka.
Overy fullyrðir að árið 1942 hafi Möndulveldin í raun verið með yfirburða stöðu og hefði getað knúið fram sigur áður en Bandamönnum tókst að snúa stríðinu sér í hag. Hann fer yfir nokkra lykilþætti s.s. tækni, efnahag, leiðtoga og hernað í lofti, láði og legi.
Það er skemmtilegt að lesa rit sem greinir svona lykilspurningar og gerir tilraun til að svara þeim. Mér finnst Overy gera það að mestu leyti vel þótt ákveðnar veilur megi greina í forsendum hans.

A one-of-a-kind book that asks and answers the deceptively simple question implied in the title. The answer ranges over technology, tactics, strategy, leadership, economics, politics, and ideology. A tour-de-force, and essential reading for serious students of the war.

2998 Why the Allies Won, by Richard Overy (read 2 Aug 1997) Some chapters of this book I found worthwhile: the chapter where the incredible story of the battle of Midway was recounted was a thrilling account; the chapter on Stalingrad and Kursk was relatively new to me (I do remember hearing much about the Kursk battle while it was going on) ; the chapter on bombing (he demonstrates that bombing of Germany was effective in preventing increase in German production}; and the chapter on the Normandy invasion. In general, though, I did not think the book particularly well-written or exciting.

There is no better book in print for those interested in understanding World War Two.