Wwii why did the allies win

In focusing attention on Allied fighting quality, the intention is not to imply that superior resources did not matter. Clearly, both resources and fighting ability were crucial. American shipbuilding capacity was central to the ability to secure—and then exploit— naval superiority in the Pacific. Yet the U. Navy defeated the Japanese navy in battle, and American air and submarine attacks weakened the Japanese war economy.

Allied fighting quality and command skills defeated Japan, with help from flawed Japanese military doctrine. For example, the Japanese used their submarines far less successfully than the Americans. More and better weapons themselves cannot produce victory. They can enhance confidence and morale, but they can also encourage misguided confidence.

Fear of compromising superiority in weaponry might even lead to reluctance to close with the enemy. In World War II, better fighters used their resources more effectively, as the Americans did in the Pacific in the latter stages of the war.

Even the initial Axis successes—by the Japanese in —42 and the Germans in —40—were not due solely to their superior fighting qualities.

As the success of the German blitzkrieg amply demonstrated, tactical and operational factors were crucial. Axis strength and success grew incrementally. Japan was able to successfully invade Manchuria in and launch a full-scale attack on China in without other powers intervening. Two years later Japan began a limited border war with the Soviet Union that failed but did not escalate. When the Japanese attacked Britain and the United States, they rightfully did not fear the Soviet Union entering the war against them.

Germany first engaged in rearmament—and then in aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia in —without encountering any united hostile response. Hitler then successively attacked a series of weak opponents: Poland, Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

The Soviet Union stood by, at least nominally neutral, while the United States remained unwilling to aid fellow neutrals. By the end of May , Germany had essentially won the war, as then conducted. Britain and its empire fought on, but Germany dominated Europe and maintained a diplomatic link to the Soviet Union, while the United States remained neutral. Britain seemed unable to reverse its early defeats.

While the impact of the Soviet Union, and later the United States, entering the war is well known, the improvements in Allied fighting quality over time are often overlooked. Take, for instance, the German-Soviet conflict.

In late , the Germans had inflicted heavy casualties on the Soviets by linking firepower and mobility. They outmaneuvered Soviet defenders and imposed their tempo on the conflict. Yet with time, the Red Army learned to counter German tactics by skillfully using antitank guns to repulse German armor attacks and establishing defenses in depth to cope with any breakthroughs. The Soviets also developed an effective offensive doctrine. After the Winter War with Finland in —40, the Soviets conducted a high-level analysis to honestly assess why their forces had at first been so ineffective against a small opponent.

It led in May to Order No. The Soviets clearly demonstrated the fighting lessons they had learned from the Finnish conflict in their war with Germany, as in Operation Uranus—the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in November This operation succeeded because the Soviets had re-established their munitions industry, especially tank production, and rapidly improved their tactical proficiency. Better planning and preparations magnified their resource advantages.

Poor German command decisions that included allocating what became key flank positions to weak Romanian forces and a feeble German response to the Soviet breakthrough were also crucial. Earlier, the large-scale Soviet counteroffensive in the winter of —42 had eventually run out of steam. Thereafter, however, the Germans proved far less successful in stemming Soviet advances. The major Soviet constraints in and were logistical. They could not resupply advance units, especially with fuel.

In , the Red Army proved adept at coordinating armor, artillery, and infantry, and in successfully executing encirclements. Soviet assets outnumbered German, particularly in artillery and aircraft. The Soviets used their reserves well to maintain the pace of their advances and to thwart German initiatives. Still, the Red Army could only achieve so much before exhaustion, losses, and supply difficulties stopped its offensives.

This gap in fighting effectiveness helps to explain the decision taken in Washington to focus a good deal of the American effort on the building up of a massive air power. Roosevelt saw air strategy as a key to future war and a way to reduce American casualties. At his encouragement the Army Air Forces were able to build up an air force that came to dwarf those of Germany and Japan. At the centre of the strategy was a commitment to strategic bombing, the long- range and independent assault on the economic and military infrastructure of the enemy state.

In January the two states finally decided to pool their very large bomber forces in a Combined Offensive against the German economy. Yet its effect was to distort German strategy and economic capability decisively between and This was achieved in three distinct ways.

First, bombing forced the German Air Force to divert most of its fighter force to the defence of Germany, and to reduce sharply the proportion of bomber aircraft produced. The effect was to denude the German frontline of much needed bomber and fighter aircraft; by German air power was easily eroded around the periphery of German-controlled Europe, where pilot losses reached exceptionally high levels. Second, bombing placed a ceiling on the ability of the German- dominated European economy to produce armaments in quantities that matched the vast resource base of the occupied economies.

This was achieved through direct destruction, the interruption of raw material, transport and energy supplies on a large scale, and the forced dispersal of German industry away from the most threatened centres.

Third, bombing forced Hitler and the German leadership to think of radical ways to combat the threat it posed. Huge resources were diverted to the production of vengeance, or 'V', weapons, which had a very limited impact on Britain when rockets and flying bombs began to fall in the late summer of A gigantic construction project for an underground economy was authorised by Hitler in Organised by Himmler, using camp labour under the most rigorous and deadly regime, millions of man-hours and billions of marks were spent trying to achieve the impossible.

Bombing provided the key difference between the western Allies and Germany. It played an important part in sustaining domestic morale in Britain and the USA, while its effects on German society produced social disruption on a vast scale by late 8 million Germans had fled from the cities to the safer villages and townships.

The use of bombers and fighter-bombers at the frontline helped to ease the path of inexperienced armies that threatened to get bogged down in Normandy and Italy. The debilitating effects on German air power then reduced the contribution German aircraft could make on the Eastern Front, where Soviet air forces vastly outnumbered German. The success of air power in Europe persuaded the American military leaders to try to end the war with Japan the same way. City raids from May destroyed a vast area of urban Japan and paved the way for a surrender, completed with the dropping of the two atomic bombs in August Here, too, the American government and public was keen to avoid further heavy casualties.

Air power provided a short-cut to victory in both theatres; British and American wartime losses were a fraction of those sustained by Germany, Japan and the USSR, and this in turn made it easier to persuade democratic populations to continue fighting even through periods of crisis and stalemate.

There are many other factors that explain victory and defeat beside von Ribbentrop's trio. Yet without Soviet resistance and reform, American rearmament and economic mobilisation, and western air power, the ability of the three major allies to wear down German and Japanese resistance would have been highly questionable. This still leaves open the question of German miscalculation. There were weaknesses and strengths in Hitler's strategy, but no misjudgements were more costly in the end than the German belief that the Red Army was a primitive force, incapable of prolonged resistance, or Hitler's insistence that the USA would take years to rearm and could never field an effective army, or the failure to recognise that bombing was a threat worth taking seriously before it was too late.

Military arrogance and political hubris put Germany on the path to a war she could have won only if these expectations had proved true. Richard Overy is professor of history at the University of Exeter. Eisenhower in Reims, France, and forced the Germans to sign another one the following day in Soviet-occupied Berlin. A man wheels his bicycle thorough Hiroshima, days after the city was leveled by an atomic bomb blast, Japan.

The view here is looking west-northwest, about feet from where the bomb landed, known as X, on August 6, American forces had made a slow, but steady push toward Japan after turning the course of the war with victory at the June Battle of the Midway.

The Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the winter and spring of were among the bloodiest of the war, and the American military projected that as many as 1 million casualties would accompany any invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Weeks after the first successful test of the atomic bomb occurred in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, , President Harry Truman , who had ascended to the presidency less than four months earlier after the death of Franklin D.

Roosevelt , authorized its use against Japan in the hopes of bringing a swift end to the war. On August 6, , the American B bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the manufacturing city of Hiroshima, immediately killing an estimated 80, people. Tens of thousands later died of radiation exposure. When Japan failed to immediately surrender after the bombing of Hiroshima , the United States detonated an even more powerful atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later that killed 35, instantly and another 50, in its aftermath.

In addition to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan came under increasing pressure when the Soviet Union formally declared war on August 8 and invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria in northeastern China. A great tragedy has ended.