Socratic Seminar Assignment:

Why did the Allies win the Second World War?

Part 1 - Socratic Seminar (20 marks - Thinking, Communication)

● You will participate in a Socratic Seminar to answer the focus question: Why did the
Allies win the Second World War?
● You will be marked on the following:
○ Frequency of discussion points
○ Citing of evidence
○ Critical analysis
○ Etiquette and decorum

Part 2 - Essay Outline (20 marks - Knowledge, Application)

● You will create an essay outline to answer the focus question: Why did the Allies win
the Second World War?
● Your essay outline must include the following:
○ A clear thesis
○ THREE supporting arguments
○ Several pieces of detailed evidence to support each of your arguments
○ Direct quotations to support your arguments
○ A Chicago style Works Cited list

Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Mark

Knowledge Essay outline Essay outline Essay outline Essay outline

demonstrates limited demonstrates some demonstrates demonstrates a
understanding of the understanding of the considerable thorough understanding
content content understanding of the of the content /1
content

Thinking Seminar discussion is Seminar discussion is Seminar discussion Seminar discussion

descriptive and/ or does mostly descriptive and demonstrates some demonstrates a high
not include proper opinion-based critical thinking degree of critical
analysis thinking /1

Communication Seminar discussion is Seminar discussion is Seminar discussion is Seminar discussion is

minimal and/ or does not occasional and somewhat frequent and frequent demonstrates
follow proper etiquette somewhat follows demonstrates mostly proper etiquette
seminar etiquette proper etiquette /1

Application Essay outline is not Essay outline has Essay outline has Essay outline is
properly structured and some structural errors structure and includes effectively structured
is missing arguments and has requires arguments and citation and includes clear
and/ or citation clarification of arguments and proper
arguments and/or citation /1
citation

/4

SOURCES
Kershaw, Ian. To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949. New York City: Penguin Books,
2015. (Sample footnote: Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (New York City: Penguin
Books, 2015), 352-356.

Excerpt from Pages 352-356:

“The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, and the American declaration of war on
Japan the next day, transformed the war into a global conflict. Hitler saw a strategic opportunity. War
against the Japanese would tie down the Americans in the Pacific arena. German U-boats, held back for
months while the USA was pursuing an ‘undeclared war’ in the Atlantic, could be let loose on American
shipping to break the crucial umbilical cord to Britain and win the war at sea for Germany. With such
hopeful notion in mind, on 11 December 1941 Hitler took Germany into a war against the United States.
Whatever Hitler’s rationale, the odds were now stacked against Germany winning the war in Europe.
Hitler had in fact, grossly overestimated Japanese military power. Pearl Harbor was a shock to the
USA, but far from a knockout blow. Japanese expansion, though initially successful, reached its limits
during the first half of 1942. But the big American naval victory at Midway in June 1942 marked the turning
point of the war in the Pacific.
The shift in fortunes in the Atlantic came a year later. Hitler had also overestimated the destructive
capacity of his U-boats. The success that they had enjoyed during 1942 could not be sustained, largely
because British intelligence was eventually able, after a lengthy struggle to decode German
communications sent through the Enigma encrypter, and to locate the position of the submarines.
Improved defence against the U-boats meant vital Allied supplies could cross the ocean in increased
security. By 1943 Hitler was losing the battle of the Atlantic.
Germany had meanwhile reached the limits of its expansion. The battle of El Alamein, stretching
over three weeks in October and November 1942, ended the German advance in North Africa and paved
the way for complete Allied victory in that theatre the following year. In the Soviet Union the second huge
German offensive (though with depleted numbers, compared with 1941) in the summer of 1942 had aimed
to secure the oil of the Caucasus, but it ended in catastrophe at Stalingrad - an attritional five-month battle
in the depths of a Russian winter that ended in February 1943 with the complete destruction of the German
Sixth Army and the loss of over 200,000 men (and some 300,000 of their allies). The fortunes of war had
turned irreversibly during 1942. There was still far to go but the leaders of the Allies were now confident of
ultimate victory…
In July 1943 the Allies crossed to Sicily - a move that triggered the toppling of Mussolini by his own
Fascist leadership the same month. This was followed in September by an Italian armistice with the Allies,
leading to the occupation of much of the country by German troops. The slow struggle northwards began
for the Allied forces. It was a second front - though not the one that Stalin had been pleading for. Nor was
the bombing campaign against German cities and industrial installations that gathered destructive
momentum during 1943. The British policy of ‘area bombing’, envisaged by Air Chief Marshall Arthur Harris
as the means to destroy German morale and win the war, had begun the previous year. A huge raid had
destroyed much of Cologne in May 1942. Other cities in northern and western Germany had been
attacked. But nothing came close in destructive power to the devastation of Hamburg in late July 1943 in
raids that killed at least 34,000 civilians - a figure amounting to more than half of all the British victims of air
raids during the entire war. Even this was far from the climax of the bombing campaign, which could be
ramped up massively in the last year of the war as Allied air superiority became practically complete.
The last big German offensive on the eastern front, in July 1943, lasted little more than a week.
‘Operation Citadel’ was called off after a colossal tank battle - over 5,000 tanks in all were involved - at
Kursk. Immense Soviet losses far outweighed those of the Germans. But German troops were needed in
southern Italy to strengthen defences following the Allied landing in Sicily…
…German strategy now amounted to no more than fighting a protracted and tenacious rearguard
action against hugely superior forces and hoping that the ‘Grand Alliance’ of capitalist Britain and America
with the communist Soviet Union would fall apart. With the gulf between the German and Allied resources
widening inexorably, the writing was on the wall…
 The successful Allied landing in Normandy on 6 June, 1944 (D-Day), and two weeks later the huge
and devastating breakthrough by the Red Army in ‘Operation Bagration’, opened the third and final phase
of the war in Europe that ended with the German capitulation…
The destruction in February 1945 of Dresden, with the loss of 25,000 mainly civilian lives, stood
symbolically for a terror from the skies that rained down on German towns and cities as air defences
collapsed. British planes dropped more bombs in March 1945 alone than in the first three years of the
war…
The Soviet steamroller was equally unstoppable in the east, pressing forward to the Baltic coast
and the Oder, poised for the final assault on Berlin that began on 16 April 1945. The Soviet advance into
Germany, and now its conquest of the Reich capital, had been accompanied throughout by horrendous
cruelty towards the German population…
On 25 April the large forces converging on Germany from both east and west met at the river Elbe.
Soviet and American troops shook hands. The Reich was split into two. Berlin was encircled the same day
by the Red Army. By 2 May the battle of Berlin was at an end. Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker
two days earlier… Complete German capitulation on all fronts was signed in the presence of
representatives from Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union on 8 May 1945.

Palmer, R.R. A History of the World 10th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007.
Excerpt from pages 845-852

On a unified strategy
By January 1942 twenty-six nations, including the three Great Powers - Britain, the United States,
and the U.S.S.R. - and representing every continent, were aligned against the Axis, a combinations to
which President Roosevelt gave the name the United Nations. Each pledged to use all its resources to
defeat the Axis and never to make a separate peace. The Grand Alliance against the Axis aggressors,
which could not be created in the 1930s, had at last been consummated.
The two Atlantic democracies, the United States and Great Britain, pooled their resources under a
Combined Chiefs of Staff. Never had any two sovereign states formed so close a coalition. In contrast with
the First World War an overall strategy was in effect from an early date. It was decided that Germany was
the main enemy, against which it was necessary to concentrate first. For the time being the Pacific war
was relegated to the background…
...the United States in 1942 was still involved in the cumbersome processes of mobilization,
converting industry to the production of war materials for itself and its Allies, imposing controls on its
economy to prevent runaway inflation, and giving military training to its profoundly civilian-minded people,
of whom over 12 million men and women eventually served in the armed forces - over three times as many
as in the First World War.
The American home front was transformed like the societies of other warring nations into a war
economy. The government carefully rationed the sale of food and essential materials such as oil and
rubber, sold millions of ‘war bonds,’ distributed thousands of war posters to sustain civilian morale,
collected countless tons of scrap metal, and worked closely with the nation’s industrial companies to
produce vast quantities of ships, warplanes, tanks, and every kind of military armament and equipment.
Persons of all racial and ethnic groups found new jobs in the expanding industrial workforce. The total
mobilization, however, led also to new forms of racial exclusion. Black Americans remained segregated in
the armed forces. More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans on the west coast were forcibly evacuated to
internment camps, where they remained until the end of the war. The national mobilization also affected
the social and economic positions of women. Large numbers of women, as in Britain, and more so than in
the First World War, took wartime jobs in defense and other industries. In contrast, almost to the end, Nazi
ideology placed obstacles in the way of utilizing women in German factories…

On the contribution of the Soviet Union

...In the winter of 1942...the Germans had suffered catastrophic reversal in the Soviet Union in the
titanic battle of Stalingrad. In August 1942 massive German forces, an army of well over a quarter million,
began an all-out assault on Stalingrad, the vital key to all transport on the lower Volga River; by September
they had penetrated the city itself. Stalin ordered his namesake city held at all costs; Russian soldiery and
the civilian population mounted a desperate defense. Hitler, still gambling on one big victory, was as
obstinate in ordering the city taken. After weeks of fighting, the Germans occupied most of the city when
suddenly a great Red Army counterattack, led by General Zhukov trapped the German army and took a
terrible toll; fewer than 100,000 were left to surrender in February 1943. The Soviets followed up their
victory with a new counteroffensive, a great westward drive that regained for them what they had initially
lost in the first year of the war...Stalingrad became a turning point not only in the history of the war but in
the history of central and eastern Europe as well.
American equipment meanwhile arrived in the Soviet Union in prodigious quantities. The terms of
the Lend-Lease were liberally extended to the Soviets; a stream of American vehicles, clothing, food, and
supplies of all kinds made its way laboriously to the USSR through the Arctic Ocean and through the
Persian Gulf. Machinery and equipment were sent for the Soviet arms plants, which were themselves
vastly increasing their output. Anglo-American bombing meanwhile was cutting into German airplane
production at home. The Allied contribution to the Soviet war effort was indispensable, but Russian human
losses were tremendous. Between 20 and 25 million people in the Soviet Union died from war-related
causes...The Soviet Union lost more men in the battle of Stalingrad...than the United States lost in combat
during the entire war in all theatres combined.

On the invasion of Western Europe:

The invasion of western Europe began before dawn on June 6, 1944. The spot selected was the
coast of Normandy directly across the Channel from Calais; false intelligence reports, planted by the Allies,
led the Germans to expect the main thrust, when it occurred, to be at Calais. An unparalleled combination
of forces - British, Canadian, and American, land, sea, and air, backed up by huge accumulations of
supplies and troops assembled in Great Britain, and the whole under the unified command of General
Eisenhower - assaulted the French coast, established a beachhead, and maintained a front. The Allies
poured their strength, over 130,000 men the first day, 1 million within a month…
At one point, momentarily, the Allied offensive suffered a serious reversal. A sudden German drive
under Hitler’s direct personal orders in December 1944 was launched against the thinly held American
lines on the Belgian sector in the Ardennes, created a ‘bulge’ in the advancing armies, and caused heavy
losses and confusion. But the Allies rallied, and Hitler used up his armored reserves in the effort. Neither
the Ardennes counteroffensive nor the new destructive weapons rained on Britain, jet-propelled flying
bombs and rockets, opening up the missile age, availed the Germans…
On the ground they pushed on and smashed through the heavily fortified Siegfried Line. The last
natural obstacle, the Rhine, was crossed when in March 1945 American forces by a stroke of luck
discovered an undestroyed bridge at Remagen; they poured troops over it and established a bridgehead -
the first troops to cross the Rhine in combat since the armies of Napoleon.

Orlow, Dietrich. A History of Modern Germany: 1871 to Present. New Jersey:

Prentice Hall, 1999.
Excerpt from pages 199-200:

...even with the outbreak of hostilities, by no means all of Germany’s economic resources allocated to the
war effort. That decision was motivated primarily by political considerations. Hitler was convinced
shortages at home had led to declining morale and eventually revolution during World War I. For this
reason he was determined to prevent another ‘turnip winter’ in Germany. In consequence, while there was
certainly shortages on the homefront during WWII, they were never as severe as they had been in the
earlier conflict. Especially during the first two years of the war the regime was careful to cultivate the
goodwill of industrial laborers with extra rations.
In strategic terms the decision to improvise a series of short conflicts completely misjudged the
nature of WWII… Hitler’s scenario of a global blitzkrieg failed completely; by the beginning of 1942 it was
clear to competent observers that the Reich faced another war of attrition.
 While the Nazis for a time dealt effectively with the problems that had plagued Germany’s
homefront in WWI, they failed to give adequate attention to a new element in warfare, aerial bombardment
of civilian populations. The Nazis had used massive bombings with devastating effect on Rotterdam and
later on English cities in the Battle of Britain, but by 1942, partly because Hitler underestimated the Allies’
capitbilites and refused to accelerate Germany’s fighter plane program, the Allies achieved air superiority
and turned the new strategy against the Germans. At first daytime and by mid-1943 nighttime bombings of
German cities became daily occurrences. WWII, until the Allied invasion, was brought home to the
Germans primarily in the form of increasingly destructive aerial bombardments. By that time the war
ended, major urban centers like Cologne and Hamburg consisted of little more than rubble and hundreds
of thousands of lives had been lost in the air raids.
After the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad (Jan-Feb 1943), it was clear even to insiders in
the Nazi regime that the German economy and home front were not prepared for a drawn-out conflict. The
Nazis introduced major organizational and lifestyle changes. In February 1942 the Four Year Plan and
Hermann Goring lost their dominant position the management of the economy. A new Ministry for War
Production, headed by Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, was established and given vast powers to coordinate
all war-related economic production…The Reich’s economic collapse began only in the late fall of 1944,
when the Allies directed their attacks primarily against industrial production facilities. In the spring of 1945
the lack of fuel and Allied bombings of the German railroad network brought the Reich’s war machinery to
a final halt…
The concept of ‘total war’ on the home front was formally launched in February 1943...The
campaign of ‘total war’ meant that guns now took precedence over butter. The civilian population had to
get used to growing shortages of virtually all commodities. In addition, the ‘total war’ brought a massive
buildup of the regime’s terror presence. Anonymous denunciations were encouraged even more than
before, and the Nazis introduced the death penalty for a whole series of minor infractions including the
crime of being a ‘defeatist.’ By the end of the war, it is clear that whatever sympathies the regime had
enjoyed among the Germans had largely dissipated. Life had become a daily struggle in the face of
constant bombings, shortages, and fear of the regime’s terror.

Merriman, John. A History of Modern Europe: From the Renaissance to the

Present. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996.

Excerpt from pages 1274-1276:

On Hitler’s Russian Disaster:

In the meantime, on the eastern front Hitler’s invasion of the SOviet Union turned into a full-fledged
military disaster. Defeats in Russia during the last months of 1942 and in 1943 send the German invaders
reeling. Hitler’s armies had been forced to retreat from the Moscow region. The Red Army was now
receiving better and more plentiful supplies from the Allies through the icy northern port of Murmansk and
from Iran in the south. Soviet factories were turning out a steady supply of tanks and trucks equipped to
fight in the snow and ice. German tanks faced not only improved Soviet tanks but also handmade
incendiary bombs consisting of bottles, gasoline, and cloth fuses that became known as ‘Molotov
cocktails.’
Improvements in the organization and discipline of the Red Army also made their mark. Unlike
Hitler, Stalin delegated authority to efficient and trusted party members during the war, holding in
abeyance the ideological indoctrination and murderous purges that had characterized much of the Soviet
Union’s post-revolutionary period. The army that Hitler had once mocked was now wearing down German
forces.
In the north, Leningrad [St. Petersburg], first reached by German troops in July 1941, held on
against a German siege that lasted 506 days, the longest in modern history, and that killed 650,000
Russian civilians. Hitler’s printed invitations to celebrate Leningrad’s fall could never be sent out…

On the Axis losses in the Balkans:

 One by one Germany’s Balkan allies bailed out. Romanian troops had greatly aided the Nazi
campaign in Odessa and the Crimea; Romanian oil and wheat had fueled the German war effort. Now, in
March 1944, seeing the writing on the wall, the Romanian government approached the Allies, hoping to
arrange a separate peace. In August, King Michael finally ended Antonescu’s military dictatorship, and the
new government declared war on Germany. The Red Army soon poured into the country, occupying
Bucharest in last August 1944.
Hitler intended Bulgaria to serve as a buffer against a possible Allied invasion from Turkey.
Bulgaria enjoyed the most authomy of any Nazi-held Eastern European state because it provided
Germany with badly needed grain, had permitted the establishment of military bases on its territory, and
had declared war on Britain and the United States in 1941… Now, as Germany’s defeat appeared
increasingly likely, the Bulgarian government brazenly announced its war against the Allies had ended.

Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Vintage House,
1989.
Excerpt from pages 347-357:

The first of these came in the Pacific, where Nimitz’s [fleet admiral US Navy] carrier-based aircraft
had already blunted the Japanese drive into the Coral Sea (May 1942) and toward Midway (June 1942)
and showed how vital air power was in the vast expanses of that ocean. By the end of the year, Japanese
troops had been pulled out of Guadalcanal and Australian-American forces were pushing forward in New
Guinea. When the counteroffensive through the central Pacific began late in 1943, the two powerful
American battle fleets covering the Gilberts invasion were themselves protected by four fast-carrier task
forces (twelve carriers) with overwhelming control of the air. An even greater imbalance of force had
permitted the British Empire divisions to crash through the German positions at El Alamein in October
1942 and to drive Rommel’s [German General and Field Marshal] units back toward Tunisia; when
Montgomery [Commander of the British 8th Army) ordered the attack, he had six times as many tanks as
his opponent, three times as many troops, and almost complete command of the air. In the month
following, Eisenhower’s [US 5-Star General of the Army] Anglo-American army of 100,000 men landed in
French North Africa to begin a ‘pincer movement’ from the west against the German-Italian forces, which
would culminate in the latter’s mass surrender in May 1943. By that time too, Doenitz [Admiral of the
German Navy] had been compelled to withdraw his U-boat wolf packs from the North Atlantic, where they
had suffered very heavy losses against Allied convoys now protected by very-long-range Liberators, escort
carriers, and hunter-killer escort groups equipped with the latest radar and depth charges - and alerted by
‘Ultra’ decrypts as to the U-boats’ movements. If it was to take longer for the Allies to achieve ‘command of
the air’ over Europe to complement their command of the sea, the solution was being swiftly developed in
the form of the long-range Mustang fighter, which first accompanied the USAAF’s bomber fleets in
December 1943; within another few months, the Luftwaffe’s capacity to defend the airspace above the
Third Reich’s soldiers, factories, and civilian population had been weakened beyond recovery.
Even more ominous to the Wehrmacht high command was the changing balance of advantage
along the eastern front. As early as August 1941, when many observers felt that Russia was in the process
of being finished off as a Great Power, [German] General Halder was gloomily confiding in the War Staff
diary:
We reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already 360...not armed and equipped
to our standards, and their tactical leadership is often poor. But...if we smash a dozen of them, the
Russians simply put up another dozen...Time...favore them, as they are near their own resources,
while we are moving farther and farther away from ours.
In this sort of mass, reckless, brutalized fighting, the casualty figures were making even First World War
totals seem modest. In the first five months of campaigning, the Germans claimed to have killed ,
wounded, or captured well over 3 million Russians. Yet at that particular moment, when Stalin and the
Stavka [high command of Soviet armed forces] were planning the first counteroffensive around Moscow,
the Red Army still had 4.3 million men in its field armies, and was numerically superior in tanks and
aircraft. To be sure, it could not match the professional expertise of the Germans either on land or in the air
- even as late as 1944 the Russians were losing five or six men for every one German soldier - when the
fearful winter of 1941-42 passed, Hitler’s war machine could again commence its offensive, this time
toward Stalingrad and then disaster. After Stalingrad, in the summer of 1943, the Wehrmacht tried again,
pulling together its armored forces to produce the fantastic total of seventeen panzer divisions for the
encirclement of Kursk. Yet in what was to be by far the greatest tank battle of the Second World War, the
Red Army countered with thirty-four armored divisions, some 4,000 vehicles to the German’s 2,700. While
the numbers of Soviet tanks had been reduced by over one-half within a week, they had smashed the
greater part of Hitler’s Panzerarmee in the process and were now ready for the unrelenting counter
offensive toward Derlin. At that point, news of the Allied landing in ITaly provided Hitler with excuse for
withdrawing from what had been an unmitigated disaster, as well as confirming the extent to which the
Reich’s enemies were closing the ring.
Was all this, then, merely the ‘proper application of overwhelming force’? Clearly, economic power
was never the only influence upon military effectiveness, even in the mechanized, total war of 1939-45;
economics, to paraphrase Clausewitz [Prussian general and military theorist] stood in about the same
relationship to combat as the craft of the swordsmith to the art of fencing. And there were far too many
examples of where the German and Japanese leadership made grievous political and strategical errors
after 1941 which were to cost them dear. In the German case, this ranged from relatively small-scale
decisions, like pouring reinforcements into North Africa in early 1943, just in time for them to be captured,
to the appalling stupid as well as criminal treatment of the Ukrainian and other non-Russian minorities in
the USSR, who were happy to escape from the Stalinist embrace until chekec by Nazi atrocities. It rand
from the arrogance of assuming that the Enigma codes could never be broken to the ideological prejudice
against employing German women in munitions factories, whereas all Germany’s foes willingly exploited
that largely untapped labor pool. It was compounded by rivalries within the higher echelons of the army
itself, which made it ineffective in resisting Hitler’s manic urge for overambitious offensives like Stalingrad
and Kursk. Above all, there was what scholars refer to as the ‘polycratic chaos’ of rivaling ministries and
subempires (the army, the SS, the Gauleiter, the economics ministry), which prevented any coherent
assessment and allocation of resources, let alone the hammering-out of what elsewhere would be termed
a ‘grand strategy’. This was not a serious way to run a war…
There is, obviously, no known way of ‘factoring out’ those errors and thus discovering how the Axis
Powers might have fared had such follies been avoided. But unless the Allies for their part had committed
equally serious strategical and political mistakes, it is difficult to see how their productive superiority would
not have prevailed in the long term. Obviously, a successful German occupation of Moscow in December
1941 would have been damaging to Russia’s war effort (and to Stalin’s regime); but would the USSR’s
population have surrendered then and there when it's only fate would have been extermination - and when
it still had large productive and military reserves thousands of miles to the east? Despite the economic
losses dealt by Operation Barbarossa - coal production down by 57%, pig iron by 68%, and so on - it is
worth noting that Russia produced 4,000 more aircraft than Germany in 1941 and 10,000 more in 1942,
and this was for one front, as opposed to Germany’s three. Given its increasing superiority in men, tanks,
artillery, and planes, by the second year of the conflict the Red Army could actually afford to sustain losses
at a rate of five or six to one and still push forwards against the weakening Germans. By the beginning of
1945, on the Belarusian and Ukrainian fronts alone, “Soviet superiority was both absolute and awesome,
fivefold in manpower, fivefold in armor, over sevenfold in artillery and seventeen times the eGerman
strength in the air.”
Since the Anglo American forces in France a few months earlier were enjoying “an effective
superiority of 20 to 1 in tanks and 25 to 1 in aircraft,” the amazing fact is that the Germans did so well for
so long….
...Berlin, like Tokyo, had overstretched itself. In November 1943, General Jodle estimated that 3.9
million Germans (together with a mere 283,000 Axis-allied troops) were trying to hold off 5.5 million
Russians on the eastern front. A further 177,000 German troops were in Finland, while Norway and
Denmark garrisoned 486,000 men. There were 1,370,000 occupation troops in France and Belgium.
“Another 612,000 men were tied down in the Balkans, and there were 412,000 men in Italy… Hitler’s
armies were scattered the length and breadth of Europe and were inferior in numbers and equipment on
every front.” The same could be said of the Japanese divisions, spread thinly across the Far East from
Burma to the Aleutian Islands.”
 ...in the critical years of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Allies lost 8.3 million tons of shipping overall
in 1942 and 4 million tons in 1943, but those frightening total were compensated for by Allied launchings of
7 million and 9 million tons of new merchant ships respectively. This was chiefly due to the fantastic
explosion in American shipbuilding output, which by mid-1942 was already launching vessels faster than
the U-boats could sink them… On land, also - and the Second World War in Europe was pre eminently a
gunner’s war and a tank crew’s war - Germany’s production of artillery pieces, self-propelled guns and
tanks was considerably less than Russia’s let alone the combined Allied totals.

Tank Production 1944

Germany 17,800

Russia 29,000

Britain 5,000

United States 17,500 (in 1943, 29,500)

But the most telling statistics of all relate to aircraft production, for everyone could see that without
command of the air it was impossible for armies and navies to operate effectively; with command of the air,
one could not achieve campaign victories, but also deal heavy blows at the foe’s wartime economy.
Such figures, moreover, disguise the fact that the Anglo-American total include a large number of
heavy four-engined bombers, so that the Allied superiority is even more marked when the number of
engines or the structure weight of the aircraft is compared with the Axis total. Here was the ultimate reason
why, despite extraordinary efforts by the Germans to retain command of the air, their cities and factories
and railway lines were increasingly devastated - as was, even more so, the almost totally unprotected
Japanese homeland… On D-Day itself (June 6, 1944), it may be
worth nothing, the Germans could muster 319 aircraft against
the Allies 12, 837 in the west.
...Yet all this could not obviate the fact that the Allies
possessed twice the manufacturing strength, three times the
‘war potential,’ and three times the national income of the Axis
powers… By 1942 and 1943, these figures of potential power
were being exchanged into the hard currency of aircraft, guns,
tanks, and ships; indeed, by 1943-44 the United States alone
was producing one ship a day and one aircraft every five
minutes! What is more, the Allies were producing many newer types of weapons (Superfortresses,
Mustangs, light fleet carriers), whereas the Axis powers could only produce advanced weapons (jet
fighters, Type 23 U-boats) in relatively small quantities…
No matter how cleverly the Wehrmacht mounted its tactical counter attacks on both the western
and eastern fronts until almost the last months of the war, it was to be ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer
mass of Allied firepower. By 1945, the thousands of Anglo-American bombers pounding the Reich each
day and the hundreds of Red Army divisions poised to blast through to Berlin and Vienna were all different
manifestations of the same blunt fact. Once again, in a protracted and full-scale coalition war, the countries
with the deepest purse had prevailed in the end.
This was also true of Japan’s own collapse in the Pacific war. It is now clear that the dropping of
the atomic bombs in 1945 marked a watershed in the military history of the world, and one which throws
into doubt the viability of mankind should a Great Power war with atomic weaponry ever be fought. Yet in
the context of the 1945 campaigning, it was but one of a series of military tools which the United States
then could employ to compel Japan to surrender. The successful American submarine campaign was
threatening to starve Japan; the swarms of B-29 bombers were pounding its towns and cities to ashes
(the Tokyo ‘fire-raid’ of March 9, 1945, caused approximately 185,000 casualties and destroyed 267,000
buildings); and the AMerican planners and their allies were preparing for a massivinge invasion of the
home islands. The mix of motives which, despite certain reservations, pushed toward the decision to drop
the bomb - the wish to save Allied casualties, the desire to send a warning to Stalin, the need to justify the
vast expenses of the atomic project - are still debated today; but the point being made here is that it was
the United States alone which at this time had the productive and technological resources not only to
wage two large-scale conventional wars but also to invest scientists, raw materials, and money (about $2
billion) in the development of a new weapon which might or might not work...

Westad, Odd Arne. The Cold War: A World History. New York: Basic Books, 2017. (Westad is a
professor of US-Asia studies at Harvard University and former School Professor of International
History at the London School of Economics and Political Science)

“As Stalin’s Red Army slowly began to push back the German divisions, at tremendous cost in lives and
materiel, the SOviet leader constantly demanded that his allies set up a second front against Germany in
northwest Europe. The fact that he did not get it until June 1944, after nine million Soviet soldiers had been
killed, was to Stalin proof of British and American perfidy and hostility.
But if Stalin distrusted and disparaged his allies, the SOviet Union was increasingly dependent on
their support for its survival. In all, goods and weapons worth $11.3 billion ($180 billion in 2016 dollars)
reached the USSR between June 1941 and September 1945. Five thousands sailors died in shipping the
aid to Soviet harbors. Some of this materiel was crucial to the SOviet war effort. Locomotives and railcars
helped transport troops. Dodge trucks became the mainstay of Soviet logistics in their great tank battles
both against germany and later against Japan. Canned rations produced in Ohio and Nebraska kept
millions of Soviets from starvation. Stalin though, not unreasonably, that the Soviets paid for these supplies
in blood on the battlefield. But he also knew that the American supplies were of such great importance to
the Red Army’s fighting capabilities that he could not under any circumstance endanger their continued
provision.”

“Most importantly, by the end of 1943 the United States had mobilized fully for war both in Asia and in
Europe. In the year to come, the United States would produce 300,000 military planes and 529 large
warships. Germany’s production was 133,000 and 20; Japan’s, 70,000 and 90. In the first three months of
1943 the United States produced as much overall shipping tonnage as Japan did in total during seven
years of war… The United States was untouched, and its GDP had almost doubled since 1939.”

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.