Why the Allies Won - Richard Overy

Overy’s intention is to examine some of the key areas that helped the Allies win World War 2, and figure out why they did so. What were the key factors, when did things shift, how easily could they have gone the other way? His feeling is it's too often taken for granted that of course the Allies won, with their vast advantages in productivity, there could be no other outcome.

To that end, he examines four general areas of combat: the battles for the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans - the former defined by conflicts between the Japanese and American navies, the latter by the struggle to protect Allied convoys from U-boats - the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, the Allied bombing campaign over Germany, and the Normandy landings. After that, he shifts to four areas that supported those campaigns: the levels of economic production, the ability to utilize technology effectively, the ability of the different Allies to not only work effectively together, but to arrange structures for handling all the different moving parts that make up a country at war, and finally, the moral aspect.

Most of the first half was things I already knew, but there were a few points in there I found new or a useful refresher. Overy is very good at tying things brought up in one chapter into points in another. When he notes that the Allied mass high-altitude bombing of Germany didn’t single-handedly brings the Nazis to surrender as its advocates promised, it did, in some senses, constitute the Second Front FDR and Churchill promised Stalin. Germany had to divert anti-aircraft guns that could have been used as anti-tank weapons against the Soviets back home to shoot at the waves of bombers. They had to divert much of their airplane production to fighters, reducing the offensive striking power of the Luftwaffe by limiting its number of bombers and close-support aircraft. And even if the Germans could repair much of the damage in a matter of days, those were still days (and resources) spent rebuilding things, rather than producing more bombs, tanks, etc. So it ties somewhat into the chapter on the Eastern Front battles, but also the one on comparative economic production, and also is brought up with regards to the Allies having a comparative moral high ground, despite, you know, killing many thousands of civilians with bombs. He manages that throughout the book, and I was impressed by it.

The second half of it had a lot more I didn’t know about, especially the chapters on production and technology. The Germans hampered their own production capabilities, not only by wasting resources on projects that were simply beyond the grasp of current technologies to make useful (pretty much all the “wonder weapon” projects), while largely ignoring basic things like trucks, and jeeps (the German infantry was still reliant on horses throughout the war). Because they let the military heads have too much say over production, instead of people who understood something about it, they tended to give contracts to smaller firms that couldn’t mass-produce, and they would constantly change what a given factory was supposed to make, which kept them from settling into an efficient groove. Also, the Germans seemed to favor a dizzying array of different vehicles, which again, keeps factories from being able to easily mass-produce a particular thing, and also makes it hard for service crews, when there are over two dozen different types of motorcycles alone being used on one front, and an even greater number of different lorries. Not to mention the Germans didn’t seem to understand the concept of producing spare parts, something the Americans and Soviets knew the value of quite well.

‘Magnitogorsk was dominated by the steelworks; a perpetual dark haze hung over the city. Around the barracks and houses of the workers lay a patchwork of small allotments where they grew potatoes to supplement the meager meals served in the vast works canteen. By American or even European standards, the plant was not very productive. It was untidy and dangerous. When the president of the American Chamber of Commerce, Eric Johnson, visited it in 1944 he found a vast inferno, filled with choking fumes, with canals of unprotected molten metal, and piles of slag and iron scrap cluttering the roadways between each workshop. In the part of the plant making shells, the absence of a moving conveyor belt was compensated for by the use of long inclined wooden racks down which the shells were rolled on their way along the production line. But throughout the plant, directed by a 35-year-old blacksmith’s son, Gregor Nesov, the Americans found a constant bustle and drive. Clean premises were not a priority for the war effort. Magnitogorsk concentrated everything on production. Over the whole course of the war vast, dirty, ill-lit plants all over central Russia were worked day and night using standard equipment and simple procedures. While the rest of the economy remained at the crisis point reached in 1941, the output of each worker in the Soviet war industry increased two- or three-fold over the course of the war.’