Why the Allies Won

I read Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won with little expectation of learning much that was new. Even the most casual student of WWII, of which I count myself, knows the conventional explanation about why the Allies won. The Allies’ industrial economies, the United States’ in particular, simply out-produced and overwhelmed the Axis. Once the Allies’ war economies hit their stride, victory was all but guaranteed -- end of story. Overy argues this oft-repeated narrative is illusory and suggests a high degree of historical determinism. To even ask the question of why the Allies won, the author submits, is to propose that other outcomes, short of absolute victory, were possible. This is precisely Overy’s argument: other outcomes were entirely possible. In fact, Overy contends the outcome in the middle years of the war was anything but certain as the “conflict was poised on a knife’s edge.” The author builds his case with familiar primary and secondary WWII sources. The strength of Why the Allies Won and the power of its argument, however, is Overy’s critical analysis and thoughtful interpretation of his sources.The essence of Overy’s case is that the Allies’ ability to consistently improve the qualitative performance of their forces, technology, and logistics coupled with their ever-increasing quantitative supremacy in numbers were the keys to victory. In other words, the Allied economies made victory possible, but by no means automatic. The Axis, on the other hand, did little to modernize and improve the effectiveness of their forces and support arms after their stunning successes against France and Great Britain in 1940 and the Soviet Union in 1941. Similarly, when they had the upper-hand from an economic perspective – which they had from 1939 to 1942 – the Germans failed to fully utilize their industrial power and vast resources.Overy makes his case for the Allies warfighting ascendency and ultimate victory using two historical approaches. The first is a review of four decisive “zones of conflict” between 1942 and 1945 where the Allies applied maximum efforts and prevailed: the war at sea (Coral Sea and the Battles of Midway and the Atlantic), the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk on the Eastern front, the tactical and strategic air war against Germany, and the invasion and reconquest of Western Europe. In each of these zones, Overy illustrates how the Allies’ strategic and operational decision cycles were faster and their tactical performance more effective than the Axis. Similarly, the Allies consistently outpaced the Axis in translating emerging battlefield requirements and lessons learned into the mass production of technology that improved warfighting.The Eastern front is an example of Overy’s ability to apply critical thinking and get beyond the numbers. At Kursk, the conventional wisdom held that the Soviets did not win; the Germans lost due to overwhelming Soviet numbers and Hitler’s meddling. Overy blows-up the overwhelming numbers argument by illustrating that the 1941 Soviet Army vastly outnumbered the Germans in machine and men, but still suffered catastrophic defeats. Similarly, it was the German General Staff, not Hitler, that planned and executed Operation Citadel. Finally, the Soviet’s modest advantage in numbers at Kursk cannot explain the enormity of the German loss. Instead, Overy argues effectively that, by 1943, the Soviets had bested the Germans in every warfighting discipline that made the difference at Kursk: doctrine, leadership, combined arms operations, communications, intelligence, and logistics. Pound for pound, the Soviets were simply better than the Germans. In each of these zones of conflict, Overy demonstrates that, without the means to employ it effectively at the operational level, quantitative superiority was no guarantor of victory.Overy’s second approach deals with factors that enabled the operational success in the zones of conflict – production, technology, leadership and moral rectitude. Here the book shines as Overy shifts the analysis and interpretation into high gear. The author is especially effective at contrasting what the Allies did right and what the Axis did wrong. On the economic front, the Soviets relied on clear lines of authority and central planning to restore their wrecked 1941 economy and get it running in high gear by late 1942. The United States empowered the nation’s captains of industry to mass produce everything from B-17 bombers to Sherman tanks. By 1944, Soviet and United States workers were twice as productive their counterparts in Germany and four times better than the Japanese. Overy also successfully argues that, until early 1943 when the Soviets were making the most of their “attenuated resources”, the “new German Empire failed to make the most of its economic advantages” (182). Had the Germans chosen to do otherwise, and they could have, the course of the war might have been much different.In the area of technology, Overy argues that standardization, limited types of major combat equipment such as tanks, trucks and airplanes, and production simplicity carried the day for the Allies. So, while the Soviets and United States were producing simple T-34 and Sherman tanks by the tens of thousands, the Germans were producing expensive, over-engineered, albeit effective, Tiger tanks. By 1944, Soviet tank production in one month exceeded an entire year of German output. The key, Overy contends, is that the Germans could have taken a different course of action to even the odds, but chose not to do so.The decisive factor, Overy contends, for Allied success on the economic and technology front was decidedly effective strategic leadership. Unity of command and unity of effort characterized the Allies efforts across the board. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, each with their own particular leadership style, communicated their strategic intent to clear-thinking senior military officers and civilians who in-turn delegated tasks to a focused and responsive bureaucracy that made things happen. Hitler’s regime on the other hand was handicapped by his own well-documented meddling and inability to think strategically. Hitler’s General Staff was similarly ineffective and focused almost exclusively on combat operations at the expense of logistics, and there was little unity of effort among the German and Japanese military services. Instead, competition, back-biting, and inter-service rivalry characterized the Axis armies, navies and air forces. Finally, the German economy was plagued by a lethargic bureaucracy, a lack of coordination, and a dearth central planning.Overy’s final point is that Allied morale and fighting spirit was higher because they were “fighting the good fight” against monstrous totalitarian regimes. This argument is somewhat thin given that Axis soldiers fought just as hard as the Allies without holding the moral high ground. For whatever reason – ideology, fear of the enemy, fear of the regime, unit cohesion, et al – Axis soldiers battled ferociously until the bitter end. The American in me wants to take Overy’s side in this argument; however, it just does not wash given the reality of what made the WWII soldier fight.In the end, however, this is a small blemish on an otherwise powerfully written and highly readable work. Overy makes his argument – that the Allied victory was not predetermined by economic primacy – with rock solid analysis and clear-thinking interpretation. Why the Allies Won is a worthwhile read for the academic and WWII buff. It also offers a valuable lesson in applying a healthy dose of scholarly skepticism when a historical event is presented as a fait accompli.

Author Richard Overy provides excellent analysis and answers to the question posed by the title of his book, "Why the Allies Won."His central premise is that, unlike some who have looked at the contending sides in World War II in terms of overall population, GNP and resources, and pronounced Allied victory as a historic inevitability, the Germans (the Japanese are not a major part of the assessment in this book) could have been victorious up through about 1942-43.Overy makes a good and persuasive case for why the allies emerged victorious in this world contest by focusing on major factors involved in setting the state and environment for each side's prosecution and conduct of the war.In about a dozen very good chapters, the author assesses his question through basically four lenses: military, economic and technology, leadership and the moral factor. In the military sphere, the Allies were better learners than the Axis. Overly argues that smashing German victories in the early part of the war basically froze their tactics, deployment and organizations in time due to their arrogance in believing that they had developed a "better" way of waging war. The allies, however, learned from their drubbings. On the sea, organization and tactics (convoys, depth charges and ASDIC, increasing air coverage) turned what would have been a decisive strategic advantage for the Germans into a sinkhole of resources and losses - 70% of all U-boats got sunk - that completely reversed the advantage in that sphere of the war over about a twelve month period to the Allies in a decisive way. Likewise, the Russians overhauled their land forces and learned to better deploy, when to commit and retreat, and how to create their own form of "blitzkrieg" that suited their character and great availability of manpower.The author makes the argument for the air war that has been advanced by many before, but that doesn't make him less correct. While Allied bombing of German industry would have a much lesser impact (as revealed by data after the war) than thought contemporaneously, it had the salutatory effect of keeping better than a million German fighting men and great amount of equipment (think 88's which would have been a great aid if deployed at the front in the anti-tank role in which they were unsurpassed) at home defending the skies above Germany. That effort also destroyed the Luftwaffe as an effective combined arms component and left the German army bereft of air support by 1944.A brilliant point on the economy and technology is made by the author. Yes, American capitalism and productive capacity and the herculean Russian efforts to physically relocate tools, equipment and factories to the Urals in advance of German overrun gave the Allies an incredible productive advantage (although the Germans were close in some areas of tanks and planes produced through 1942 and even 1943). But the Germans got bogged down in two major ways. First the Nazi economic system (fascist corporatism) curtailed the free market and corrupted the allocation of resources through favoritism and the incessant internal competition by German factions to win favor, contracts and keep senior governmental officials "happy." German leadership constantly muddled in the design and productive process which curtailed and/or delayed the output of necessary weapons and systems. Most importantly, the author discuss how this German command interference and the desire to produce a wide array of very sophisticated tanks and planes that were ever changing ended up severely curtailing the total amount of needed weapons that could be produced and sent to their fighting units. Thus, the Germans produced some of the best tanks of the war; Panther, Sturmgeschütz, JagdPanther, King Tiger, etc., while the Russians stuck with the T-34 once they found it and we Americans turned out Shermans like they were Chevrolets. The image of ten Shermans engaging one King Tiger not only speaks to the great design of the Tiger, but to the vastly greater number of Shermans that were able to be deployed. The Tiger might get three of the Shermans, but some of the other seven would be able to work their way around to the rear of the Tiger and eventually take it out. His point is that the Germans would have been much better off, and had much more equipment, if they produced solid designs, stopped tinkering with them, and didn't waste resources on a multitude of variants of the tanks and planes they tried to develop.Another factor that the author cites as key is the ability of Allied leaders to both work together and let their generals run the actual war (after major strategic decisions had been made by their political leadership). Stalin of course came late to this realization and Churchill never got tired of meddling or pet projects, but in comparison to Hitler's insistence on serving as his own general-in-chief for every theater of war and incessant micro-managing, the allies wisely left major as well as minor military decisions up to the generals who had been trained for it. This ground is not new, but Overy does a good job of making a case that has been made many times before about the different command philosophies and the German strategic bungling that arose from Hitler convincing himself that he was a military genius and that his Generals lacked will and were weak.I thought the author's weakest argument was on the relative moral components of each side's war fighting. Yes, the Allies all having been attacked (forgiving Stalin's attack of eastern Poland as Hitler's ally) and the nature of the Nazi and Japanese regimes of course gave our side the moral high ground and helped rapidly build public support and fervor in support of ruthless prosecution of the war (ignoring of course that one is willing to get into bed with a Stalin when fighting a Hitler). And he does marshal some good anecdotal evidence that the German population was somewhat ambivalent about commitment to the war from the get-go, despite the great public enthusiasm that greeted some of Hitler's amazing early triumphs. However as the author discusses in his section on strategic bombing, even wholesale devastation of German cities and massive casualties from the Eastern front didn't really break the fighting ability of German field units and caused no mass uprisings or civilian threats to Nazi war prosecution. I've read too much about the incredible unit cohesiveness and continued willingness to slog it out even into 1945 by German soldiers, sailors and airman to be convinced that the moral component had nearly as much impact as the other prisms through which Overy assesses Allied success.This is a very well researched and written book. Overy handles facts, assessment and conclusions in a straightforward and lucid manner that makes this book an easy read. Highly recommended to those interested in World War II from a strategic level.

Much of the content is solid reasoning and very insightful. This book made me think along some new lines. However, it has at least two obvious flaws:1. This book is not up to date. Research into WW2 is gaining new information every year. An updated version would be appreciated.2. The chapter about the battle of Kursk is severely flawed. According to modern research the Kursk battle was in fact a German tactical victory (mainly because the German losses were far lower than the Soviet ones), though Germany lacked the strategic resources to keep the pressure up, which in turn led to a German strategical defeat. The contemporary description of he battle, which Overy bases his dicussion on, has been shown to be based on inflated Soviet propaganda.In conclusion, this book is far from the final word (Germany could certainly have done more), but it very competently does explain some very important principles which were critical for achieving an Allied victory.

This is a great and well informed study as to why the Axis powers were doomed not to win the Second World War after initial successes. Written by eminent historian Richard Overy, this is essential reading for anybody studying the era, or just interested in it.

As a student of history, it is sometimes easy to yearn for the yesteryear of my Foundation Degree, where English Literature was my major. For while historical texts are notoriously boring long-winded and "heavy-going", Overy's brilliant work is both informative and stimulating.The chapters are clearly categorised enabling the reader, scholar or lay, to dip in and seek the answer to the question he/she might have. His focus on the role economics play in war is both useful and understandable. It is at such points that even the keenest of readers can get lost in a plethora of statistics. Yet Overy draws out the essentials in a digestible way.I commend this book to you, whatever level you feel you're at. I guarantee you'll learn something knew about this exciting epoch in world history. His closing chapter has rekindled my passion for the subject.

A really good book for anyone who is already fascinated with this episode of human history, or indeed anyone who wants to know about it. The style is easy to read, the information is fed to the reader in manageable chunks in a way which allows you to take it all in. Well written. I love it.

I have read quite a few WW2 books and this is the most interesting one to date.Good insight into why the allies won, that adds to the accepted reasons and challenges some of them.