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By Root 1290 0

last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.’ To this Evelyn Waugh responded with characteristic waspishness, ‘How is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?’ His question, while mischievous, was entirely to the point. To defeat Nazi Germany, it was indispensable for its enemies to destroy the Wehrmacht. It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for doing this, accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance. In 1940–41, the British Empire defied Hitler alone. Thereafter, the United States made a dominant material contribution to Germany’s defeat, by supplying aid to Russia and Britain which assumed massive proportions from 1943 onwards, and by creating great air and naval armadas. The Anglo-American bomber offensive made an increasingly heavy impact on Germany. The Western Allied armies, however, by deferring a major landing on the Continent until 1944, restricted themselves to a marginal role. The Russians eventually killed more than four and a half million German soldiers, while American and British ground and air forces accounted for only about 500,000. These figures emphasise the disparity between respective battlefield contributions.

For Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s soldiers to have played a decisive role in the ground war against Germany, they would have needed to land on the European continent at least forty divisions, and probably more, in 1943 before the Russians achieved their great victories. These armies did not exist, with the length of training and scale of equipment that American and British military leaders deemed essential. Equally important, shipping was lacking to transport such a force to the Continent and keep it supplied thereafter. The Luftwaffe remained relatively potent: its nemesis came in the following year, at the hands of the USAAF’s Mustang fighters over Germany. Allied dominance of French air space, which proved absolute in 1944, would have been contested had the Allies landed earlier.

The Americans were willing to risk landing a small army in France in 1943, or even in 1942. The British, who would have had to provide most of the men, were not. They judged, almost certainly rightly, that unless they deployed overwhelming strength they would suffer another disaster, as painful as those of the early war years. Even if a Continental campaign in 1943 had proved sustainable, it would have cost hundreds of thousands more casualties than the Anglo-American armies suffered in 1944–45, since they would have faced German forces much stronger than those deployed in Normandy on and after D-Day, following a further year of attrition on the Eastern Front.

The expanses of sea separating the Western Allies from occupied Europe posed a challenge for invasion forces which must cross them, but also quarantined the Anglo-Americans from German interference. Roosevelt and Churchill were able to exercise the luxury of choice, denied to the Red Army which continuously confronted Hitler’s armies. Captain Pavel Kovalenko was among many Russians embittered by the Western Allies’ supposed pusillanimity, which conveniently ignored the Soviet Union’s ignominious role between 1939 and June 1941. Kovalenko wrote from the front on 26 March 1943: ‘Winston Churchill made a speech on the radio, [saying]: “I can imagine that some time in the next year or possibly the one after, we shall be able to accomplish the defeat of Hitler.” What can one expect from these bastards of “allies”? Cheats, scoundrels. They want to join the fighting when the outcome is decided.’

Churchill, strongly aware of such sentiments, minuted his chiefs of staff in March 1943: ‘Everywhere the British and Americans are overloading their operational plans with so many factors of safety that they are ceasing to be capable of making any form of aggressive war. For six or eight months to come, Great Britain and the United States will be playing about with half a dozen German divisions [in North Africa and