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By Root 1236 0

It was apparent to German economic managers as early as December 1941 that victory was beyond Hitler’s reach because of events in Russia and the accession of the United States to the Allied cause. This was long before the RAF’s and USAAF’s strategic air offensives attained maturity: Allied bombing of Germany hastened the end, but did not decide the outcome. Nonetheless, it is important to stress the importance of close air support, and absolute command of the skies, to the western war in 1943–45. The Western Allies created superb tactical air forces, and used them with all the skill and flair their ground operations lacked. Every man who glimpsed the armies, their convoys crowding the roads of Italy and later north-west Europe nose-to-tail without intervention from the Luftwaffe, recognised the critical contribution of air power in conferring freedom of movement, while denying it to the Wehrmacht.

The United States Navy and Marine Corps were chiefly responsible for the defeat of Japan. In pursuing that end, many battles were fought, notably in Burma and the Philippines, which were strategically redundant. But the momentum of war imposed its own imperatives, and such a judgement is much easier for historians than it was for contemporary national leaderships – as might also be said about the arguments against dropping the atomic bombs.

The United States was the only belligerent which emerged from the war without a sense of victimhood. Most of its people took pride both in their contribution to Allied victory, and in their new status as the richest and most powerful nation on earth. It was characteristic of American romanticism that a war which the United States joined only because it was attacked by Japan evolved during the ensuing forty-five months into a ‘crusade for freedom’. Thanks to Pearl Harbor, fewer of Roosevelt’s people questioned the justice of their cause than in any other war their country has fought. ‘It was the last time most Americans thought they were innocent and good, without qualification,’ said Pfc Robert Lekachman.

Americans sustained a highly effective operational relationship with the British, a notable achievement given the difficulty of sustaining alliances, together with mutual suspicions and differences of national outlook. The partnership worked best at the bottom, where British and American personnel collaborated amicably, and worsened progressively towards the summit of commands. Americans nursed a repugnance towards imperialism which intensified when some witnessed it at first hand in Egypt, India and South-East Asia. They cherished a hubristic belief in their own virtue, and consciousness of their own dominance. In 1945, Congress’s brutally abrupt closure of Lend-Lease reflected an absence of sentimentality about Churchill’s nation; opinion polls showed Americans more willing to forgive Russia’s Lend-Lease debt than Britain’s. Relations between the two nations might have deteriorated thereafter, but for new imperatives created by the acknowledged menace of the Soviet Union. The rapidly evolving confrontation between East and West caused the United States to accept the necessity to preserve its alliance with Britain and other European nations, somewhat to subdue its anti-imperialist scruples, and to offer the stricken Continent a portion of its vast war profits to aid economic resurrection.

Whatever Stalin’s limitations as a military commander and his monstrous record as a tyrant, he presided over the creation of an extraordinary military machine, and pursued his objectives to triumphant fulfilment. In 1945, the Soviet Union seemed the only nation which had achieved its full war aims, creating a new East European empire to buffer its frontiers with the West, and securing important footholds on the Pacific coast. Former US Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles reported an alleged 1943 exchange between Stalin and Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary. The Russian leader said: ‘Hitler is a genius, but doesn’t know when to stop.’ Eden: ‘Does anybody know when to stop?’ Stalin: ‘I do.’ Even