Could the Axis powers have consolidated their lightning victories of 1939-42 in such a way as to achieve ultimate victory? Military historians have long debated the strategic decisions that might have tipped the war in Hitler’s and Hirohito’s way. Leaving aside unlikely scenarios like a successful German invasion of Britain in 1940, a cancellation of Operation Barbarossa or a Japanese decision to attack the Soviet Union rather then the United States, four more or less plausible possibilities have been suggested:
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Hitler might have accepted his military leaders’ advice (notably that of Admiral Raeder) and focused his attention on winning the war in the Mediterranean in 1941, before invading the Soviet Union. He might, fir example, have struck across the Eastern Mediterranean to Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria; or through Turkey (violating her neutrality) towards the Caucacus; or across Egypt to Suez and beyond. Even as it was, the British positions in Malta and Egypt were acutely vulnerable . Rommel might well have been able to drive the British out of Egypt if he had been sent the twenty-nine German divisions that were sitting more or less idle in Western Europe.
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Alternatively, Hitler might have diverted more resources into winning the battle of the Atlantic in 1942. Certainly, the German submarines were inflicting severe losses on Allied shipping throughout 1942 and into the spring of 1943.
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Hitler might have waged his war against the Soviet Union more intelligently. Again, he might have listened to the experts (Halder and Guderian among them), who advised him to concentrate German efforts on capturing Moscow rather than diverting Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt’s Army Group southward toward Kiev. In a similar vein, might not have squandered his 6th Army so profligately at Stalingrad; Alan Brooke’s fear was that Paules might instead conquer the Caucasus, opening the way to the Caspian sea and the Persian Gulf oilfields.
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The Japanese could have waged a different war against the Western powers, attacking Ceylon rather then Port Moresby and Midway in 1942 in order to challenge British dominance of the Indian ocean. They might also have diverted troops away from China and Manchuria- where 56 per cent of their overseas forces were still stationed at the end of the war- to reinforce their line of defense in the Pacific.
The difficulty with all these counterfactuals- aside from their postulating a Hitler who was not as deaf to expert military advice as the real Hitler was- is that virtually none of them suggests a way in which the Axis powers could have overcome the overwhelming economic odds against them once they had taken on simultaneously the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union.
To be sure, the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939-42 narrowed the economic gap between the Axis and Allies. The Germans very succesfully sucked resources out of occupied Western Europe; at their in 1943 unrequited transfers from France amounted to 8 per cent of German gross national product, equivalent to a third of pre-war French national income. Germany qll but monopolized the exports of the West European countries she occupied. The former Czechoslovakia, to, was substantial net contributor to the German war effort. So deep did Operation Barbarbossa and subsequent offensives penetrate that they captured more than half of Soviet industrial capacity. More over, the Germans were able to treat their empire as a bottomless reservoir of cheap labor. Foreign workers accounted for a fifth of active civilian labor force by 1943. After being put in charge of German armaments production, Albert Speer galvanized the Reich’s economy, almost trebling weapons output between 1941 and 1944 by imposing standardization on the manufactures and achieving startling improvements in productivity. The Japanese also performes feat of economic mobilization, increasing aircraft production by a factor of five and a half between 1941 and 1944.
Yet it was nowhere near enough. The Big Three had vastly superior material resources. In 1940, when Germany and Italy had faced Britian and France, the latter combination’s total economic output had been roughly two-thirds that of the other side;s. The defeat of France and Poland lengthened the odds against Britain, but the German invasion of the Soviet Union restored economic balance. With the entry of the United States into the war, the scales tipped the other way; indeed, they all toppled over. Combined Allied GDP was twice that of the principal Axis powers and their dependencies in 1942. It was roughly three times in 1943, and the ratio continued to rise as the war went on, largely as a result of the rapid growth of the US economy. Between 1942 and 1944 American military spending was nearly twice that of the Germany and Japan combined. It is difficult to see how different strategic decisions could have prevented this disastrous lengthening of economic odds against Axis victory. So much increment in Allied production simply lay beyond the reach of Axis arms, in the United States and beyond the Urals. Moreover, the additional oilfields that might have come within Hitler’s reach had he fought the war differently were still far too modest in their output to have narrowed significantly the petroleum gap between the two sides.
It is important also to bear in mind that Axis powers were fighting not only against the British,Russians and Americans; they were fighting against the combined forces of the British, Russian and American empires as well. The total numbers of men fielded by various parts of the British Empire were immense. All told, the United Kingdom itself mobolized just under six million men and women. But an additional 5.1 million came from India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Victories like El Alamein and even more so Imphal were victories for imperial forces as much as for British forces; the colonial commitment to the Empire proved every bit as strong as in the First World War. Two and a half million Indians joined the British Indian Army. The Red Army was also much more than just a Russian army. In January 1944 Russians accounted for 58 per cent of the 200 infantry divisions from which record were available, but Ukrainians accounted for 22 per cent, an order of magnitude more than fought on the German side. Half the soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army at Stalingrad were not Russians. The American army, too, was ethhnically diverse. Although they were kept in segregated units, African-Americans accounted for 11 per cent of the total US forces mobilized and fought in all major campaigns Operation Torch on wards. Two of the six serviceman who Raised the stars and stripes on Iwo Jima were of foregion origan; one was Pima Indian. A man once said"America is the international country… Our Army had Yugoslavs and Frenchmen and Austrians, and Czechs and Norwegians in it, and everywhere our Army goes in Europe, a man can turn to the private beside him and say:Hey, Mac, what’s this furriner saying?’… And Mac will be able to translate. This is where we are lucky. No other country has such a fund of men who speak the languages of the lands we must invade… Just as truly Europe once invaded us, with wave after wave of immigrants, now we are invading Europe, with wave after wave of sons of immigrants.".