The first lecture on WWII covered political and diplomatic events. This lecture sketches the military history. It is meant to be sufficient to give students a sense of the chronology, but falls far short of a complete history. The next lecture will return the focus to America.
The Second World War
Lecture Two: The Military History
Opening: The Blow Not Struck
In April 1942, George Marshall flew to London to win a war in a single stroke.
He carried a plan. The United States had been in the war for four months, and Marshall—Chief of Staff of the Army, a man whose austere self-command made Roosevelt slightly afraid of him—believed the way to beat Germany was the way that looked most obvious on a map. You concentrated overwhelming force at the decisive point, and the decisive point was northern France. Everything else was a detour. Build up American divisions in Britain through 1942, and in 1943 hurl them across the Channel straight at the German army in the West. Strike the enemy where he was strongest, break him there, and end it.
To Marshall, British reluctance to embrace this looked like a failure of nerve—and worse, a failure of focus. The British kept talking about the Mediterranean, about the Middle East, about Egypt and the Suez Canal and the sea lanes to India. To an American eye, this was an empire defending itself, dressing up the protection of its colonial lifelines as grand strategy. Marshall wanted to kill the German army. The British, he suspected, wanted to save their empire, and were prepared to let the war wander around the edges of the Mediterranean for years while they did it.
The British thought he was the one who did not understand. They had been fighting since 1939. They had been thrown off the continent at Dunkirk. They knew, in their bodies, what the Wehrmacht could do to an army that landed unready on a hostile shore. And what Marshall proposed—hurling a green, half-trained American force, short of landing craft and short of experience, across the Channel against battle-hardened German divisions—struck men like Alan Brooke, the head of the British army, as something close to madness. It would not be a decisive blow. It would be a massacre on the beaches, and the survivors pushed back into the sea. Then in August 1942 came Dieppe, a raid on the French coast that ended in slaughter, and the British caution looked less like timidity and more like knowledge.
This fear—that an opposed landing in France would end in catastrophe—did not go away when the argument ended. It haunted Allied commanders straight through to the morning of D-Day itself, two years later, when Eisenhower carried a note in his pocket taking the blame for a failure he thought entirely possible.
So the British argued for a different strategy. Not a direct confrontation with the mighty Germans, but an assault on what Churchill called the “soft underbelly” of the Axis: strike first in the Mediterranean, where the enemy was weaker and success was likelier. Clear North Africa, knock Italy out of the war, and blood the American army against Germans somewhere it could afford to lose. Roosevelt, over Marshall’s objection, agreed—he wanted American soldiers fighting Germans in 1942, not waiting in England for 1943—and in November the Allies landed in North Africa.
It worked, on its own terms. The Americans got into the fight. They learned, painfully, at places like Kasserine Pass how much they still had to learn. North Africa was cleared; Sicily followed; Italy was invaded and Mussolini fell.
But the underbelly was not soft, and it was not free. Every division committed to the Mediterranean, every landing craft—and landing craft were the scarcest currency of the entire war—was a division and a craft not available for France. The Mediterranean was a machine for consuming exactly the resources a cross-Channel invasion required. By the time the Allies met at Casablanca in January 1943, the arithmetic was already decided, whatever anyone wished. There would be no invasion of France that year. Marshall had lost the argument for the second time, and the great blow he had wanted to strike in 1943 would not fall until June of 1944.
Why it took so long to reach that beach—why a war that began in 1939 did not return to France until 1944—is the question this lecture answers. To see it whole, we have to go back to the beginning.
A Timeline of the War
1939 — The war begins
September 1: Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war two days later.
Autumn 1939–spring 1940: the Sitzkrieg, or “Phoney War”—declarations without fighting in the West.
1940 — The year of German triumph
May 10: Germany strikes west through the Low Countries and France—the same day Chamberlain falls and Churchill becomes Prime Minister.
Late May–June: Dunkirk; France surrenders on June 22. Britain stands alone.
July–October: the Battle of Britain—the first German defeat, fought entirely in the air.
1941 — The war goes global
June 22: Germany invades the Soviet Union. Vast advances—but the drive stalls before Moscow in December, and there is no knockout blow.
December 7: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war.
1942 — The hinge
Winter–spring: Japan overruns the Pacific and Southeast Asia—the Philippines, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies.
June: Midway—the U.S. Navy halts the Japanese tide in a single day.
October–November: three near-simultaneous turns—El Alamein in Egypt, Stalingrad’s encirclement in Russia, and the Anglo-American landings in North Africa.
1943 — The turn becomes undeniable
February: the German Sixth Army surrenders at Stalingrad.
July: Kursk breaks German offensive power in the East for good; the Allies land in Sicily.
September: Italy invaded, Mussolini gone, Italy out of the war.
1944 — The decisive year
June 6: D-Day—the Allies return to France at last.
Summer: the Soviet offensive shatters German Army Group Centre; Paris is liberated in August.
Pacific: the Marianas fall, putting Japan in range of American bombers; Leyte Gulf destroys the Japanese fleet.
1945 — Victory
Spring: the Allies cross the Rhine, the Soviets take Berlin; Germany surrenders on May 8.
August: atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan surrenders.
The Western Theater
Across every theater the same rhythm holds: in 1941 the Allies are retreating almost everywhere, through 1942 they are holding, and only from 1943 onward are they advancing. The Western theater shows this rhythm in its purest form—it opens with the worst defeat of the war and closes with the enemy’s capital in ruins.
The Battle of France, 1940. When Germany struck west on May 10, 1940, the Allies expected a replay of the last war—a grinding contest of trenches along a fixed line. Instead the Germans sent their armor through the Ardennes, the wooded hills the French had thought impassable and left lightly held. The panzers broke through at Sedan, wheeled north, and reached the Channel in ten days, trapping the best Allied armies against the sea. What saved them was not a victory but an evacuation: at Dunkirk, across nine days at the end of May, a fleet of warships and small civilian boats lifted some 340,000 men off the beaches and back to England. They came home without their guns, their tanks, their trucks—an army rescued but disarmed. France surrendered on June 22. In six weeks the strongest army in Western Europe had ceased to exist, and Britain stood alone.
The Battle of Britain, 1940. Hitler’s next step required crossing the Channel, and to cross the Channel he first needed the sky. Through the summer and autumn of 1940 the German air force tried to break the Royal Air Force and failed—worn down by British radar, by the narrow endurance of its own fighters over English soil, and by the pilots the RAF kept throwing back into the air. It was the first German defeat of the war, and it was fought entirely overhead. Denied control of the air, Hitler shelved the invasion and turned east. Britain had not won the war, but it had survived to keep fighting it—and as long as Britain held, there remained a base from which the West could one day be retaken.
The Battle of the Atlantic. Beneath all of this ran the longest campaign of the war, the one on which every other Western effort depended. Britain was an island that could not feed itself or arm itself without what came across the Atlantic—food, fuel, raw materials, and eventually the American armies and their equipment massing for the return to France. Germany’s answer was the U-boat: sink the ships faster than they could be built or replaced, and Britain would be starved out of the war without a single German soldier setting foot on the island. For a long stretch it very nearly worked. Sailing in convoys, the merchant ships crossed an ocean in which packs of submarines waited, and through 1942 and into the spring of 1943 the sinkings ran at a rate the Allies could not sustain—hundreds of ships and thousands of merchant sailors going down into the freezing North Atlantic, the tonnage lost outrunning the tonnage built. It was, Churchill later said, the only thing in the war that truly frightened him.
Then, in the spring of 1943, the balance tipped—not by any single stroke but by many advances arriving together. More escort ships and small escort carriers closed the gap in mid-ocean where aircraft had not been able to reach; long-range patrol planes covered the rest; better radar, and the steady work of breaking the U-boats’ codes, let the convoys find the submarines before the submarines found them.
The codebreaking in particular was a triumph hidden for decades after the war. The German navy encrypted its orders on the Enigma machine, a device its operators believed produced unbreakable cipher—and at Bletchley Park, in England, a team of mathematicians and cryptanalysts broke it anyway, building some of the earliest computing machines to do it. When Bletchley could read the U-boats’ signals, the Allies could route convoys around the waiting wolfpacks and vector their hunters straight onto the submarines; when the Germans changed their system and the codebreakers went blind, the sinkings climbed again. The secret war over the U-boats’ messages ran the length of the battle, and the side that could read the other’s mail held an advantage that could tip a convoy between safe passage and slaughter.
In a few brutal months the hunters became the hunted, and U-boat losses rose so steeply that Germany pulled its submarines back from the North Atlantic. The lifeline held. And because it held, everything else in the West became possible: the buildup in Britain, the bomber fleets, and the great crossing to Normandy all rested on the ships that kept getting through.
North Africa and Italy, 1942–1943. The return to the continent began not in France but, as we have seen, along the “soft underbelly.” Before the Anglo-American landings, though, came the raid that shadowed every plan that followed. In August 1942 an Allied force of roughly six thousand men, most of them Canadian, assaulted the French port of Dieppe. It was a catastrophe. More than half were killed, wounded, or captured in a single morning; tanks foundered on the steep shingle beach, unable to climb the seawall, and the survivors were thrown back into the sea before noon. Dieppe taught hard lessons that the Allies never forgot. Assaulting a defended port head-on was suicide—so the eventual invasion of France would land on open beaches and bring its harbors with it, towed in pieces across the Channel. A landing needed overwhelming bombardment, specialized armor, and total command of sea and air—so the whole technical apparatus of D-Day was built precisely because Dieppe had shown what happened without it. And it hardened the conviction, already strong in British minds, that a premature crossing would fail. The expensive rehearsal shaped both the argument and its eventual answer.
The main effort came in November 1942, when Anglo-American forces landed in North Africa and, together with the British drive west from El Alamein, caught the Germans and Italians in a closing vise. Here the American army learned its trade the hard way—at Kasserine Pass in early 1943 the Germans handled the green U.S. troops roughly, and the lesson stuck. By May the Axis forces in Africa surrendered. Sicily followed in July; the invasion of the Italian mainland in September knocked Mussolini from power and took Italy out of the war. But the Germans poured troops down the peninsula and fought for every ridge. Italy did not collapse—it became a slow, bloody grind up a mountainous spine, tying down Allied divisions for the rest of the war. The underbelly, it turned out, was not soft.
D-Day and the return to France, 1944. On the morning of June 6, 1944, the Allies came back to the continent they had been driven from four years before. It was the largest amphibious assault in history—thousands of ships, five beaches along the Normandy coast, airborne divisions dropped inland in the dark. Everything Dieppe had taught was present: the artificial harbors, the massed naval and air bombardment, the specialized armor built to clear obstacles and climb seawalls. And still it was not certain. The fear that an opposed landing would end in slaughter—the fear that had haunted Allied commanders since Dunkirk—was alive that morning in Eisenhower himself, who had written a note in advance taking full blame for the failure he thought entirely possible, and folded it into his wallet. He never had to use it. The Allies held the beaches, built up faster than the Germans could counterattack, and in August broke out of Normandy. Paris was liberated that month, and the German army in the West fell back toward its own frontier.
Into Germany, 1944–1945. The advance was neither smooth nor cheap. A bold gamble to leap the Rhine in the autumn of 1944 failed at Arnhem. In December the Germans gathered their last reserves for a surprise blow through the Ardennes—the same ground as 1940—and tore a bulge in the American line before the offensive was contained. It was the final spasm. In the spring of 1945 the Allies crossed the Rhine and drove into the heart of Germany from the west while the Soviets closed from the east. Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. The war that had begun with German armor racing to the Channel ended with Allied armies meeting in the ruins of the Reich.
The Eastern Front
Everything about the Eastern Front was larger and worse. This was where the German army was actually destroyed—the majority of its dead were made here, in a war fought on a front a thousand miles wide, across a scale of space and death that the Western theater never approached. It was a war between two dictatorships that had already shown, at home, how little either valued human life, and now turned that indifference outward against each other. Hitler did not intend an ordinary war of conquest in the East. He intended a war of annihilation—to destroy the Soviet state, enslave its peoples, and murder its Jews. That is the fact that sets this theater apart: the fighting and the killing were not separate stories. The same advance that carried the German army toward Moscow carried the machinery of mass murder behind it.
Barbarossa, 1941. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union along an enormous front—the largest invasion in history. The opening months were a catastrophe for the Soviets. Whole armies were encircled and captured, hundreds of thousands at a time; the Red Army reeled back hundreds of miles, and it seemed the Soviet state might simply collapse. But behind the front, something else began at once. Special killing squads—the Einsatzgruppen—followed the army into the occupied territories and began murdering Jews en masse, shooting them at the edges of pits in towns and forests across the newly conquered lands. This was the Holocaust in its first form, by bullet rather than by gas chamber, and it started in the summer of 1941, in the wake of the advancing army.
The advance did not stop, but it did not finish, either. The Germans reached the outskirts of Moscow in December, close enough to see the city—and there they were halted, by the Russian winter for which they were not equipped, by lengthening supply lines, and by a Soviet counterattack drawn from reserves Hitler had not known existed. The knockout blow had failed. And a Germany that could not win quickly in the East had entered a war it was not built to fight—a long one.
Stalingrad, 1942. In 1942 the Germans struck south, toward the oil of the Caucasus and toward the city on the Volga that bore Stalin’s name. Stalingrad became the emblem of the whole front: a battle fought street by street, house by house, room by room, in the rubble of a burning city, at a cost in lives that beggars description. Both dictators poured men into it and forbade retreat. Then, in November, the Soviets did not fight the Germans in the city—they struck the weaker allied armies on the flanks, broke through, and closed a ring around the entire German Sixth Army inside Stalingrad. Hitler forbade breakout. The trapped army starved and froze through the winter, and in February 1943 what was left of it surrendered. An entire German field army had been destroyed. It was the psychological turning point of the war in the East.
Kursk, 1943. That summer the Germans mounted one last great offensive in the East, against a Soviet bulge in the line at Kursk. The Soviets knew it was coming, and had dug in with depth the attackers could not chew through. It became the largest clash of armor the world had seen, and it ended with the German offensive spent and broken. After Kursk, the initiative in the East passed permanently to the Soviets. The Germans would never again mount a strategic offensive there. From this point the front moved only one direction—westward, toward Germany—and it did not stop.
The Soviet advance, 1944–1945. In the summer of 1944, as the Western Allies were fighting in Normandy, the Soviets launched a massive offensive that shattered the German center and destroyed an entire army group—a blow larger than anything happening in the West, and one that broke the back of German power on the continent. The Red Army rolled forward across the borderlands and into Poland, and as it advanced it overran the sites of the mass murder—the camps in the East, where by now the killing had moved from the pits to the gas chambers, and where the scale of what had been done became visible as the Germans retreated. Through late 1944 and into 1945 the Soviets drove west across Eastern Europe, and in the spring of 1945 they fought their way into Berlin itself, block by block, to the bunker where Hitler took his own life. Germany surrendered days later. The regime that had launched a war of annihilation in the East was destroyed, in the end, by the state it had set out to annihilate.
The Pacific
The Pacific war was unlike the others. It was fought across an ocean rather than a continent, and so it was first of all a naval and air war, in which the decisive weapon was not the tank but the aircraft carrier, and the object was not ground but distance—the vast reaches of sea between Japan and everything it had seized. The same rhythm holds here as elsewhere: through early 1942 Japan advances almost unchecked, by mid-1942 it is stopped, and from 1943 the tide runs the other way. But here the turn came faster and earlier than in any other theater.
The Japanese tide, 1941–1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was meant to cripple the American fleet long enough for Japan to seize an empire and fortify it before the United States could recover. For a few months it worked spectacularly. Japan swept across the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia—the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, the great British naval base at Singapore, the Dutch East Indies with their oil. It was a run of conquest as swift as Germany’s in 1940. But Pearl Harbor had missed its most important targets: the American aircraft carriers, which had not been in port. In a war that would be decided by carriers, the weapon that mattered most had survived.
Coral Sea and Midway, 1942. The tide turned in the space of a month. In May, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, an American fleet checked a Japanese advance toward Australia—the first time a Japanese thrust had been stopped. Then in June came Midway. The Japanese sailed east to destroy what remained of the American fleet and were instead ambushed—American codebreakers had learned their plan—and in a single morning four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk. It was the decisive battle of the Pacific war. Japan never replaced those carriers or the trained aircrews that went down with them, and after Midway it was never again able to mount a strategic offensive. Barely six months after Pearl Harbor, the initiative had already passed to the United States.
Island-hopping, 1943–1944. Now came the long problem of reaching Japan across an ocean studded with fortified islands. The answer was a strategy of selection rather than conquest. Rather than storm every island Japan held—each one costly, each one defended to the last man—the Americans took only the ones they needed, the islands whose airfields and anchorages would carry the advance forward, and simply bypassed the rest. The strongpoints left behind were cut off, their garrisons stranded and useless, withering on the vine while the war moved past them. Underneath this, a quieter campaign did decisive work: American submarines strangled Japanese shipping, sinking the tankers and freighters that carried oil and raw materials home, until the island empire Japan had conquered could no longer supply the home islands that had conquered it. The fighting on the islands that were taken—Tarawa, Saipan, later Iwo Jima and Okinawa—was savage beyond almost anything in the war, defenders fighting to nearly the last man. But the direction never reversed. In 1944 the capture of the Marianas—Saipan, Tinian, Guam—put the new long-range B-29 bombers within reach of Japan itself, and that same year, at Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history destroyed what remained of the Japanese fleet as a fighting force.
The end, 1945. By 1945 Japan was, in a strategic sense, already beaten—its fleet sunk, its shipping cut, its cities burning under bombers it could no longer stop. But “beaten” and “surrendered” were not the same thing, and the closer the war came to Japan itself, the more ferocious the defense grew. Iwo Jima and Okinawa were bloodbaths; kamikaze pilots flew their aircraft into ships; and Allied planners looking ahead to an invasion of the home islands forecast casualties on a horrific scale, measured against the fanaticism those two battles had shown. It was into this expectation—an invasion everyone dreaded—that the atomic bomb arrived. It was the endpoint of the strategic-bombing logic the whole island campaign had been building toward: the islands had been won to put bombers over Japan, and this was the ultimate bomb. In August 1945 atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Soviet Union declared war and swept into Manchuria; and Japan surrendered. The war that had begun for America at Pearl Harbor ended in the ruin of the empire that had struck there.
Conclusion
Three theaters, three different wars—a war of beaches and hedgerows in the West, a war of annihilation across a thousand miles of the East, a war of carriers and islands across the Pacific—and yet a single shape runs through all three. In 1941 the Allies were losing everywhere: France fallen, Britain besieged, the Soviet armies reeling back toward Moscow, the Pacific swallowed by Japan. By the end of 1942 the losing had stopped—at Stalingrad, at El Alamein, at Midway, in the mid-Atlantic—and from 1943 onward the Allies advanced on every front until the enemy capitals fell.
Which returns us to the puzzle we began with. Why did a war that began in 1939 not return to France until 1944? The answer runs through everything we have traced. Because Britain nearly starved before the Atlantic was won; because the Americans were green and had to learn their trade in Africa and Italy before they could be trusted against the German army in France; because the landing craft that a cross-Channel assault required were the scarcest thing in the war, and were being spent in the Mediterranean; and because the memory of Dunkirk and Dieppe made every commander certain that a premature crossing would end in slaughter. The road to that beach in Normandy ran through all of it—the convoys, the desert, the mountains of Italy—and it could not have been shorter than it was.
It is worth holding two facts together at the end. The war in the West and the Pacific is the war Americans remember—Normandy, Midway, the flag on Iwo Jima. But the German army was broken in the East, at a cost the Western Allies never had to pay; for every American who died defeating Germany, dozens of Soviet soldiers did. Both things are true, and a clear view of the war keeps them both in sight.
That is the shape of the fighting. But armies are only the visible edge of a nation at war. Behind the men on those beaches stood factories and shipyards, rationed households and mobilized science, millions of workers and the arguments a democracy has with itself even as it fights. How the United States became the arsenal that made this victory possible—and what the war did to American society in the making—is where we turn next.
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