9.3: The Road to Victory

Battle of Stalingrad

When Hitler renewed his invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1942, he focused on conquering the breadbasket and oil fields of southern Russia, namely Stalingrad.  The Blitzkrieg again brought rapid success, but also brought the Reich army too far ahead of its supply lines. Although the strategy included sophisticated tanks, armored troop carriers, and dive bombers, the Germans still used horse-drawn wagons to bring up food, ammunition, and spare parts to the advancing armies.  As the advance slowed, Axis armies arrived at Stalingrad, the new industrial city on the Volga River, too slowly to take advantage of the si.  Hitler badly wanted to conquer and wipe out Stalin’s namesake city, and the Soviet Premier was just as determined to defend it.  In late 1942, the two armies commit themselves to death in the destroyed city, fighting house to house in a five-month battle that killed nearly two million people on both sides. Stalin placed his trust in General Georgy Zhukov, who planned a brilliant Soviet pincer move, cutting off the German 6th army in Stalingrad. When his army was forced to surrender in February 1943, Hitler was apoplectic in his anger and his generals began to doubt that he any longer had the strategic brilliance he showed in the previous years. Stalingrad is undoubtedly the single most important battle of the entire war. Hitler never recovers the advantage and remains in a constant state of defensive retreat from her on out. While the American beachheads in Sicily and France decisively opened a second front and ensured a more swift victory, the Soviets were on their way to defeat Hitler on their own. Had the Nazis succeeded at Stalingrad they would have shortened the front lines while ensuring access to the oil fields of Baku. The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of World War II.

The Soviet Counterattack

The Germans planned to follow up with renewed attacks to get at Soviet oil, but their battle with the Red Army at Kursk turned the course of the war definitively to the Soviets.  Zhukov correctly guessed the German strategy, and fortified Kursk while massing armies to the north and south.  After the greatest tank battle in world history, Zhukov unleashed another pincer move, and the Germans retreated from battle as quickly as they could.  The Red Army began rolling westward, putting the Germans permanently on the defensive for the remainder of the war.  More than any other Ally, the Soviet Union was most responsible for defeating Hitler, but at a great sacrifice. 25,000,000 Soviet soldiers and civilians died in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, and roughly 80 percent of all German casualties during the war came on the Eastern Front.

The North African Campaign

Allied victories in North Africa in 1942 also reversed Axis gains.  The Germans and Italians had been threatening British Egypt since late 1940, and led by the capable General Erwin Rommel, seemed to be on the brink of victory in the spring of 1942. Hitler’s decision to invade southern Russia was based, in part, on the expectation that the Middle East would soon fall into Axis hands.  In November, the first American combat troops entered the European war, landing in French Morocco, where French Vichy forces switched sides and joined the struggle to defeat the Axis.  The Americans pushed the Germans and Italians eastward while the British, after defeating Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt, began rolling the Axis armies back to the west.  By early 1943, the Allies had pushed Axis forces into Tunisia and then out of Africa.

American Island Hopping

Meanwhile, the Americans gradually stopped Japanese expansion in the Pacific.  In the summer of 1942, American naval victories at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the aircraft carrier duel at the Battle of Midway crippled Japan’s Pacific naval operations. The battles were the first time two naval fleets engaged one another by air and not by sea.  At Coral Sea, the U.S. Navy blocked the Japanese threat to Australia, ultimately stopping their territorial advancement. Midway Island became the ultimate turning point for the war in the Pacific when the U.S. destroyed three Japanese aircraft carriers, the most important weapon of that war. While American carriers were sunk at various battles, U.S. industrial power was able to replace them…a capacity that Japan lacked.

To dislodge the Japanese hold over the Pacific, the U.S. began a campaign of “island hopping”…attacking island after island, bypassing the strongest but seizing those capable of holding airfields to continue pushing Japan out of the region. Combat was vicious. At Guadalcanal Japanese soldiers launched suicidal charges rather than surrender. Many Japanese soldiers refused to be taken prisoner or to take prisoners themselves. Such tactics, coupled with American racial prejudice, turned the Pacific Theater into a much more brutal and barbarous conflict than the American-European Theater.​

Italy: Europe’s “Soft Underbelly”

In January 1943, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met at Casablanca to discuss the next step of the European war (see figure 9.3.1). They also declared that they expected nothing short of unconditional surrender from the Germans to avoid a repeat of the confusion and ambiguity after the Great War.  Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and French General Charles de Gaulle could not attend the Casablanca Conference. Figure 9.3.1 is a black and white photo of US President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill seated on chairs outdoors, and they are surrounded by a large group of war correspondents, seated on the ground in front of them, taking notes. Roosevelt and Churchill made a public announcement about the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis Powers. In other words, they announced that their goal was to fight the Axis Powers to their ultimate defeat. Churchill convinced Roosevelt to chase the Axis up the Italian peninsula, into the “soft underbelly” of Europe. Stalin preferred a cross-Channel invasion of France, but the British and Americans were not yet prepared in 1943. In July, Allied forces led by General Dwight Eisenhower crossed the Mediterranean to invade Sicily in the largest amphibious assault to that point (D-Day will be even larger). The Italian King dismissed and arrested Mussolini, who escaped with Germany’s help and established a fascist government in northern Italy. The south, however, switched sides and fought alongside the Allies for the rest of the war. However, the advance northward toward Europe’s “soft underbelly” turned out to be much tougher than Churchill had imagined. Italy’s narrow, mountainous terrain and Mussolini’s newly formed fascist state gave the defending Axis the advantage. Movement up the peninsula was slow, and in some battles, conditions returned to the trench-like warfare of World War I as the German armies fell back to new defensive positions, exhausting Allied forces in one battle after another.  It would take nearly a year to capture Rome, and northern Italy was not liberated until the last weeks of the war in 1945.

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): US President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill at the Casablanca Conference, Library of Congress, in the Public Domain.

Futile Firebombing

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) sent thousands of bombers to England and North Africa in preparation for a massive strategic campaign against Germany—another move to assure Stalin the Allies were opening a “second front” against Germany. Initially, U.S. bombers focused on destroying German ball-bearing factories, rail yards, oil fields, and manufacturing centers during the day, in part out of reluctance to target civilians in terror bombings.  However, after the London Blitz, the British felt no compunction against retaliation in kind, and carpet-bombed German cities at night.  By the end of 1944, the Americans joined the British in the same strategy, bombing urban industrial targets despite massive civilian casualties. The joint RAF-USAAF bombing of the industrial city, Dresden, in February 1945, dropped 3,900 tons of high explosives on the city, causing a firestorm that killed 25,000 civilians.

Air squadrons initially flew unescorted, since many believed that “flying fortress” bombers equipped with defensive firepower flew too high and too fast to be attacked. However, advanced German technology allowed fighters to easily shoot down the lumbering bombers. German fighter planes shot down almost half of American and British aircraft until long-range escort fighters were developed that allowed the bombers to hit their targets while fighters confronted opposing German aircraft. Historians still debate the effectiveness of the Allied bombing campaign against both Germany and Japan, and the overall usefulness of bombing civilians in World War II. The Germans increased production of war materiel during the war, relocating factories and streamlining production. German and Japanese civilians, like the Londoners in 1940, learned to live with aerial attacks instead of rising to overthrow their own governments and sue for peace. Critics of terror-bombing argue that targeting civilians rarely results in surrender, and instead often stiffens a country’s resolve to fight on and inflict the same terror on its foe.

Review Questions

• How did the different wartime experiences of the Allies influence the goals of the “Big Three” leaders, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt?
• If terror-bombing civilian populations is ineffective, why did everyone continue to do it?