The war that began in September 1939 was a
European war, in contrast to the world war that
ensued when the Soviet Union, the US and Japan
became involved in 1941. Militarily there is an
obvious reason for seeing 1941 as a dividing line.
In Asia, the China War being waged since 1937
was a separate conflict until it was widened into
the Pacific War by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
In Europe Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union
marks a turning point in the course of the war.
But in a deeper sense the global implications of
Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939 were there from
the beginning. Long before Germany declared
war on the US, America was throwing its support
behind Britain and actually engaging in warfare
in the battle of the Atlantic. Then Nazi–Soviet
‘friendship’, affirmed in August 1939, was
nothing but a temporary expedient. Hitler did
not abandon his goal of winning living-space in
the east and conquering ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’.
In 1940 and 1941 Britain on its own was inca-
pable of inflicting serious damage on Germany.
Was its survival as a belligerent therefore of much
importance? Without the war in the east, it is dif-
ficult to imagine how Britain could have launched
even a destructive bomber offensive against
Germany. Not only was much of the German air
force fighting the Russians, but had the war
against Russia not continued, and so frustrated his
plans, Hitler would have diminished the size of
his victorious continental army and transferred
the main German war effort to building up an air
force which, in sheer size alone, would have over-
whelmed the Royal Air Force. Hitler was never
able to realise this plan as Germany’s war
resources continued to be fully stretched in
holding the eastern front. Britain was the only
Western European democracy left in 1940. Its
refusal to accept the apparent logic of the military
situation saved post-war Western Europe from
suffering the fate either of continued German
overlordship or of a future under Stalin’s Red
Army if, as seems more probable, the Soviet
Union had won the war. Instead democratic
Britain provided the link, and later the base, for
an Anglo-American counter-offensive in Western
Europe that created the conditions for recovery
free from the totalitarian control of the left or the
right. Without Britain still fighting from 1940 to
1941, the likelihood of an American involvement
in the European theatre of the war was remote.
The powers victorious in the Second World
War recognised that they would be faced with
world problems and worldwide confrontations
after the war was over. The future of the millions
who were largely tacit observers of the war, the
subjects of the colonial European empires, or
under Japanese rule, would be dependent on its
outcome. A new world was in the making and its
history would have been different had Germany
and Japan emerged as the post-war superpowers.
The size and destructive capability of the
armies that fought on each side during the Second
World War exceeded even those of the Great WarChapter 25
THE VICTORY OF THE ALLIES, 1941–5