was based on the belief that despite the tem-
porary weakness of China and the possibility of
revolutions and civil war, 450 million Chinese
would someday become united and mod-
ernised and would be the most important
factor in the whole Far East.
The problem during the last two years of the
land war in Asia was to get Chiang Kai-shek’s
armies to put up any resistance at all to the
Japanese, who renewed their offensives and occu-
pied large new areas of eastern China in 1944.
The Japanese overran the American-built airfields
from which they had been bombed. Chiang Kai-
shek, meanwhile, positioned half a million of his
best troops in the north to contain the commu-
nists and was preserving his armies for a future
war of supremacy in China after the Western
powers had defeated Japan. Throughout 1944
the tension between Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-
shek grew. Roosevelt had little faith in the
Chinese leader. He wished to force on him the
appointment of an American general to command
all the Chinese armies and to bring about effec-
tive cooperation between the communists and the
Kuomintang against the Japanese. A China policy
that would reconcile China and serve America’s
global interests continued to elude the US.
During the course of 1943 the tide of war turned
decisively against Japan, Italy and Germany. The
enormous industrial resources of the US alone,
when fully mobilised for war, exceeded all that
Germany, Japan and their allies could produce
together. The Soviet Union and Russia were by
now more than a match for the military strength
Germany had built up in the east. It was only the
tenacity and skill of Germany’s armies, despite
Hitler’s disastrous interferences as at Stalingrad,
that enabled Germany to stave off defeat for so
long. Germany did not collapse even when the
ordinary man in the street knew the war was lost
and had no confidence left in Hitler’s promised
‘wonder’ weapons. They fought to the bitter end,
until Hitler had shot himself and the crushing
superiority of the Allied armies closing in from all
sides made further resistance a physical impossi-
bility. Until close to the end of the war, Hitler’s
regime could still successfully terrorise and kill
anyone who openly refused orders to fight to the
last. Equally important was German fear of
Russian conquest and occupation. Nazi propa-
ganda had successfully indoctrinated the German
people into believing that the Russian subhumans
from the east would destroy, loot and kill and that
it was better to die resisting than to fall into
Russian hands. Early experiences of the Russian
armies when they first invaded East Prussia
appeared to confirm this belief.
But a separate peace with the West, the prin-
cipal hope of those who had plotted against
Hitler during the later stages of the war, was not
a possibility. In practice the Western Allies could
follow no other policy than to demand that
Germany must surrender unconditionally on all
fronts simultaneously. The actual phrase ‘uncon-
ditional surrender’ emerged during discussions
between Roosevelt and Churchill when they met
at Casablanca in January 1943 to coordinate and
agree on Anglo-American strategy. Roosevelt
gave it official public backing in speaking to the
press. It meant that Britain and the US would not
entertain any bargaining over peace terms with
Germany, Italy and Japan and would fight until
complete military victory had been achieved.
It has been argued that the call for uncondi-
tional surrender made the enemies of the Allies
fight more fanatically to the bitter end and that
the war might have been shortened by a more flex-
ible Allied attitude. The evidence of Germany’s
and Italy’s behaviour in 1944 and 1945 does not
support this view. The Italians were able to over-
throw Mussolini and in fact negotiate their sur-
render, whereas Hitler’s grasp over Germany
remained so complete, and his own attitude so
utterly uncompromising, that no negotiated peace
was possible short of Germany’s total collapse,
even if any of the Allies had desired to negotiate
for peace. The advantages of having proclaimed as
a war aim ‘unconditional surrender’ on the other
hand were solid. Allied differences on how to treat
a conquered Germany could be kept secret
since the Allied public had been satisfied by the
demand of ‘unconditional surrender’. Moreover,
Roosevelt and Churchill hoped that the call for
unconditional surrender would reassure Stalin in
1
THE VICTORY OF THE ALLIES, 1941–5 287
