Actually it wasn’t inevitable, Churchill’s hindsight notwithstanding, that Hitler’s declaration of war on the US made an allied victory inevitable. Hitler couldn’t defeat the US, but a negotiated end to the war was still a distinct possibility. Prosecuting the war until the unconditional surrender of Germany did not become allied policy until January 1943 - and, even then, the British were not exactly wedded to it. If Hitler could have been displaced internally, a negotiated end to the war would have been a distinctly attractive proposition.
I know that this was the hope of the July 20 plotters; get rid of Hitler who was losing the war, truce with the west and wipe out the real enemy, Judeo-Bolshevism. But why would Roosevelt, who had been waging an undeclared war against Germany before Pearl Harbor and agreed to ‘Germany First’ not long after, or Churchill, who’d already rejected an armistice in more desperate circumstances, consider negotiation with a regime which could never, ever be trusted?
The appeasers had hoped Germany would eventually slay its own monster, but the genuine fury and shock at the assassination attempt Germans felt towards the army plotters make it unlikely. Getting into a slight aside, though. The issue of ‘unconditional surrender’ is an interesting one; on one hand it arguable extended the war when announced in 1943 as you note, on the other what alternative with Hitler’s cronies would be practical or possible?
The main objection to an “unconditional surrender” demand was that it removed, or at least reduced, the incentive for regime change in Germany. If not only Hitler but the entire senior party cadre could have been liquidated by a conservative military coup, the Allies could possibly have then come to terms with a non-Nazi German government and ended the war sooner, saving many lives.
The second objection is that, the longer the war continued, the more of Eastern Europe the Soviets got to occupy, which of course created a long-term problem. And this in fact was Churchill’s concern; if the Nazis were removed from power, he would then have seen the Soviets as the greater enemy, and for that reason he was deeply uneasy about the “unconditional surrender” policy, of which which Roosevelt was the most enthusiastic proponent.
Hardly. By about August of 1944, everyone knew it was just a matter of time.
In about mid-1943, the Red Army went on the offensive for good, as part of the aftermath of the Battle of Kursk. At the same time, the Allies invaded Sicily, and not much later, invaded Italy proper.
At this point, the Germans were staggering, if not quite on the ropes yet.
By about August of 1944, the German resistance in France had all but evaporated after the Falaise pocket fighting, and the Allies were advancing almost as fast as they could. They literally outran their supplies chasing the Germans.
At that point, it was pretty clear to everyone that the Allies were going to win, because the Germans had all but collapsed in the West, and in the East, had all but collapsed in the center against the Soviet “Operation Bagration”- by the point when the Falaise Pocket collapsed, the Russians were already to Warsaw and had also outpaced their supplies. The only reason the Germans had a chance to regroup and resist was because the Allies had to halt their advance so their supplies could catch up.
+1! Never a bad topic to discuss.
After Stalingrad, Roosevelt sent Stalin a commemorative scroll hailing it as the ‘Turning Point of the War’.
I’m vexed as to finding a date for it though.
Army Group Centre was destroyed by Operation Bagration from 22 June to 19 August 1944 . The Warsaw uprising didn’t happen until 1 August - it was a *result *of the Soviet success, not the cause of it. German casualties from Bagration were of the order of 400,000, from the uprising under 20,000.
The Normandy landings (6 June) were far more influential on the German effort in the East than the uprising, valiant though it was.
First of all, “about August of 1944” i smore or less late 1944. Next “everyone knew”? Got a cite for that? Any memo from the Big Three saying “well, we might as well slow down, and not try so hard, we got this thing in the bag?”.
Until the very last days, the Allies gave it their all. No one ever said “Well, the War is over, might as well start the process of sending the troops home”. Sure Bradley was in favor of cutting Allied casualties by throwing more material at the foe.
Why would you let up, even if you know you’ll eventually win? That both gives the enemy a chance to regroup, and it gets more of your own guys killed.
But like both of us are saying, by shortly after D-Day, it was pretty clear to everyone that the Germans were eventually going to lose.
From a pedantic military history standpoint, the real tipping point was the Battle of Kursk- that’s the point when the Germans lost the strategic initiative for good. After that, they were being done-to, rather than doing-to, in that after Kursk (summer 1943) the Germans didn’t control where and when they fought on a strategic level, and were pretty much reacting after that. Yes, there were counterattacks like the Ardennes offensive and the Lake Balaton offensive, but they were just that- counterattacks, not strategic changes in the way the war was handled.
Of course, in the summer of 1943, it wasn’t exactly clear that this had happened, and nor was it clear that it wouldn’t reverse itself. But by summer 1944, it was abundantly clear.
This is wrong. Really, really, really wrong. Askance explained about Bagration, but the Germans were in constant retreat on the Eastern Front from November 1942 until the end of the war with early summer 1943 being the only pause, and that pause being a result of the deliberate Soviet decision to remain on the defensive and deliver a riposte after defeating the German 1943 summer offensive at Kursk. From August 1943 until the end of the war, the Soviets were constantly on the offensive on some part of their front and the Germans were losing ground every day. A picture being worth a thousand words, maps of the Eastern Front 18 November 1942 to March 1943 and Eastern Front 1 August 1943 to 31 December 1944.
The joke was on this guy - he didn’t surrender until 1974!
He passed away this year.
There’s a huge difference between;
- We can now see, with perfect hindsight and knowledge of intel from both sides- that THIS was the turning point.
2.The Allies making plans for a possible Victory. - The Allies figuring that the turning point has come, and they are on the Road to Victory.
- It’s all over but the shouting.
Yeah, I was going to respond to the Warsaw claim, but others have done a better job than I feel able to do from this phone interface. I do want to add that I feel that the Allies’ sense of when the war would end would be refined by events and technical breakthroughs. Stalingrad, Kursk, and D-Day were such events…I’ll add “Black May” 1943, when the U-boats were broken. For technical developments…there are so many. Obviously the Trinity test is the clearest, but how about the first tests of Merlin-engined P-51 Mustangs?
Afterthought…or the first T-34 to roll off the re-positioned assembly lines east of the Urals?
The summer of '44 was also key in another respect: The assassination plot against Hitler (which the Allies certainly learned about right away) plus other dissatisfaction among the German generals. E.g., the German general (blanking here) whose advice was to surrender after the Normandy breakout. Maybe the Allies could deduce a lot about the situation via Ultra decrypts. In particular, they had to have known that the Germans had no viable atomic bomb in development or other war-reversing weapons.
'43 was still too early to officially call it over on the Eastern Front. The Germans managed to pull off some impressive attacks at times. Note that in hindsight we know that the Germans were doomed due to poor decisions by Hitler. If the generals had been allowed to make all the key decisions at that time, the Eastern Front would have dragged on much, much longer. And wars dragging out increases the chances of alternate outcomes. It was only after Bagration that it no longer mattered who decided what.
While there may have been questions here and there prior to summer '44, late that summer they knew they were going to win fairly soon. If anything, they were too confidant of an early victory.
On the Japanese side, there were peace feelers put out in '44. But these were just “end the war with limited pull back” type proposals. Not actual surrender offers. (But unlike the earlier “Let’s stop here with us keeping all we’ve got.” proposals.) None the less, this would have told the allies that Japan knew it was licked and that victory was inevitable. Especially when coupled with decrypts of their diplomatic cables (not even Magic protected in many cases) which would have told even more about their thinking. But the Allies still believed that a costly invasion was going to necessary almost right up to the actual surrender.
No. The Bomb did not shorten the war. The Bomb was purely to intimidate the Soviets.
The Soviet counterattack at Moscow on December 5, 1941 was the end of the Nazi plan for a quick victory a la France in 1940 and the beginning of a long grinding war that sober German generals knew probably couldn’t be won. Stalingrad settled it.
The US and Britain knew this too and did the minimum until they could sweep across the Channel against relatively light opposition to stop the Soviets from overrunning Europe.
The Japanese never had a chance to defeat the US. Even if they would have won at Midway in June of 1942, the US would have just built more aircraft carriers. They were far to vulnerable to naval blockade. When the Soviets were beating the Nazis in 1942-43, they knew their goose was cooked too when the Russians entered the war.
Utter tripe. We asked the Soviets to join the war against Japan; hardly something we’d be doing if we wanted to intimidate them. Stalin agreed to do within 90 days of the defeat of Germany at the Yalta Conference. Germany surrendered May 8, 1945. The Soviets declared war upon Japan on August 8, 1945, exactly 3 months after Germany’s surrender. The Soviet invasion coming between the dropping of the two bombs was a matter of coincidence of the timing of the defeat of Germany and of the first two bombs becoming available for use, nothing more.
Again, complete nonsense. The US high command was pushing for an invasion of France in 1943, while the British high command and Churchill in particular wanted to wait until 1944. Churchill was able to get his way, leading to the invasions of Sicily and Italy after North Africa had been cleared in May 1943. Calling this, the Battle of the Atlantic, which wasn’t settled as a losing game for the U-boats until mid-43, and the Combined Bomber Offensive, which did not look to be doing very well in 1943 “the minimum” and the extremely bitter fighting in Normandy when the invasion of France did come “light opposition” is utter bullocks.
That’s fascinating. Where did you hear that?
Well, that’s bullshit, if only because of the schedule for Operations Olympic and Coronet, which were scheduled to occur in October 1945 and March 1946.
The fact that Japan surrendered a little over a week after the bombing of Hiroshima, leads me to believe that they were scared shitless of being on the receving end of more atomic bombs.