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The Second World War was the biggest conflict in human history. It touched every continent, claiming millions of lives, and it created the world that we know today. But why did it turn out the way it did? Why did the Allies win the war? Or is a better question, why did the Axis lose it?
Using IWM's Second World War galleries, we'll journey through the key events, turning points, and human stories that decided the outcome. First, let's go back to the 1920s. These were the world's major powers. Now, there were six of them, but two were a cut above the rest, true global superpowers, and they would both join the Allied side in the coming war. Britain was the world's largest empire. With its huge navy, it controlled the world's oceans. While the United States was the world's richest country, the financial capital of the globe.
But in 1929, everything changed. The world economy crashed and Britain and the US stepped back from the world stage. In the chaos, nationalist governments rose to power around the world, in particular in Germany and Japan. Their new governments wanted to build empires from which they could extract resources and become global superpowers themselves. Crucially, they were prepared to go to war to make this vision a reality.
The policy of Britain, France, and the United States was to avoid war at any cost. The United States passed laws requiring it to remain neutral in any future war, while Britain employed a strategy known as appeasement. This policy is widely discredited today, but at the time it was popular. On display here in IWM's Second World War Galleries is the Anglo-German Declaration signed by Prime Minister Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. It was drafted in the wake of the Munich conference where the British and French had agreed to Hitler annexing the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia in the hope of avoiding war. Chamberlain believed that this piece of paper guaranteed peace for our time. But less than a year later, he would find himself declaring war on Germany.
In 1931, this new era of conflict began. Japan invaded Manuria and was soon engaged in a full-scale war with China. They made rapid advances, but the territory was vast and Chinese forces continued to resist. By 1939, the Japanese had run out of steam. During this time, they also perpetrated numerous atrocities against the local population who they deemed racially inferior. Up to 20 million Chinese people would die over the course of the Second World War.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Germany began building up their war machine and expanding their territory in Europe. First the Rhineland, then Austria, then the Sudatan land in 1938. It was at this point that Hitler signed the Anglo-German declaration that we saw earlier, promising that his ambitions had been satisfied. But the following year, he annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia. It was a watershed moment. Despite their unpreparedness for war, Britain and France gave security guarantees to Poland. And so when Germany invaded in 1939, Europe was engulfed in allout war.
Then in a shocking development, the Soviet Union allied with Germany to invade Poland from the east. The communist Soviets and fascist Germans were ideological enemies. But in 1939 and 40, they put their differences aside and remade Europe. The Soviets occupied the Baltic states, plus parts of Romania and Finland. Meanwhile, the Germans took Denmark and Norway before achieving one of the most stunning victories of the war. Using cuttingedge tactics, the German forces overran France and the Low Countries in the space of just 6 weeks.
Britain was vulnerable. When the British evacuated from France at Dunkirk with the help of small boats like Tamzin, they left nearly all of their heavy equipment behind. The appearance was of an unstoppable German war machine and Britain alone and at bay. However, this wasn't entirely the case. Britain received crucial support from its empire and dominions, the United States, plus other nations whose governments were in exile in the UK. Germany expected Britain to surrender, but to Hitler's dismay, Britain's new prime minister, Winston Churchill, resolved to fight on. Britain could still rely on the vital defensive barrier of the English Channel. The Royal Navy was at full stretch, but still the largest in the world. And the Royal Air Force had a highly sophisticated air defense system and cuttingedge fighter aircraft. Together, they were able to hold Germany at arms length and prevent an invasion. Britain was still in the war.
It was now that Germany, Japan, and Italy signed an alliance to become the Axis powers. Now, at this point, their prospects looked good. However, beneath the surface, there were big problems. Italy wanted to build a new Roman Empire in North Africa and the Balkans, but their attempts to conquer Greece and Egypt were floundering. Germany's new territory in Europe was being blockaded by Britain's Royal Navy, and supplies were running short. In fact, Germany was so lacking in food and oil that their alliance with the Soviet Union was the only thing keeping them afloat.
Likewise, Japan had occupied French Indochina in 1940 to cut the Chinese off from their supply lines. But this act had provoked a fierce response from the United States. The United States was not officially in the war, but it was still making its presence felt. The atrocities committed by Japan in its war against China helped to sway American public opinion against Japan. In response to the Japanese seizure of French Indochina, America imposed an oil and steel embargo on Japan. When Britain and the Netherlands joined the embargo, Japan lost access to 94% of its oil imports effectively overnight.
The Americans were also gearing up their own war machine. And while America was still ostensibly neutral, this crucial material of war was supplied exclusively to the Allies. The United States soon passed the Lend Lease Act, which supplied aircraft, ships, food, and clothing free of charge. This onslaught of American weapons posed a serious problem for Germany and Japan. The Axis powers were under pressure. Japan risked running out of oil and losing its war with China, while Germany risked becoming subservient to their hated enemy, the Soviet Union. They could not survive like this for long.
And so in 1941, both Germany and Japan decided to risk everything. Despite their weakness, they widened the war to capture the resources they so desperately needed. In June 1941, Germany turned on their ally and invaded the Soviet Union. They had the largest invading force in the history of warfare. But the Soviet Union was a huge country. If they wanted to win, the Germans would have to do it quickly. Nazi ideology deemed Slav peoples to be racially inferior and hence a less formidable enemy. Hitler believed we have only to kick in the front door and the whole rotten edifice will come tumbling down. This dismissive assessment proved deadly for Nazi Germany. The Germans underestimated the Soviet resilience and the immense reserves of people which they had at their disposal. The Soviets undertook a mammoth relocation of industry encompassing entire production plants behind the Eural Mountains. This ensured that their armed forces had the weapons like the M30 howitzer to combat the invasion. Meanwhile, the Soviet people sacrificed their lives on an astonishing scale in defense of their motherland. In all, 25 million Soviet citizens would lose their lives in what official propaganda called the Great Patriotic War. The Germans needed a quick victory, but the fortitude of the Soviets denied them this. In December 1941, the German advance was brought to a halt just a few miles from Moscow. Their great gamble had failed.
At almost exactly the same time, the Japanese launched an attack of their own. But it did not come against the Soviets. With their army bogged down in China, the Japanese planned to capture the oil, rubber, and iron or rich areas of Southeast Asia. However, they believed that by attacking these territories, they would bring the United States into the war against them. And so, to give cover for this southern strike, they launched a surprise attack on the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Their attacks were successful, and Japan took control of much of the territory and resources that they needed. Their hope was to defend them with such tenacity that the Americans, who they perceived as cowardly, would choose to negotiate. But instead, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union came together and formed a plan for final victory.
In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationist sentiment in the United States was quickly extinguished. President Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed they would only accept the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. The Allies plan to secure victory through a relentless attritional struggle at sea, in the air, and on land. To do this, they would have to leverage their advantage in people, resources, and production. The unggainainely looking B-24 Liberator, which you can get up close with at IWM Duxford, is representative of those virtues. At the peak of output, the vast production plant at Willow Run, Michigan, was building one aircraft every 63 minutes. The tide of the war was about to take a dramatic turn.
By 1942, the Allies had broken German and Japanese codes, helping them to win vital victories like the Battle of Midway, in which American aircraft sank four Japanese aircraft carriers, gutting the Japanese Navy as an offensive force. Similarly, on the Eastern Front, Germany's last ditch effort to capture the oil fields of the Caucuses was foiled at the battle of Stalenrad, the bloodiest battle of the war, where Soviet forces surrounded and destroyed an entire German army. The Axis powers had hoped for a quick victory. Instead, they were stuck in a war of attrition in which they were outnumbered in every conceivable way. It was now up to the Allies to turn their myriad advantages into a victory.
The term battle of the Atlantic implies a clash of grand fleets akin to that of Trfalga. Rather, it was a struggle conducted during the entire war as Germany employed yubot in an attempt to starve Britain out of the conflict. The Germans sank millions of tons of Allied shipping, illustrated here in IWM's Second World War Galleries. Losses peaked during what German submariners called the Second Happy Time in 1942. But the Allies began to turn the tide. The Allies were able to replace their losses with mass manufactured Liberty ships. At peak production, three were built every 2 days. They also developed their convoy tactics, providing improved naval escorts. Finally, technical innovation was also employed. Aircraft like the very long range liberator to cover the entire Atlantic, sonar and the leite to hunt out the yubot, and the hedgehog mortar to assist in their destruction.
By 1943, the Allies were winning the Battle of the Atlantic and were slowly strangling the Axis powers with blockades of their own. When the Japanese attempted to transport the bounty from their newly conquered territories back to the home islands, they were savaged by American submarines and aircraft. In fact, the Axis powers had so little oil that they had to slash training times for their pilots, making them easy prey for their better trained adversaries. By now, the Allied forces had taken the offensive, island hopping towards Japan, recapturing Ukraine and knocking Italy out of the war. This brought them closer to Axis territory, where Allied air power could now deal real damage.
The British and Americans subjected the Third Reich to a roundthe-clock bombing campaign. The British wreaked destruction on housing in German towns and cities by night and the Americans targeted daylight precision bombing at German factories. The costs for both USAF and bomber command were high. On display we have a tail section from a BF110 knight fighter whose pilot hints vulfa downed 121 unescorted British bombers. Still, the strategic bombing campaign caused the Germans to disperse their aircraft production to smaller factories, sacrificing economies of scale. Luftvafa fighter aircraft were lured into the air to attack masked formations of American bombers, whereupon they were engaged by the Yusf fighter escorts. In this attritional warfare, the Allies triumphed. By now, American bombers were also striking Japan, using firebombs to tort entire cities. Hundreds of thousands of Axis civilians would lose their lives in the Allied strategic bombing campaigns.
1944 also revealed the height of the Holocaust, Germany's campaign of mass murder against Europe's Jewish population. In total, 6 million Jewish people would be starved, murdered, or worked to death in the service of Germany's ailing war economy. That summer, the Allies landed in France on D-Day and began to liberate Western Europe. At the same time, the Soviets launched the massive Operation Batraton. Both campaigns saw major success. Not only did they outnumber the Germans in men and machines, but they also had better logistics, supplying their men with trucks, while the Axis powers mainly relied on horses.
The Allied leadership had learned how to fight a modern war. At the beginning of the war, the Germans delegated considerable authority to field commanders. This autonomy enabled the astounding success of the campaign against France in 1940. By comparison, Stalin appointed himself supreme commander of Soviet forces. We have his shoulderboards on display here. But as the war progressed, Stalin began to trust the advice of his generals with improved results. Meanwhile, Hitler went in the opposite direction. He began to believe increasingly in his own strategic genius. "I go the way providence dictates with the assurance of a sleep walker," he said. Hitler refused requests by field commanders to make strategic withdrawals with disastrous consequences for the German army. As a result, the Allies made consistent gains.
The outcome of the war was essentially decided, but Germany and Japan refused to surrender. The starkkest manifestation of this was the sacrificing of young Japanese pilots ordered to crash their aircraft crammed with explosives into Allied naval vessels. This insistence on fighting to the death derived from the belief that surrender was a contemptable shame. As a result, the misery and bloodshed would continue.
Adolf Hitler gave precedence to Germany's fault or vengeance weapons like the V1 suspended here. Hitler believed the casualties and destruction wreaked by these weapons would terrorize the civilian population causing the Allied leaders to sue for peace. This however was a delusion. The vast resources devoted to producing VW weapons came at the cost of producing muchneeded armored vehicles and fighter aircraft. It also cost the lives of tens of thousands of slave laborers who were forced to build the weapons in terrible conditions deep underground. By contrast, the Allies spent considerable wealth developing a brand new era definfining weapon with decisive impact, the atomic bomb.
In May 1945, crushed from east and west, the Germans were forced to surrender. Japan fought on, but when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union invaded Manuria, it became abundantly clear that there was no point in further resistance. In August 1945, the Second World War came to an end with the Allies victorious.
The Allies had an overwhelming superiority in natural resources and population. the senus of total war. But this advantage did not assure them of victory. Through an indomitable spirit and dogged resistance, they survived the initial reverses to fight another day. They agreed upon a broad strategy and learned often painfully how to fight a modern war. They also successfully exhorted their populations to prodigious efforts and sacrifice. for millions the ultimate sacrifice. The people of the Allied nations demonstrated their resolve and resilience whether in fighting the axis, producing the myriad manufacturers demanded by modern mechanized war, or serving in the many auxiliary services. On VE Day, Churchill addressed crowds in London with the words, "This is your victory."