2. THE INVASION OF THE SOVIET UNION
Hitler’s June 1941 advance into the USSR – known as Operation Barbarossa – was the decisive moment of the war, because thereafter, at unspeakable human cost, the Red Army did the heavy lifting: first to contain the Germans, and finally to defeat them. It may be argued that American supplies – everything from aluminium to spam, boots, trucks and telephone cable – made an important contribution to Soviet victory, but in the crucial first 18 months of the eastern war, western materiel reached the USSR in modest quantities, making only a marginal contribution to the Soviet war effort until 1943, by which time the battle of Stalingrad had been fought and won.
As the great historian Sir Michael Howard often said, counter-factuals are foolish, because once one variable changes, infinite possibilities are opened up. But I have always thought that if Hitler, instead of launching Barbarossa, had reinforced Rommel and completed the conquest of the Mediterranean and Middle East, as I believe he could have
done, Churchill’s government would not have survived. It might well have been replaced by a Tory administration that sought a compromise peace with Germany. After the experience of the First World War, I don’t think the British people (any more than the French) had the stomach for the ghastly struggle of attrition that proved necessary on the eastern front before the Germans were driven back. It is unlikely there was ever any easy route to winning the Second World War, or has been in any great clash between more or less evenly matched modern industrial powers.
I suppose a scenario can be pondered wherein the western Allies dallied until an atomic bomb was built, then used it against Germany. But that presupposes US entry into the war, and indeed many other things. I rest my case that an enormous amount of killing and dying had to happen before the Nazis were crushed, and though it did not seem so to the western Allies and their peoples at the time, posterity can see that the Soviets did most of it.
Sir Max Hastings is an author and journalist, whose books include Chastise: The Dambusters
Story 1943 (William Collins, 2019)