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v

Strategic Studies Institute

and 

U.S. Army War College Press

ENDS, MEANS, IDEOLOGY, AND PRIDE: 

WHY THE AXIS LOST AND WHAT WE CAN 

LEARN FROM ITS DEFEAT

Jeffrey Record

July 2017

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vi

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vii

FOREWORD

Dr. Jeffrey Record, a professor emeritus of strategy at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, 

examines the causes of the Axis defeat in World War II 

and postulates still relevant lessons that we can learn 

from that defeat. Record contends that the Axis was 

beaten by a combination of resource inferiority (after 

1941) and strategic incompetence—for example, the 

pursuit of territorial ambitions far beyond the limits 

of Axis strength. World War II’s lessons for the future 

include the enduring importance of material strength 

even in an age of irregular warfare; the pernicious 

effects of extreme ideology on sound strategic judgment; and the limits of operational and tactical superiority in delivering strategic success.

Dr. Record completely dispels the notion that the 

Second World War has no pertinence to navigating 

through the strategic challenges of the present era.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute and

U.S. Army War College Press

ix

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JEFFREY RECORD is Professor Emeritus at the Air 

War College in Montgomery, Alabama, where he 

taught strategy for 20 years. Before that, Dr. Record 

served as pacification advisor in the Mekong Delta 

during the Vietnam War; Rockefeller Younger 

Scholar on the Brookings Institution’s Defense Analysis Staff; Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign 

Policy Analysis, the Hudson Institute; and the BDM 

International Corporation. Dr. Record also has extensive Capitol Hill experience, having served as a legislative assistant to Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen, 

and later as a professional staff member of the Senate 

Armed Services Committee. He is the author of 10 

books and 24 monographs, including: Wanting War: 

Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq; Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of the Gulf War; and The Wrong 

War: Why We Lost in Vietnam. Dr. Record received his 

doctorate at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced 

International Studies in 1973.

xi

SUMMARY

Why did the Axis Powers lose World War II, and 

what can we learn from its defeat? The Axis seemed on 

top of the world until 1941, when it added to its list of 

enemies the United States and the Soviet Union. The 

entry of Russia and America into the war decisively 

tipped the balance against Germany, Italy, and Japan. 

Resource-rich Russia and the United States were prepared for protracted conflict, whereas the Axis was not. 

From Pearl Harbor onward, it is difficult to imagine 

how the Axis could have avoided the fate that befell it, 

short of Stalin’s defection from the Allied side.

Material weakness should have imposed strategic 

discipline on Axis territorial ambitions, but none of the 

three major Axis states seemed to recognize the limits 

of their power. Imperial ambitions, fueled by extreme 

ideologies, held sway over a realistic grasp of what 

was possible and what was not.

An examination of World War II’s outcome reveals 

three lessons. First, numbers still matter. The best 

strategy is to be strong. The strong sometimes lose, 

but the weak lose more often. Second, ideology can 

distort sound strategic thinking. Both Germany and 

Japan were victimized by extreme racial ideologies 

that prompted them to overestimate their own fighting 

power and underestimate that of their enemies. Third, 

operational and tactical superiority cannot redeem a 

faulty strategy. Throughout the war, Germany outperformed its enemies on the battlefield; however, it was 

still crushed strategically.
1

ENDS, MEANS, IDEOLOGY, AND PRIDE:

WHY THE AXIS LOST AND WHAT WE CAN 

LEARN FROM ITS DEFEAT

INTRODUCTION

Carl von Clausewitz believed that “superiority of 

numbers is the most common element of victory,” and 

that the “best strategy is to be strong.” However, the 

great Prussian philosopher of war also recognized that:

superiority of numbers in a given engagement is only one 

of the factors that determines victory. Superior numbers, 

far from contributing everything, or even a substantial 

part, to victory, may actually be contributing very little, 

depending on the circumstances.1

Those circumstances might include a weaker 

enemy with a stronger willingness to fight and die, or 

with a superior strategy, such as irregular warfare of 

the kind that sapped the French and American will to 

win in Indochina. Nevertheless, it is always better to be 

stronger than weaker, especially when both sides are 

waging a regular war. All armed combatants, be they 

states, insurgencies, or gangs, seek strength because 

strength protects, confers security choices, and usually—though not always—prevails. Guerrilla warfare, 

terrorism, and other forms of irregular warfare are 

hardly the preferred choices of the weaker side. On 

the contrary, they are dictated by weakness. Irregular 

warfare is a matter of necessity, not choice. Colin Gray 

observed:

In irregular warfare a relatively resource-rich regular side 

is pitted against a resource-challenged foe. Of necessity, 

the latter must operate by stealth, and has to avoid open 

combat except under conditions of its own choice.2
2

Mao Zedong himself rejected guerrilla warfare as a 

means to decisive victory; it was but a preparatory 

stage to gaining the ability to conduct operations 

from superior strength—i.e., final-phase conventional 

warfare.

Almost a decade ago, the study Beating Goliath: 

Why Insurgencies Win was published, which examined 

weaker-side victories over powerful states and the reasons for their success.3

 According to extant theory, as 

well as my own thinking, the weaker-side wins rested 

on some combination of a stronger will to win,4 a more 

effective strategy,5 the political composition of the 

stronger side (democracy versus dictatorship), and 

access to external assistance.6 My research revealed 

that foreign help was a common enabler of victorious 

insurgent wars, and that such help, while certainly no 

guarantee of insurgent success, can even transform 

the weaker side into the stronger one.7 For example, 

the available evidence suggests that by the time of the 

Battle of Yorktown in October 1781, the American side, 

which included the Continental Army, local militias, 

and French naval and ground forces (to say nothing of 

massive French financial credits and gunpowder shipments), was the materially preponderant side.8

Here, this monograph wishes to explore the causes 

of conflict outcomes not between strong states and 

weak nonstate challengers, but rather between strong 

states themselves, using World War II as an illustrative vehicle and focusing on the relative role that the 

war’s tangibles and intangibles played in that conflict’s outcome. On its face, World War II would seem 

to offer little insight into the kinds of war that have 

dominated the post-1945 era, especially the post-Cold 

War period. However, the relative influence of material versus nonmaterial factors, especially the degree to 
3

which they can be substituted for each other, remains 

an enduring issue in the study of war. World War II 

was the last and most stupendous great power war, 

and although predominantly a regular war, it contains 

instruction relevant to other forms of armed conflict.

Great powers are by definition the strongest of 

states in terms of territory, population, industrial 

power, financial resources, technological prowess, 

and military forces. Of course, there are considerable 

disparities in strength among great powers. In terms 

of raw physical strength, for example, the main Axis 

Powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy) were severely disadvantaged by the major Allied Powers (Great Britain and its empire, the Soviet Union, and the United 

States). In the case of Italy, pretensions of great power 

status were delusional, and Japan’s fighting power, 

though impressive, could not overcome the American homeland’s geographic advantage (being beyond 

Tokyo’s military reach) and overwhelming war production superiority. Indeed, the degree of Allied superiority over the Axis, including a near monopoly of 

access to the world’s petroleum deposits, points to the 

conclusion that World War II’s outcome was predetermined. The resource disparity between Japan and 

the United States was especially severe, leading Colin 

Gray to judge that the Pacific War “was a conflict that 

Imperial Japan was always going to lose [emphasis in 

original].”9

“For all of its operational-tactical brilliance, stunning initial victories and plunder, the Axis . . . possessed 

less than half the economic power of its enemies,” 

observed MacGregor Knox, and:

Barring improbable levels of incompetence or irresolution 

in Britain or the United States, that crushing imbalance 

doomed the Axis in the intercontinental war of attrition 
4

that emerged from Hitler’s failure to destroy Soviet 

Russia, Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and the 

Fuhrer’s immediately following and wholly eccentric 

declaration of war on the United States.10

The numbers are stark. The Allies (excluding China) 

enjoyed a 2.7:1 advantage in population and a 7.5:1 

advantage in territory, in addition to controlling access 

to almost the entire world’s known oil reserves.11 In 

addition, in each of the wartime years (1939-1945), the 

Allies’ collective gross domestic product (GDP) never 

fell below twice that of the Axis.12

I resist being a determinist when it comes to war 

outcomes. Resource superiority is always nice to have, 

but the trick is to translate that raw superiority into 

capable fighting power and then to employ that power 

effectively at the tactical and operational levels on 

behalf of a competent strategy. This is what the Axis 

failed to do.

Germany, Japan, and Italy were strategically 

incompetent—i.e., they failed to discipline the relationship between their imperial ambitions and their 

military means. Simply put, they bit off more—far 

more—than they could chew. They allowed hope to 

subvert reality and illusions to subdue sound strategy. 

Sir Basil Liddell Hart defined strategy as “the art of 

distributing and applying military means to fulfill the 

ends of policy.” It depends for success:

first and foremost, on a sound calculation and coordination 

of the ends and means. The end must be proportional to 

the total means, and the means must be used in gaining 

each intermediate end which contributes to the ultimate 

end.13

I believe that the combination of resource inferiority 

and strategic incompetence doomed the Axis to defeat. 
5

This is not to denigrate the record of the Allies. Despite 

a very mixed tactical and operational performance in 

the early years of the war, the Allies orchestrated a war 

effort that hitched their material advantage to an effective war-winning strategy. I take no issue with Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won. The key to victory was 

material superiority plus “a very great improvement in 

the military effectiveness of Allied forces.”14 It was not 

just a question of brawn but also of brains. The Allies 

painstakingly learned how to deal with Axis superiority at the sub-strategic levels of war, sometimes overcoming it with sheer brute force, unpleasantly defined 

by John Ellis as “two things: an overwhelming physical . . . superiority . . . and a marked lack of finesse 

in applying that superiority.”15 Raw power alone does 

not confer strategic success. That power has to be transformed into effective war-winning outcomes.

Much has been written about why the Allies won. 

However, it is equally important to address the question of why the Axis lost. Germany almost certainly 

could have prevailed had Hitler recognized the limits 

of German power—the first obligation of a sound strategy. He could have refrained from attacking the Soviet 

Union and declaring war on the United States, and 

simply stood pat on his European territorial gains as 

of May 1941. Absent war with the Russians and Americans, Hitler would have remained dominant on the 

European continent with the Soviet Union, still Hitler’s ally by virtue of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, continuing to supply Germany 

with vital quantities of oil, foodstuffs, and other raw 

materials. (Ironically, Nazi-occupied western Russia 

supplied Germany but a fraction of what Germany 

obtained from a friendly Stalin.) Great Britain would 

have remained strategically isolated, with little chance 
6

of overthrowing German power on the continent and 

little chance of inducing an isolationist United States 

to enter the war. Barring war with Russia, Hitler might 

have had more than sufficient force to sweep British 

power and influence out of the Mediterranean and 

North Africa, including Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, and 

Suez. Under such circumstances, even Winston Churchill likely would have been compelled to stop fighting 

Germany and come to some kind of terms with Hitler—e.g., Britain’s acceptance of German rule on the 

continent in exchange for Hitler’s agreement to leave 

the remaining British Empire alone.

Hitler seemingly had it made in May 1941. His 

forces occupied France, the Low Countries, Denmark, 

Norway, most of Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, 

including Greece. He enjoyed friendly fellow fascist 

regimes in Spain, Italy, and Romania, as well as a very 

beneficial alliance with Stalin. Adam Tooze has concluded that with:

hindsight it is hard to avoid the conclusion that after 

the defeat of France Germany would have done better 

to adopt a defensive posture, consolidating its position 

in Western Europe, attacking British positions in the 

Mediterranean and forcing the British and the Americans 

to bomb their way onto the Continent.16

Douglas Peifer contends, however, “an Axis victory over the Anglo-Americans in 1941-42 was not as 

self-evident as one might think.” He points out that 

by mid-1941, Franklin Roosevelt was firmly determined to enter the war of Britain’s side and was 

already supplying Churchill with massive quantities 

of Lend-Lease assistance. Moreover, Hitler was in less 

a position to invade the British Isles than he was in 

1940. He had no means of coercing Churchill into some 
7

kind of settlement, especially given what was already 

a de facto Anglo-American alliance, and Germany’s 

growing war production disadvantage vis-à-vis Britain alone, to say nothing of the United States. Peifer 

also questions whether the Germans had “a viable 

strategy for winning the war in the Mediterranean . . . 

absent Spanish assent to [a German] attack on Gibraltar,” which was not forthcoming. Also lurking in the 

background, although unbeknownst to Hitler, was the 

likelihood of an American atomic bomb, which assuredly would have been dropped on German targets had 

Germany not surrendered before the summer of 1945.17

Foreswearing conquest of Russia would of course 

have forced Hitler to do something that he could never 

bring himself to do: renounce a central tenet of his core 

ideological convictions. Hitler believed it was his historical destiny to rid Europe of Jews and communism 

and to establish a race-based empire in Slavic Europe 

stretching from Poland to the Ural Mountains, with surviving Russians reduced to hungry serfs to be worked 

to death by their German masters. Hitler also believed 

that only the creation of a German empire from the 

Atlantic to the Urals would enable him to defeat the 

United States, which he regarded as an inevitable 

enemy that stood in the way of German world domination. Thus, Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet 

Union was the most consequential strategic decision 

of the Second World War. Without it, it is difficult to 

imagine how Hitler could have been defeated.

IMPERIAL JAPAN

As for the Japanese, who were never as powerful as 

the Germans (at least on land), they could have avoided 

war with America had they not been victimized by 
8

their own racial ideology, which told them they were 

destined to rule the Chinese and other “lesser” peoples of Asia, and had they not been persuaded, as was 

Hitler, that war with the United States was inevitable. 

They could have invaded Southeast Asia, as they did in 

1941-42, without attacking American territory. Former 

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is known to have 

worried that a Japanese invasion of only the European-controlled portions of Southeast Asia (e.g., Malaya, 

the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, French Indochina) 

would make it impossible for him to unite the country 

behind a declaration of war against Japan.18 How could 

Roosevelt, who in 1941 was straining to join the war in 

Europe against Nazi Germany, which was a far more 

urgent threat to first-order U.S. security interests than 

Japan, make the case for spilling American blood over 

a bunch of European colonies in the Far East? “Perhaps 

the major error of the Japanese was their decision to 

attack the United States when the main objective was 

to gain the strategic resources of Southeast Asia,” contends Louis Morton. 

Had they bypassed the Philippines and rejected 

Yamamoto’s plan for a strike against Pearl Harbor, it is 

possible that the United States might not have gone to 

war or, if it had that the American people would have 

been more favorably disposed to a negotiated peace.19

Belief in the inevitability of war often becomes a 

self-fulfilling prophecy because it encourages believers to strike the first blow—to start wars at times and 

places of their own choosing. Had the Japanese been 

attuned to Roosevelt’s political dilemma—his inability 

to take a united America into war absent a direct attack 

by Germany or Japan—they might have avoided the 

strategic disaster that befell them. The irony, at least 
9

for the Japanese, was that their attack on Pearl Harbor 

inflicted only modest damage on the U.S. Pacific Fleet. 

The fleet’s three invaluable aircraft carriers were elsewhere on December 7, 1941, and most of the battleships that were sunk were later refloated and returned 

to service. If the attack was but a “military inconvenience” for the United States, it was a “political disaster” for Japan because it implanted in the American 

electorate a burning desire for revenge that culminated 

in the mass destruction of Japanese cities in 1945.20

The magnitude of Japan’s strategic incompetence is 

jaw dropping. Consider the following facts of 1941.

First, Japan’s economy, though fully mobilized 

for war, was one-tenth the size of the American economy, a disparity certain to widen as the United States 

moved toward complete mobilization.21 (The power of 

the United States turned out to be such that Japan’s 

defeat consumed only about 15 percent of America’s 

total war effort.)22

Second, Japan was vitally dependent on the United 

States for key raw materials, including oil, of which 

the United States supplied 90 percent of Japan’s 

requirements.

Third, Japan was a resource-poor state, completely 

dependent on seaborne commerce that it was poorly 

prepared to protect in war. For Japan’s Mahan-worshipping Imperial Navy, defending the country’s merchant marine was an afterthought.

Fourth, Japan’s Army ground and air forces were 

already tied down in Manchuria (deterring a Soviet 

invasion) and in China, where they were stuck in a 

4-year unwinnable war. For Japan, the “China Incident” was a Vietnam War writ large.

Fifth, Japan lacked the military wherewithal to 

threaten the continental United States, whereas the 
10

United States could—and eventually did—obliterate the Japanese home islands. Japan was a regional 

power, whereas the United States would soon become 

a global power.

Given these facts, a prolonged war with an enraged 

United States, in which American war production 

would prove decisive, was to be avoided at all costs. 

However, how could Japan prevent the United States 

from taking its time, years if necessary, to amass overwhelming force and project it across the Pacific? It 

could not, and some Japanese understood this. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, for one, who knew America 

well, declared in October 1940 that a war with the 

United States would be a protracted one, during which 

Japan’s resources would be slowly exhausted to the 

point of having to quit. “We must not start a war with 

so little chance of success,” he warned.23

Certainly, in retrospect, Japan’s decision to attack 

the United States seems self-evidently suicidal. “The 

Japanese bet in 1941,” wrote Raymond Aron in 1966, 

“was senseless since [Japan] . . . had no chance of winning and could avoid losing only if the Americans were 

too lazy or cowardly to conquer.”24 Gordon Prange, 

the great historian of the Pearl Harbor attack, called 

it “a reckless war. [Japan] could not possibly win.”25

Roberta Wohlstetter, in her groundbreaking work, 

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, condemned the fanciful Japanese assumption that the United States: 

with ten times the military potential and a reputation for 

waging war until unconditional surrender, would after 

a short struggle accept the annihilation of a considerable 

part of its naval and air forces and the whole of its power 

in the Far East.26
11

Toshikazu Kase, a Japanese foreign policy official who 

was present on the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered, concluded that the Pacific War “was unequal 

from the start. [It] was the product of brains fired 

by sheer madness.”27 Looking back on Pearl Harbor, 

Haruo Tohmatsu and H. P. Willmott observed simply 

“no state or nation has ever been immune from its own 

stupidity.”28

How, then, to explain Japan’s decision? Was it 

madness? Or simply inexplicable? Here we enter an all 

too familiar world—actually the real world—in which 

rational calculation of ends and means is constantly 

threatened by arrogance, ideology, prejudice, wishful 

thinking, and pride.

In the summer of 1941, the Japanese were confronted by what they viewed—with considerable justification—as a stark choice between war with America 

and a humiliating political submission to the United 

States involving Japan’s ruin as an aspiring great power 

via severe U.S. economic sanctions and insistence that 

Tokyo abandon its empire in China. For Japan, pride 

or “face” dictated a decision to fight regardless of the 

consequences. Acceptance of the Roosevelt administration’s suspension of oil deliveries to Japan and 

diplomatic insistence that it evacuate China and Indochina in exchange for a resumption of trade with the 

United States would have reduced Japan to an American vassal state. Ian Kershaw argued:

For no faction of the Japanese elites could there be a 

retreat from the goals of a victorious settlement in China 

and a successful expansion to establish . . . Japanese 

domination of the Far East. . . .[These objectives] had not 

just become an economic imperative. They reflected honor 

and national pride, the prestige and standing of a great 

power. The alternatives were seen as not just poverty, but 
12

defeat, humiliation, ignominy, and an end to great power 

status in permanent subordination to the United States.29

Japanese reasoning was summed up by Admiral Osami Nagano, Chief of Staff of the Imperial Japanese Navy in September 1941: “Japan would rather 

go down fighting than ignobly surrender without a 

struggle because surrender would spell spiritual as 

well as physical ruin for the nation and its destiny.”30

No wonder the Japanese fought so long and fanatically 

to stave off defeat! The employment of suicide aircraft 

in 1944-45, like today’s Islamic suicide bombers, testifies to a remarkable combination of determination and 

tactical military effectiveness. Indeed, Tokyo’s attitude 

in late 1941 was not dissimilar from Churchill’s in the 

summer of 1940 when he publicly asserted that he 

would prefer that Britain go down fighting rather than 

submit to Hitler.

Clearly, the Japanese understood they could not 

defeat the United States outright, as had Nazi Germany 

vanquished France in 1940, and that Japan’s prospects 

in a long war with the United States were poor, even 

non-existent. They also assumed, however, that war 

with the United States was inevitable, in part because 

they regarded the United States and Great Britain as 

strategically inseparable. This meant that a Japanese 

invasion of Southeast Asia would automatically trigger war with the United States. This was not in fact the 

case. War with America was certain only if American 

territory was attacked.31

A second—and self-evident—assumption was that 

time was working against Japan. The longer Japan 

waited to strike the United States, the dimmer its prospects for avoiding defeat. As the trade embargo took 

hold and the United States accelerated its rearmament, 
13

Japanese economic and military power relative to that 

of the United States began to decline rapidly. In the 

critical category of naval tonnage for example, Japan 

in late 1941 possessed a competitive 70 percent of U.S. 

tonnage (including tonnage deployed in the Atlantic), 

but the Japanese correctly projected, based on published sources (and excluding estimated war loses), 

that that ratio would drop to 65 percent in 1942, 50 percent in 1943, and 30 percent in 1944.32 The Two-Ocean 

Navy Act passed by the U.S. Congress in July 1940 

called for construction of 6 battleships, 18 aircraft carriers, 33 cruisers, 115 destroyers, and 43 submarines.33

H.P. Willmott has observed that the act “doomed the 

Imperial Navy to second-class status, since the activities of American shipyards would be as catastrophic 

for Japanese aspirations as a disastrous naval battle 

would be.”34

Yamamoto had warned Japanese leaders that, 

“Anyone who has seen the auto factories of Detroit 

and the oil fields in Texas knows that Japan lacks 

the national power for a naval race with America.”35

Japan’s relative power would never be better than in 

1941. Indeed, during the war years the United States 

built 8,812 naval vessels to Japan’s 589.36 Japan’s productive disadvantage in combat aircraft was almost as 

grim. In 1941, the United States produced 1,400 combat 

aircraft to Japan’s 3,200. Three years later the ratio was 

37,500 to 8,300.37

A third assumption, which reflected the near certainty of a long war, was that Japan could force the 

United States into a murderous, island-by-island slog 

across the Pacific which, it was hoped, would eventually exhaust the Americans’ political will to fight on 

to total victory. To bring their power directly to bear 

against the Japanese home islands, the Americans 
14

would have to drive thousands of miles westward 

from Hawaii and northward from Australia, plowing through New Guinea and the Philippines, and the 

Central Pacific island chains of the Carolines, Gilberts, 

and Marianas. By heavily fortifying these territories 

and defending them to the death, the Japanese could 

raise the blood price to the point where the Americans might settle for terms that would permit Japan to 

retain its mainland, if not insular Asian empire. After 

all, the strength of U.S. security interests in East Asia 

could never equal that of Japan’s.

“The Japanese theory of victory,” contends Colin 

Gray:

amounted to the hope—one hesitates to say calculation—

that the United States would judge the cost of defeating 

Japan to be too heavy, too disproportionate to the worth 

of the interests at stake.38

Referring to the tenacity of Japan’s hopeless defense of 

its Central Pacific bastions, Adrian Lewis argues that 

the Japanese understood the “futility of their situation,” but that their objective was not victory. Rather, 

“it was to inflict as many casualties as possible on 

American forces, to hold out as long as possible, and to 

prolong the war [and] destroy the will of the American 

people.”39 This strategy persisted even into 1945, with 

Japanese hardliners in Tokyo insisting that they could 

achieve a conditional surrender to the Americans by 

turning, or threatening to turn, the defense of the home 

islands into an American bloodbath.

The Japanese were correct in assuming they could 

impose a protracted war of attrition on the Americans. 

They employed a combination of distance and ferocity to force the Americans to grind their way, bloody 

assault after bloody assault, across the vast expanses 
15

of the Pacific. Yet, Japan was destined to lose unless 

America’s overwhelming capacity for war was subverted by a collapse of political will to pay the necessary price. However, the Japanese attack on Pearl 

Harbor had eliminated that possibility. Again, the 

intriguing question arises: What if Japan had avoided 

attacking U.S. territory in December 1941?

Belief that the Japanese could bleed the Americans 

into a compromise settlement of the war rested on a 

fourth assumption (or at least hope): Japanese racial 

and spiritual superiority could neutralize America’s 

physical superiority. Japan was neither the first nor 

last of America’s enemies to stress the human element 

in war and to underestimate the resolve of Americans 

at war. Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Mohamed Farad 

Aideed, and Osama bin Laden all recognized America’s material advantage but believed they could defeat 

it by mobilizing such intangibles as a greater willingness to fight and die and a strategy and set of tactics 

designed to sidestep superior U.S. firepower. The Japanese knew they would be outgunned by the United 

States, but they believed that the unique qualities of 

their race—racial purity, martial skill, willpower, 

discipline—could defeat the “soft” Americans. “The 

Japanese regarded us as a decadent nation in which 

pacifism and isolationism practically ruled the policy 

of our government,” testified Joseph Grew, U.S. 

Ambassador to Japan, after the war. Willmott notes 

that modern Japan in 1941 was:

a nation with no experience in defeat and, more 

importantly a nation [that believed itself] created by 

gods, and ruled by a god [Emperor Hirohito]. . . . This 

religious dimension provided the basis for the belief in 

the superiority of the Japanese martial [prowess] that was 

a guarantee against national defeat.40
16

As for America, many Japanese shared the view of 

Rear Admiral Tasuku Nakazawa, Chief of the Imperial 

Navy’s operational section: 

a composite nation of immigrants [that] lack[s] unity, [can] 

not withstand adversity and privation, and regard[s] war 

as a form of sport, so that if we deal a severe blow at the 

outset they will lose the will to fight.41

In Japanese eyes, writes John Dower, “all Westerners 

were assumed to be selfish and egoistic, and incapable of mobilizing for a long fight in a distant place.” It 

was also assumed that Germany would defeat Britain 

and that the U.S. war effort “would be undercut by any 

number of debilitating forces endemic to contemporary” American society such as “isolationist sentiment, 

labor agitation, racial strife, political factionalism [and] 

‘plutocratic profiteering’.”42 As a creature-comforted 

society, America was simply too feckless to sustain the 

blood and treasure costs of a long, faraway, and harsh 

war, especially in a region where the strength of U.S. 

interests was weak relative to Japan’s. At some point, 

the capitalists who controlled the country would turn 

against a war whose balance sheet was registering far 

more costs than benefits.

John Lynn has pointed out that, barring Japanese 

racial stereotyping of Americans as:

soft, self-indulgent, and incapable of serious sacrifice . . . 

Japanese war plans made no sense, since Tokyo realized 

that the advantage of numbers in manpower and material 

always rested with the United States.43

Japan’s relative poverty virtually dictated an embrace 

of racial and spiritual power over material strength. 

(Fairness demands recognition that racism also colored American views of the Japanese. Aside from a 
17

long history of anti-Asian racism in the United States, 

especially on the West Coast, many Americans in 1941 

regarded the Japanese as racially inferior, even barely 

human, and the German-Japanese alliance of 1940 as a 

union of master and servant. Indeed, many Americans, 

including Secretary of War Henry Stimson, believed 

the Japanese were incapable of planning, much less 

executing the attack on Pearl Harbor, and were dumbfounded by the string of stunning operational successes 

the Japanese achieved against the West in Southeast 

Asia in the first half of 1942. In fact, the Germans were 

not even informed of the Pearl Harbor attack by their 

Japanese “allies.”)44

The presence of a materially superior enemy, especially one as powerful as the United States, encourages the conviction that the intangibles of war can be 

employed to neutralize or even overcome physical disadvantage. Mao Zedong clearly understood this and 

adopted a strategy of prolonged irregular warfare as 

the solution. The prerequisite of weaker-side success, 

however, is not to go “regular” prematurely—i.e., to 

avoid falling into the trap before one is ready; of playing the stronger side’s game of engaging in direct, 

regular, and conventional combat. That is a recipe 

for defeat, as the Vietnamese communists discovered 

during the Tet Offensive of early 1968, and the Islamic 

State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) discovered later in Syria 

and Iraq when it attempted a positional defense of the 

territory it controlled.

The Japanese, however, had no viable irregular warfare options. They were compelled to wage 

the kind of war for which they had been trained and 

equipped, as eager imitators of the Western great 

powers, and to wage it against a firepower-dominant 

foe, which among other things possessed the resources 
18

and scientific talent to harness the destructive power 

of the atom. Given Pearl Harbor’s inoculation of American public opinion against any thought of a conditional Japanese surrender, it is difficult to imagine any 

outcome of the Pacific War other than unconditional 

surrender.

This is not to belittle the contribution to victory 

of the U.S. performance at the operational and tactical levels of war. The Americans planned effectively 

and presciently, were well led, and fought with skill 

and determination. They perfected the complex art of 

amphibious warfare and used their submarine force 

and air power with devastating effect against Japanese 

shipping and the Japanese home islands themselves. 

Moreover, they demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice blood and treasure that utterly refuted Japanese 

assumptions.

Midway, Guadalcanal, Leyte Gulf, the Philippine 

Sea, and Okinawa have all been cited as turning points 

in the Pacific War. What about Pearl Harbor? Did it not 

initiate a war that Japan was doomed to lose? Could 

the Japanese have done anything differently after Pearl 

Harbor to avoid defeat?

FASCIST ITALY

Shortly before he committed suicide, Adolph Hitler 

confessed that his friendship with Benito Mussolini:

could be added to the list of my mistakes. It is visible that 

the Italian alliance rendered more service to the enemy 

than to ourselves. The intervention of Italy . . . brought 

us an infinitesimal aid in comparison with the numerous 

difficulties which it has created for us. [Italy] contributed 

. . . to making us lose the war. . . .[Hitler concluded] The 

greatest service which Italy could have done to us was to 

have kept out of the conflict.45
19

Italy was the weakest of the three major Axis Powers, 

and in fact lacked the resources and military prowess 

to become the great power that Mussolini longed for 

her to be. In terms of peak-year wartime GDP (in billions of 1990 dollars), Italy ($151 billion in 1939) ranked 

well behind Germany ($437 billion in 1944) and Japan 

($197 billion in 1942). Italy was dwarfed by the United 

States ($1,499 trillion in 1944), Russia ($495 trillion in 

1944), and the United Kingdom ($351 billion in 1943).46

As Hitler judged, Italy proved to be a strategic liability for Germany. Italian military failures in the Balkans 

and North Africa in 1941 diverted German forces into 

both areas just as Hitler was preparing to invade the 

Soviet Union. It is testimony to the Mussolini regime’s 

fundamental feebleness that Hitler felt compelled to 

invade most of Italy in 1943, in the wake of Mussolini’s 

dismissal and arrest by King Victor Emmanuel. (Unlike 

Hitler, Mussolini was simply head of government, not 

head of state. In addition, unlike Hitler, who brooked 

no institutional challenge to his authority, Mussolini 

shared power and authority in Italy with both the Vatican and the monarchy, which commanded the Italian 

military’s primary loyalty.)

Fascist Italy’s ends-means gap was even greater 

than Imperial Japan’s. Mussolini had visions about 

recreating a Roman-dominated Mediterranean empire, 

which of course would have required the expulsion of 

the British and French powers in the region—a task 

well beyond Italy’s military capacity. Throughout 

the war Britain controlled the western (Gibraltar) and 

eastern (Suez) entrances to the Mediterranean, which 

among other things forced Italy into utter dependence 

on Germany for its industrial raw materials. British 

forces also routinely defeated Italian naval forces at 

sea and military forces on land in North Africa. The 
20

battleship-centric Italian Navy lacked aircraft carriers 

and effective radar, and the Italian Army’s leadership 

rejected mechanization in favor of continued reliance 

on foot infantry and mules. The army entered World 

War II with essentially the same weapons and mindset 

it had in World War I.

Compounding the Italian military’s mediocre performance—and in part a cause of it—was the war’s 

unpopularity. Despite almost 20 years of Fascist rule, 

most Italians had little taste for a war of any kind in 

1940, much less a war on the side an overbearing ally 

and (after 1941) against an enemy as popular in Italy 

as the United States. In contrast to Nazi Germany and 

Imperial Japan, the regime’s attempt to inspire popular worship of national martial glory failed utterly, 

and Mussolini’s strategically nonsensical decision to 

send a large Italian Army to fight alongside Germany 

in Russia hardly improved the dictator’s popularity. 

Italian forces retreated and/or surrendered in droves 

wherever they were sent, prompting Mussolini to complain to his foreign minister (and son-in-law) Count 

Galeazzo in 1941: 

Have you ever seen a lamb become a wolf? The Italian 

race is a race of sheep. Eighteen years [of fascist rule] 

are not enough to change them. It takes a hundred and 

eighty, or maybe even a hundred and eighty centuries.47

Unlike the Germans and the Japanese, the Italian 

performance at all three levels of war—strategic, operational, and tactical—was disastrous, dooming her to 

certain and early defeat. Indeed, it is difficult to speak 

of an Italian war effort when compared to the other 

major belligerents. Italian military expenditure peaked 

at 23 percent of GDP in 1941 (compared, for example, 

to Germany’s 70 percent in 1943, and America’s 42 
21

percent in 1944). Moreover, Italy lost only 205,000 military and 25,000 civilians in World War II, or just over 

one-third of its death toll in World War I. By comparison, Germany suffered 7,000,000 military and civilian 

deaths.48

Italy was simply not a serious military power when 

compared to her allies and enemies (except backward 

foes like the Libyans and the Ethiopians), and she was 

trapped in the suffocating embrace of a contemptuous 

ally.49 MacGregor Knox observed:

the humiliating inadequacy of Italian military 

performance in 1940-43 had sources far more complex 

than the alleged primacy of the regime’s propaganda, 

and . . . those sources were reciprocally interrelated at a 

variety of levels. Parochialism, fragile military traditions, 

shortages of key technical skills; energy and raw material 

dependence; the regime’s inability to mobilize effectively 

what resources existed; the incompetence and venality of 

industry; the deficiencies in military culture that prevented 

the armed forces from imagining, much less preparing 

for modern war; strategic myopia, dissipation of effort, 

passivity, logistical ineffectiveness, and dependence [on 

Germany]; and the armed forces’ greater or lesser degrees 

of operational and tactical incapacity were so interwoven 

that separating them analytically is a thankless task.50

Italy’s fortunes in World War II might have fared 

better had the so-called Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis been 

a genuine alliance, based on common war aims and 

governed by a unified command structure. However, 

the Axis Powers had nothing but divergent war aims 

and no common command apparatus remotely resembling the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff or 

even the more informal consultative but effective strategic relationship between Roosevelt, Churchill, and 

Stalin. On the contrary, the Axis was little more than 

a collection of tyrannical regimes united only by their 
22

hatred of the West and communism and by their desire 

for imperial expansion in their respective regions of 

the world. Neither Hitler, Mussolini, nor Hedeki Tojo 

bothered to inform each other of their plans, including 

the momentous German decision to invade the Soviet 

Union and the no less fatal Japanese decision to attack 

Pearl Harbor. Geography in any event prohibited any 

meaningful direct cooperation between Nazi Germany 

and Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy’s proximity to 

Hitler’s Germany proved fatal.

NAZI GERMANY

I have argued that the combination of acute material inferiority and gross strategic incompetence condemned Japan and Italy to certain defeat. To be sure, 

one can never dismiss the role of contingency and 

human factors in determining war outcomes. However, given the degree of Japanese and Italian resource 

inferiority and strategic recklessness, it is difficult to 

imagine the circumstances that could have spared 

Tokyo and Rome the fate that befell them. For example, suppose that the Japanese had destroyed the 

entire U.S. Pacific Fleet (including its three aircraft carriers) in December 1941, and then went on to occupy 

the Hawaiian Islands. Such a feat clearly would have 

delayed the return of U.S. naval and air power across 

the Pacific and the ultimate destruction of the Japanese 

home islands (an aircraft carrier-less U.S. Pacific Fleet 

could not have stopped the Japanese in the critical battles of the Coral Sea and Midway). In the final analysis, 

however, the United States was simply too powerful, 

too distant, and too enraged to have been denied an 

eventual and decisive victory in the Pacific War.
23

Nazi Germany presents a more complicated case. 

Like Japan, Germany was physically weaker than its 

combined adversaries were, at least after 1941, when 

it added the Soviet Union and the United States to 

its list of enemies. Even by the time of Pearl Harbor 

in December 1941, however, German misfortune in 

Russia may have already fated Hitler to ultimate strategic disaster. Blitzkrieg, a novel method of employing mechanized ground forces, tactical air power, and 

radio communications in tandem that had worked so 

well elsewhere in Europe, came to grief in Russia for 

reasons that ought to have been apparent to its proponents. Once again, as with the Japanese in East Asia, 

German imperial objectives were permitted to outrun 

available economic and military means. “Hitler was 

powerless to alter the underlying balance of economic 

and military force,” concludes Adam Tooze:

The German economy was simply not strong enough 

to create the military force necessary to overwhelm all 

its European neighbors, including both Britain and the 

Soviet Union, let alone the United States.51

Nazi Germany was nonetheless the most powerful 

and strategically dangerous Axis state. Had it defeated 

Russia in 1941, as it expected to do—and almost did—

it is difficult to envision how Britain and the United 

States could have successfully challenged Hitler’s control of Europe. As John Lukacs observed:

the Anglo-American alliance, for all its tremendous 

material and financial and industrial and manpower 

superiority, could not really have conquered Hitler’s 

Germany without Russia. That’s why June 22, 1941 [the 

date of Operation BARBAROSSA, Germany’s invasion 

of Russia] was the most important turning point of the 
24

Second World War, [even] more important than Pearl 

Harbor.52

The Soviet Union was the only state within Hitler’s 

military reach that was big enough, powerful enough, 

and fierce enough to absorb a German attack and 

then counterattack. To be sure, Russia benefitted substantially from U.S. Lend-Lease assistance, including 

weapons, ammunition, foodstuffs, vehicles, aircraft, 

oil, and other raw materials. However, that assistance 

did not arrive in great quantities until early 1943 (just 

as the Germans were surrendering at Stalingrad).

The numbers are stupendous. The German war 

against Russia cost the Soviet Union an estimated 

27,000,000 military and civilian deaths (out of a total 

population of 160,000,000) and much of its territory 

and industrial infrastructure. Yet in each year of the 

4-year conflict, including the disastrous year of 1941, 

the Soviets out-produced Germany in such key items 

as aircraft, tanks, and artillery.53 (In terms of gross 

war production of World War II’s major combatants, 

the Soviet Union ranked second only to the United 

States.)54 In 1942 alone, despite territorial and other 

losses that amounted to a 25 percent drop in GDP, the 

Soviet Union achieved war production ratios over Germany of 3:1 in small arms and artillery, 4:1 in tanks, 

and 2:1 in combat aircraft.55

Moreover, though Germany consistently outperformed all of its enemies at the tactical and operational 

levels of war, it was Russia which, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, tore the guts out of the German Army.56

Though the Soviets suffered 65 percent of all Allied 

military casualties during the war (the United States 

and Britain about 2 percent each),57 they accounted for 

4 out of 5 (80 percent) of all German military dead in 
25

World War II.58 According to John Ellis, between June 

1941 and March 1945 (2 months before Germany surrendered), a total of 4,900,000 German soldiers were 

killed or wounded on the Eastern Front, as opposed 

to about 580,000 in northeastern Europe against Eisenhower’s armies.59 Even by November 1, 1941, a month 

before the Battle of Moscow, German casualties totaled 

686,000, or one-fifth of Operation BARBAROSSA’s 

starting invasion force of 3,400,000 (with one-for-one 

replacements nowhere in sight).60

As a killing machine, the German Army was 

unquestionably better than its competitors, especially 

the Red army. The statistics are unequivocal: up to 

the end of 1944, “on a man-to-man basis, the Germans 

inflicted between 20 and 50 percent higher casualties 

on the British and Americans than they suffered, and 

far higher than that on the Russians,” notes Andrew 

Roberts. Moreover, they did so “under almost all military conditions [including Allied air superiority]. . . . it 

is indisputable that the Germans were the finest fighting force of the Second World War.”61 No wonder it 

took the overwhelmingly resource-rich Allies so long 

to bring Germany down! (Even before BARBAROSSA 

and the full ramp-up of the U.S. war economy, the 

combined GDP of the United States, Britain, and the 

Soviet Union exceeded that of Germany by 436 percent.62) Even in 1939, the combined GDP of just Britain 

and France alone was 60 percent greater than that of 

Germany and Italy.63

Clearly, the Eastern Front was the decisive theater 

of operations of World War II (although this conclusion 

has been recently—and ridiculously—challenged by 

Phillips Payson O’Brien64). However, why did events 

there turn out the way they did? Was it simply a clash 

of strength? Or were there other factors at work? How 
26

could an army as tactically and operationally skilled as 

the Wehrmacht be defeated? Indeed, why did Hitler 

invade Russia in the first place? Was not Nazi domination of Europe already a fact? Could Hitler have won 

in Russia, and why did he not?

First things first: Hitler believed he was destined by 

Providence to invade the Soviet Union for ideological 

and strategic reasons. His Nazi ideology told him that 

it was his fate to establish a race-based empire in Slavic 

Europe that would put an end to Jewry and communism and that he was the only German capable of fulfilling that mission. “Essentially it all depends on me, 

on my existence because of my political talents,” Hitler 

pronounced in 1939.65 Ian Kershaw observed that even 

before World War II, Hitler had “little sense of his own 

limitations.” On the contrary, he had:

a calamitous over-estimation of his own abilities, coupled 

with an extreme denigration of those—particularly in 

the military—who argued more rationally for greater 

caution.66

Hitler also believed that destroying Russia would 

eliminate Great Britain’s last remaining potential ally 

on the continent and thereby finally compel London to 

come to terms—Hitler’s terms of course—with Berlin. 

Hitler’s reasoning was not unsound. Britain had little 

chance of surviving a war with Germany in full control of continental Europe’s vast resources, including 

those of Russia. Conquest of Russia would also afford 

him (he thought) the resources necessary to defeat 

the United States, which he regarded as an inevitable 

enemy.

Hitler further saw in Russia’s conquest the destruction of the world’s only communist regime and the 

opportunity—finally—to rid Europe of its Jewry. 
27

In fact, within weeks after the first German soldier 

crossed the Russian border the mass shooting of Jews 

(and communists) began. The campaign in Russia provided “the cover of traditional [military operations]” 

under which Hitler could launch “a murderous racial 

struggle.”67

Finally, Hitler believed he could take Russia, just 

as he had taken France in 1940. After all, had not Germany already overrun most of Europe in lightning 

campaigns? True, Britain remained in the field, but 

no English Channel protected the Soviet Union. And 

were not the Russians racially dullard Slavs incapable 

of conducting modern warfare or designing first-class 

weapons? And had not Stalin recently murdered the 

best and the brightest of the Red army’s senior leadership? And did not Russia’s post-purge military performance in its war against Finland (1939-40) prove to be 

nothing short of embarrassing?

There were good reasons to conclude that the 

Soviet Union could be knocked out in a single summer 

campaign in 1941. Ideology and recent history bred 

confidence in Berlin, and of course the Germans didn’t 

know what they didn’t know—for example, that the 

size and regenerative power of the Red army was far 

greater than estimated, and that the quality of many 

Soviet weapons, notably the T-34 tank, was much better 

than imagined. The Germans also seemed oblivious to 

the fact that blitzkrieg, which had worked so well in 

the relatively small and developed Western European 

states, might not work in the vast and comparatively 

road-less expanses of Russia.

In the case of France, Hitler did not seem to recognize what a high-risk gamble the German victory had 

been. Tooze has argued that the 1940 campaign against 

France:
28

was not a repeatable outcome. In fact, when we appreciate 

the high risks involved in Manstein’s plan, the attack on 

France appears to be more similar to the Wehrmacht’s 

other great gamble, the attack on the Soviet Union in June 

1941.68

Blitzkrieg was a fast, short-reach instrument dependent on a network of all-weather roads and on good 

weather itself. It also rested on a single-shift, short-war 

German economy, which was not fully mobilized for 

total war until 1942 after it became evident that Germany was facing a long war. Such an economy could 

support swift, sequential military campaigns, but not a 

protracted war against a giant, resource-rich coalition. 

(If one can get away with a string of short wars, why 

waste the time and money preparing for long ones?) 

Indeed, Germany in 1941—before the war turned 

global—was neither economically, nor militarily prepared for a multi-year conflict with a resource-superior coalition. For Germany, operational success still 

meant strategic success, and the Germans were in fact 

prone to equate the two.

The Germans also seemed to ignore the implications of their army’s own force structure. The army that 

entered the Soviet Union in June 1941 had a blitzkrieg 

component, but was still predominantly a slow-moving, muscle-powered force of foot infantry and horses. 

The army’s cutting edge—the face of blitzkrieg—consisted of 19 armored (tank) divisions and 14 motorized 

(truck-mounted infantry) divisions. It was this spear 

tip that crashed through Russia’s border defenses and 

raced deep into the country, encircling vast Soviet forces 

as they went. The rest of the Operation BARBAROSSA 

force consisted of 112 infantry divisions that relied on 

marching for their mobility and horse-drawn artillery 

for their organic fire support.69 (The German Army 
29

entered Russia with an estimated 600,000 to 750,000 

horses.70) Predictably, the fast tip outran the slow 

shaft, creating problems of coordination and leaving 

gaping open spaces between the two.

Operation BARBAROSSA failed for several reasons. First, Hitler’s military plate was already pretty 

full. Substantial German forces were tied down in 

Western and Central Europe. Additionally, Fascist 

Italy was fast becoming a costly strategic liability for 

Germany. Italian military failures in Greece and Libya 

had sucked German forces into the Balkans and North 

Africa. And of course the British, whom the Germans 

could not conquer, remained defiant and in a de facto 

alliance with the United States. Indeed, Hitler was 

motivated to invade Russia in part because he believed 

the United States was fast moving to enter the war on 

Britain’s side and he wanted to eliminate the Soviet 

Union before that happened.

In attacking the Soviet Union, Hitler violated perhaps the most important, hard-learned German military injunction of all: avoid the trap of a two-front war. 

(The United States turned out to be the only World 

War II combatant capable of successfully waging a 

robust two-front war.) Even Stalin was surprised. He 

ignored repeated warnings of BARBAROSSA because 

he believed them to be disinformation and because he 

refused to believe that Hitler would be so reckless to 

start a war with the Soviet Union before he had first 

finished off Britain. Albert Seaton has argued that:

the overthrow of the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist 

Republics] would have required the whole German 

economy and all of the German reserves, and there could 

have been no question of dissipating forces in Africa, the 

Balkans, Scandinavia and Western Europe, or of fighting 
30

Britain in a bitter air and sea war. Adding the United 

States to its enemies was the final senseless act.71

Second, blitzkrieg ran afoul of Russian distances, 

weather, and primitive infrastructure. Russia was not 

France or the Low Countries. Stephen Fritz has estimated that the German Army’s armored and motorized components could project themselves in a single 

bound no farther than 300 miles, after which they 

would have to stop, rest, and refit for additional operations.72 This limit did not matter much in Western 

Europe, where states were relatively small and had 

good road networks. In Russia, however, a thrust of 

300 miles left invading German forces still 400 miles 

from Moscow and much farther from the oil and other 

resources of southern Russia. Moreover, those miles 

were not just any miles. Of the 850,000 miles of road 

in the USSR in 1941, only 40,000, or less than 5 percent, 

were hard-surfaced, all-weather roads.73 The rest were 

dirt roads or sandy tracks that turned into goo in the 

spring and fall rainy seasons.

To the long east-west distances must be added 

the peculiar challenge of expanding north-south distances. The farther the Germans moved eastward, the 

broader the front became because of the funnel-like 

shape of Soviet territory west of the Urals. Operation BARBAROSSA started along a front of 900 miles, 

which later expanded to 1,500 miles.74 Together these 

horizontal and vertical distances dramatically reduced 

German force-to-space rations to the point where large 

expanses of Russian territory escaped German control, 

a situation ideal for the kind of partisan warfare the 

Russians waged with increasing effectiveness after 

1941.
31

As for the Russian weather, much has been made 

of it. Yes, Russian winters were harsh, as Napoleon 

discovered in 1812. However, the point is that the Russians were prepared for it whereas the Germans were 

not. Hitler did not order the issuance of winter gear 

and clothing to the German Army in Russia either 

because he thought the war would be over before the 

first snowfall or because he thought it would demoralize the troops, or both. The end result was that those 

German forces that made it far enough to be thrown 

back before Moscow were severely disadvantaged in 

dealing with fresh Soviet forces, especially Siberian 

divisions trained, equipped, and clothed for winter 

warfare.

Third, the scope and tenacity of Russian resistance, 

the apex of which was Stalin’s iron determination, 

greatly exceeded German expectations. A combination 

of murderous German behavior in Russia, Soviet reliance on a vast pool of trained manpower reserves, and 

an astonishing war production capacity that permitted 

Moscow not only to replace its battlefield losses but 

also to expand the Red army at the same time stunned 

the Germans. Russian manpower losses were, to be 

sure, historically unprecedented. Stalin and his generals were bowled over by what hit them on June 22, 

1941. Between late June and the end of the year the Red 

army sustained losses (killed and captured) of about 

3,000,000 men, including 2,000,000 prisoners of war 

(POWs) (most of whom the Germans allowed to die 

in captivity). Equipment losses included almost 15,000 

tanks, 66,000 artillery pieces, and 7,000 aircraft.75

The key to this transition from near swift and utter 

defeat to resurrection, which amounted to the most spectacular military recovery in history, was the existence, 

unbeknownst to the Germans, of a rapidly mobilized 
32

pool of trained military reserves of 14,000,000 men.76

On the eve of BARBAROSSA, the Germans estimated 

that the Red army contained 200 divisions available 

for combat in western Russia. By the end of the year, 

the Russians had generated enough new divisions to 

stop further German advances: 97 divisions from outside western Russia, including 17 from Siberia, and 94 

newly raised brigades.77 An unnerved General Franz 

Halder, Chief of Staff of the German Army, confided 

to his diary that “we have underestimated the Russian 

colossus. . . . At the start of the war we had counted 

about 200 enemy divisions. We have now counted 

about 360.” To be sure, “These divisions are not as well 

armed or equipped as ours [and] they are often poorly 

led. But there they are. And if we knock out a dozen of 

them, then the Russians put up another dozen.”78

Fourth, the savagery of German behavior stiffened 

Soviet resistance and precluded any thought of exploiting ethnic and other discontent with Stalin’s rule. 

Hitler made it crystal clear from the beginning that the 

war in the East was going to be quite different from the 

1940 campaigns in the West. It was to be a war of annihilation and enslavement against Germany’s political 

and racial enemies—i.e., communists, Slavs, and Jews. 

No quarter would be given. Commissars and other 

Soviet officials would be shot on the spot. Millions of 

Slavs, including Soviet POWs, would be left to starve 

or worked to death. Indeed, the Nazis had developed a plan to deliberately starve 30,000,000 Russian 

city-dwellers in order to free up foodstuffs for delivery 

to Germany.79 As for the Jews, the opportunity to kill 

them outright had at last arisen, and in fact, the first 

mass shootings of Jews began in the summer of 1941. 

Geoffrey Megargee summarized the set of attitudes, 

beliefs, and assumptions behind the German campaign 
33

of conquest and genocide in the East. In addition to 

“faith in their own superiority,” “loathing of Jews and 

Slavs,” and “fear and hatred of Marxism and conflation of it with Jewishness,” the Germans believed they 

were locked in an “existential struggle” that granted 

“Germany’s right to use any means to win.”80

By the end of September, none of this was lost on the 

Russians. If they had no future under Nazi rule except 

serfdom or death, then they had every reason to fight 

on to the death. Certainly, Stalin and his regime had 

no future under Hitler, which raises the still-debated 

questions of Moscow’s strategic value and whether 

Stalin would have continued fighting had the Germans taken the city. Would Moscow’s fall have made 

any difference in the war? The answer is: probably not. 

Napoleon took Moscow in 1812 and still lost his war 

against Russia. Moreover, taking Moscow would have 

been a tall order given the onset of winter, Hitler’s 

indecision, the ragged state of Army Group Center, 

and the arrival of fresh Soviet divisions for Moscow’s 

defense. Second, Stalin, though prepared to evacuate 

the city and fight on (as had Czar Alexander I in 1812), 

nevertheless ordered a last stand before Moscow that 

in fact saved the city. He was a man who certainly 

had nothing to lose. Defeat of the Soviet Union almost 

certainly would have meant the liquidation of Stalin 

and his regime. Even with Moscow gone, “there can 

be little doubt that Stalin would have continued,” contends Seaton, “particularly when he had been assured 

the support of the United States.”81

Looking back, the failure of Nazi Germany to conquer the Soviet Union in 1941 was the turning point 

of World War II. Hitler’s only hope was that BARBAROSSA would deliver a shock that the Soviet Union 

could not withstand. With Russia out of the war, Hitler 
34

would have been able to mobilize all the resources of 

continental Europe solely against the Anglo-Americans who, without the Russian giant, would have 

been hard put to challenge Hitler’s writ on the continent. Yet Stalin did not break, which meant that Hitler 

was no longer able to translate even the most spectacular operational victories into war-winning outcomes. Particularly with entry of the United States into 

the war, Nazi Germany was condemned to probable 

destruction. After 1941, Germany could and did rack 

up impressive operational successes, but not of sufficient strategic significance to alter the war’s ending. 

Moreover, by failing to avoid a protracted war, Hitler 

afforded a resource-rich United States time to mobilize 

overwhelming power, including the time to develop 

and field atomic weapons.

The key to Soviet survival was Stalin’s ability to 

absorb BARBAROSSA without losing his nerve and 

then to transition to offensive operations. The Soviet 

Union and its leadership simply turned out to be too 

big and too determined to buckle in the face of the 

Nazi onslaught. True, there was a moment when Stalin 

wavered. A week after the invasion, when the magnitude of the disaster became apparent, Stalin, depressed 

by manpower and territorial losses and the breakdown of communications between Moscow and Soviet 

forces in the field, “withdrew in despair to his dacha

outside Moscow, prompting his frightened politburo 

colleagues . . . to drive out and coax him back to the 

Kremlin.”82 From then on, however, Stalin remained 

resolute. By the end of 1941, Stalin had taken the worst 

that Hitler could throw at him, and he remained firmly 

in political control of Russia. He made good his military losses and was increasingly ahead of Hitler in 

war production. He was also already formulating his 
35

territorial objectives in post-Nazi Europe. The road 

ahead would be long and hard, but he had survived 

to fight on.

By the end of 1941, Hitler had allowed Germany to 

be trapped in a protracted war against a coalition possessing—or soon to possess—overwhelming material 

superiority. It was now a war he could not win as long 

as the Grand Alliance remained committed to Germany’s complete defeat. Hitler’s only hope was Stalin’s 

defection from that alliance. However, this was most 

unlikely absent substantial German territorial concessions (starting with Berlin’s agreement to evacuate 

Russia) that Hitler was hardly prepared to make to a 

Stalin bent on exacting terrible revenge and securing 

a Soviet security buffer zone in Eastern Europe. By 

failing before Moscow and then gratuitously declaring 

war on the United States, Hitler had escalated his war 

aims well beyond his capacity to fulfill them. Yes, there 

were considerable tensions between the Anglo-Americans and the Russians—e.g., the timing and location 

of a second front against Germany and the disposition 

of post-war Europe, especially Germany and Eastern 

Europe—but Germany was in no position to forge a 

separate peace with Moscow that was mutually acceptable to both Hitler and Stalin.

It should be noted at this juncture that Russia’s survival in 1941 was no guarantee of Germany’s defeat 

in 1945. While it is true that the Russians tore the guts 

out of the German Army, they could not have done 

so without Anglo-American participation in the war, 

absent which the Soviet Union might well have been 

destroyed by Hitler. The Russo-German War was a 

close-run contest, especially in 1941-42, and Russian 

manpower reserves were not unlimited, especially 

given the horrendously unfavorable casualty exchange 
36

rations the Germans managed to impose upon the Russians throughout the war. The Anglo-Americans not 

only compelled Hitler to divert significant forces away 

from the Eastern Front—in North Africa, Italy, and 

in the skies over Germany itself—they also provided 

Russia enormous quantities of Lend-Lease assistance, 

especially after 1942, that permitted Russia to replace 

its huge material losses, including hundreds of thousands of motor vehicles that afforded the Red Army 

the mobility that enabled it to exploit its critical victories of 1944-45. If the Anglo-Americans could not have 

defeated Hitler without Russia’s help, the Russians 

alone could not have done so without Anglo-American military pressure on the Third Reich and massive 

material assistance to Stalin. Additionally, the Pacific 

War, conducted almost exclusively by the United 

States, insured that the Soviet Union could wage its 

one-front war against Germany without fear of having 

to fight in the Far East as well.

At this point in our examination, Hitler himself, the 

most destructive leader in human history,83 deserves 

further comment. For starters, Hitler had no sense of 

the limits of German power despite Germany’s defeat 

in World War I (in which he served) by essentially 

the same coalition that he found himself at war with 

in World War II. He believed, at least until Stalingrad 

(or Kursk or Normandy), that Germany’s racial and 

martial superiority—plus his own genius, Providential 

destiny, and iron will—made victory inevitable.

His ideology also told him that the Russians were 

a bunch of sub-human Slavs destined for slavery or 

extermination under German rule and that the United 

States was a Jewish-dominated and racially mongrelized society that lacked the will and military skills 

to defeat Germany. (The Japanese, as noted, also 
37

dismissed America as a decadent society lacking the 

will to wage decisive war.)

Nor did Hitler recognize that the odiousness of 

Nazi ideology, Germany’s behavior in Russia, and Berlin’s manifest territorial ambitions all generated both 

powerful enemies and weak allies. He valued Mussolini as Europe’s senior fascist leader, but was victimized by Italy’s military incompetence, and in the end 

invaded his ally and reduced Mussolini to a pathetic 

German puppet. Hitler respected Japan’s fighting 

power, although he regarded the Japanese themselves 

as nothing more than little yellow monkeys.

Hitler also believed himself to be a military genius 

on par with Frederick the Great. He never fully trusted 

Germany’s military leadership and constantly interfered at the operational and even tactical levels of decision-making. (Can anyone imagine President Franklin 

Roosevelt telling Eisenhower or MacArthur how to 

run their campaigns and fight their battles?)

Hitler, in short, was an incompetent strategist and 

military leader, and he was so in part because of a pernicious ideology and extreme self-worship that polluted his judgment. These factors also help explain 

why Hitler chose to fight on long after it became objectively clear that Germany was defeated. Hitler was 

notoriously stubborn, and he had come to believe, in 

his last surreal underground bunker days, that the 

“master race” German people had failed him. (How 

dare they!) Indeed, the once subhuman Slavs, now 

practically standing on top of his bunker, were now 

the race of destiny. Under these circumstances and 

given Hitler’s evident responsibility for the massacre 

of millions, Hitler had no future preferable to death by 

suicide. Therefore, he killed himself.
38

SOME CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

What does World War II tell us about ends, 

means, ideology, pride, and war? First, Clausewitz—

to repeat—was right: numbers matter, and the best 

strategy is to be strong. The strong lose occasionally, 

but it is easier to win if you are stronger. In the case 

of World War II, acute resource inferiority is the starting point for explaining why the Axis lost. The Axis 

faced an array of enemies (after 1941) whose collective 

resources posed a daunting challenge to strategic military success. Consider, for example, that in 1941 the 

combined GDP of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the 

United States were twice that of the Axis Powers, a 

ratio that grew to 3:1 in 1944.84 In the case of Japan, 

its resource inferiority vis-à-vis the United States was 

such that it almost certainly doomed Tokyo to defeat 

from the start of the Pacific War regardless of Japan’s 

subsequent operational performance.

This is not to argue that the strong always win. 

They do not. However, for the weak to win they must 

find ways to compensate for their weakness—a greater 

willingness to fight and die, a more effective strategy, foreign help, etc. Germany and Japan knew they 

were physically disadvantaged, but believed that their 

racial superiority and advantage in other intangibles 

provided sufficient compensation.

Second, ideology can distort sound strategic judgment. Tooze has rightly observed “Hitler’s conduct of 

the war involved risks so great that they defy rationalization in terms of pragmatic self-interest.”85 Why 

he did so—and why the Japanese took even greater 

risks in attacking the United States—can be explained 

only by the presence of powerful ideologies that poisoned common sense. Both Germany and Japan were 
39

victimized by extreme ideologies of racial superiority 

that prompted them to overestimate their own fighting power and underestimate that of their enemies. 

Confidence in the success of Operation BARBAROSSA 

rested heavily on the assumption that the Slavic Russians were incapable of effectively resisting an invasion by the Aryan Germans. The Japanese viewed the 

Americans as a racially impure country too undisciplined to sustain the blood and treasure sacrifices necessary to drive the Rising Sun out of East Asia. True, 

the Americans also disparaged the Japanese, but there 

is no evidence that their racism significantly affected 

U.S. strategic decision-making or operational planning. The Roosevelt administration’s critical decision 

to prioritize Germany’s defeat over Japan’s was based 

on the indisputable fact that Germany was by far the 

greater threat to core U.S. security interests.

Enemy derogation of American society continues to 

this day. To survive war with the United States, much 

less win, adversaries must not only adopt some form 

of protracted irregular warfare, but also must convince 

themselves that Americans are morally weak—i.e., 

that notwithstanding their superior hard power, they 

lack the guts and political stamina to prevail in the end. 

Osama bin Laden, who was emboldened by America’s 

defeats in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia, believed 

that he could force a casualty-sensitive United States 

out of the Middle East by committing acts of terror 

against the American homeland. He sorely underestimated, as did the Japanese in 1941, the consequences 

of directly attacking American territory and the resilience and determination of American society at war 

once attacked.

True, suicide bombers, be they kamikazes directed 

against U.S. warships or Islamic terrorists flying 
40

commercial airliners into buildings, are tactically very 

effective and difficult to deter or stop. They can, and 

have, inflicted considerable death and destruction. 

However, they do not confer strategic victory. Nor do 

they pose an existential threat to the United States—

any more so than did the Axis, for whom the United 

States was simply too distant and powerful to be 

threatened, much less defeated. Even the detonation 

of a nuclear device in an American city by an Islamic 

terrorist group, though horrible to contemplate, would 

not threaten the survival of the United States. Only 

massive thermo-nuclear missile strikes could do that. 

After all, most German and Japanese cities were obliterated by air attack in World War II, and both countries 

survived and rebuilt themselves. The Axis states posed 

a far greater threat to world peace in the 1940s than do 

terrorist organizations today, precisely because they 

were powerful states and not weak nonstate actors. 

Terrorism is a challenge, but overreaction to it—e.g., 

invading Iraq and embracing torture—is self-defeating. ISIS is an exceptionally vicious organization and 

it has inspired a growing amount of terrorist attacks 

in the West. However, it should not be mistaken for 

anything other than a desperate, weak actor incapable 

of overthrowing the established democratic order in 

Western societies. Nazi Germany it is not.

A striking example of ideology’s capacity to deform 

strategic judgment was Hitler’s attitude toward 

the prospect of developing an atomic bomb. Hitler 

rightly rejected a proposed German bomb program 

on the grounds that World War II would be over by 

the time the bomb became available.86 (Former Third 

Reich armaments minister Albert Speer declared in 

his memoirs that even an all-out effort would not 

have produced a German atomic bomb until 1947.87)
41

However, Hitler scuttled the project for another reason: 

Anti-Semitism. Hitler often referred to nuclear physics 

as “Jewish physics” because the science was so closely 

associated with prominent Jewish physicists. If nuclear 

physics was in fact a Jewish discipline, then anything it 

claimed the potential capacity to do was automatically 

suspect.88 Thus, even had Germany been able to build 

the bomb before 1945, Hitler probably still would have 

rejected it.

Third, operational and tactical superiority cannot 

redeem a faulty strategy. The Germans outperformed 

all their enemies at the sub-strategic levels of war 

throughout the conflict under almost all military conditions. The problem for Germany, as for the Confederate States of America and the United States in 

Vietnam, was that winning battles and campaigns 

was not sufficient to win the war—especially against 

a larger, more powerful, and determined foe. Hitler 

had hoped to fight a sequence of short wars against 

individual states rather than a long war against an 

array of states. He was surprised in 1939 when Britain and France honored their defense guarantees to 

Poland, and he was undoubtedly surprised when the 

German Army came up short in Russia in December 

1941. Numbers counted, and at that point, Hitler did 

not have them and could never hope to obtain them, 

especially once the Americans joined the war. The 

gap between Hitler’s war aims in Europe and German 

power could no longer be bridged. After 1941, his only 

hope was political, not military—i.e., making the concessions necessary to detach the Soviet Union from the 

Grand Alliance.

As for the Japanese, who displayed very impressive tactical and operational skills in the early years of 

World War II, their decision to attack the United States 
42

at a time when they were bogged down in an unwinnable war in China was strategically catastrophic. The 

Pacific War was a conflict Tokyo could not possibly win 

absent a collapse of American will—itself an impossibility given the impact of Pearl Harbor on American 

opinion. The Germans had a chance against the Soviet 

Union; the Japanese had no chance against the United 

States.

Fourth, considerations of pride and honor should 

never be ignored in war. The Japanese fought as long 

and hard as they did because they believed surrender 

to be worse than death. Better to die with honor than 

to live without it. Indeed, but for Emperor Hirohito’s 

decisive intervention to break a deadlocked war cabinet in the wake of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima 

and Nagasaki, the diehard militarists running Japan 

would have compelled the Americans to invade the 

Japanese home islands, which promised a senseless 

(for the Japanese) bloodbath that would have made no 

difference in the Pacific War’s outcome.

The Japanese should have surrendered—at the 

very latest—in March 1945, when it became clear (with 

the massive firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 

March 9-10) that they could no longer muster an effective defense against U.S. strategic incendiary attacks 

on Japan’s largely wood-and-paper cities, to say nothing of the tightening U.S. naval blockade of the home 

islands. They deluded themselves into believing that 

the Americans, facing the prospect of a bloody ground 

assault of the home islands, would agree to a conditional surrender that among other things would leave 

Japan’s established political order in place, and spare 

Japan the humiliation of a U.S. occupation.

There was also the issue of reputation. Modern 

Japan had never been militarily defeated and had 
43

proudly created in Asia the kind of colonial empire 

the West had earlier imposed on the region. Japan had 

successfully mimicked and borrowed from the Western powers to become an Asian copy of a Western 

imperial state complete with Western-style naval, air, 

and ground forces. Having avoided the humiliation of 

the kind of subjugation the West imposed on the rest 

of Asia, Japan was desperate to avoid the abasement 

of total defeat, which accounts in large measure for the 

savagery of Japanese resistance in the Pacific, highlighted by banzai and kamikaze attacks.

It is worth noting that humiliation can and often 

does promote a fanatic will to fight and die. Hitler’s 

rise in the 1930s was certainly encouraged by the punitive Treaty of Versailles that the victors of World War 

I imposed of Germany in 1919. Another example is 

found in Osama bin Laden’s worldview, which was 

profoundly shaped by an Arab world humiliated by 

over a century of Western domination, mostly through 

indigenous surrogate regimes happy to serve Western interests as well as their own. The mess that is the 

Middle East today rests in part on a platform of violent opposition to continued Western intrusion on the 

soil of a once and deservedly proud Arab civilization. 

One wonders if there is a strategy, or at least a coherent strategy, underlying America’s repeated and ongoing military interventions in the Middle East. What is 

their purpose? To prop up friendly regimes, some of 

which—like Saudi Arabia, with its extreme religious 

and gender bigotry—are reactionary and therefore 

part of the problem? To kill terrorists, whose supply 

in the region appears to be inexhaustible? To be seen 

to be doing something about the chaos and anarchy 

there, because we do not know anything else to do? Or 

have we simply become addicted to knee-jerk military 
44

interventionism as a substitute for a broader, more 

nuanced foreign policy?

Western uses of force in the Middle East generate 

hatred and often violent responses, and the West’s 

strength of interests in the region, though substantial, 

can never equal that of the people who live there. This 

means that whatever the short-term benefits of military intervention, the long-term consequences could 

be worse, much worse. That is the central lesson of the 

Iraq War. Yes, the war removed Saddam Hussein, but 

are we better off with today’s violent, anarchic, and 

pro-Teheran Iraq than Saddam’s stable and anti-Persian Iraq? To ask the question is to answer it.

In the end, the Axis lost World War II because it 

was strategically incompetent. It failed to recognize the 

limits of its own power and permitted its political ends 

to fatally outrun its military means. Indeed, the Axis 

Powers mistook operations for strategy and campaigns 

as war-winners. “Germany lost the Second World War 

in part because it . . . made operational thought do 

duty for strategy,” concludes Hew Strachan, “while 

tactical and operational success was never given the 

shape which strategy could have bestowed.”89

ENDNOTES

1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter 

Paret, eds. and trans., Princeton University Press, 1976, pp. 194, 

204.

2. Colin S. Gray, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare, 

London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007, p. 224.

3. Jeffrey Record, Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win, Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007.

4. Andrew Mack, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The 

Politics of Asymmetric Conflict,” World Politics, Vol. 27, No. 2, 

1975, pp. 175-200.
45

5. Ivan Arreguín-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of 

Asymmetric Conflict, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

6. Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society 

and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United 

States in Vietnam, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

7. Record, Beating Goliath, pp. 23-66.

8. Ibid., pp. 25-34.

9. Colin S. Gray, War, Peace, and International Relations: An 

Introduction to Strategic History, New York: Routledge, 2007, 

pp. 180-182.

10. MacGregor Knox, Hitler’s Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, 

Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940-1943, New York: Cambridge 

University Press, 2000, p. 1.

11. Based on numbers appearing in Mark Harrison, “The 

Economics of World War II: An Overview,” in Mark Harrison, 

ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International 

Comparison, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 3.

12. Based on numbers appearing in Ibid., p. 10.

13. B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, New York: Frederick A. 

Praeger, 1967, pp. 335-336.

14. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, New York: W.W. 

Norton and Company, 1995, p. xiv.

15. John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy Tactics in the Second 

World War, New York: Viking Books, 1990, p. 122.

16. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and 

Breaking of the Nazi Economy, New York: Viking Penguin, 2007, 

pp. 424-425.

17. Memorandum from Douglas Peifer to Jeffrey Record, 

September 2016.
46

18. See Jeffrey Record, A War It Was Always Going to Lose: Why 

Japan Attacked America in 1941, Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 

2011, pp. 104-106.

19. Louis Morton, War in the Pacific, Strategy and Command: The 

First Two Years, Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. 

Army, 1962, p. 126. It is important to remember that the attack 

on Pearl Harbor was a raid in support of the Japanese invasion 

of Southeast Asia. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto argued that Japan 

could not afford to leave the U.S. Pacific Fleet intact along the 

invasion’s eastern flank.

20. John Mueller, “Pearl Harbor: Military Inconvenience, 

Political Disaster,” International Security, Vol. 16, No. 3, Winter 

1991/92, pp. 175-182.

21. Illustrative of America’s overwhelming production 

advantage over Japan is the ratio of U.S.- Japanese output (Japan 

being “1”) in the following selected strategic items, 1942-45: crude 

oil, 222:1; bituminous coal, 11:1; pig iron, 15:1; finished steel, 14:1; 

aluminum, 7:1; and merchant shipping, 16:1. Ellis, p. 478.

22. Overy, Why the Allies Won, p. 321.

23. Quoted in Sadao Asada, From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The 

Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States, Annapolis, MD: Naval 

Institute Press, 2006, p. 276.

24. Raymond Aron, Peace And War: A Theory of International 

Relations, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1966, p. 68.

25. Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of 

Pearl Harbor, Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, eds.,

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981, p. 279.

26. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, 

Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962, p. 355.

27. Toshikazu Kase, Journey to the Missouri, New Haven, CT: 

Yale University Press, 1950, p. 9.

28. Haruo Tohmatsu and H. P. Willmott, A Gathering Darkness: The Coming of War to the Far East and the Pacific, 1921-1942, 

Lanham, MD: SR Books, 2004, p. 1.
47

29. Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the 

World, 1940-1941, New York: Penguin, 2008, p. 380.

30. Quoted in Asada, p. 267.

31. Leaving aside the specific events that triggered the Pacific 

War, the Japanese believed that war with the United States was 

inevitable because they were convinced that the United States 

would never tolerate Japanese control of all East Asia.

32. Nobutaka Ike, Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 

Policy Conferences, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967, 

p. 175.

33. Spencer Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of World War II: A 

Political, Social, and Military History, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 

2004, p. 1541.

34. H. P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance: Japanese and Allied 

Pacific Strategies to April 1942, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute 

Press, 1982, p. 61.

35. Quoted in Asada, p. 183.

36. Compiled from data appearing in Harrison, pp. 15-16. Figures exclude landing craft, torpedo boats, and auxiliary vessels.

37. Ibid., pp. 15-16.

38. Gray, War, Peace, and International Relations, p. 180.

39. Adrian R. Lewis, The American Culture of War: The History 

of U.S. Military Force from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom, 

New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 59.

40. Quoted in Prange, p. 517.

41. Quoted in Asada, p. 292.

42. John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the 

Pacific War, New York: Pantheon Books, 1986, p. 260.

43. John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, 

Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003, p. 237.
48

44. See Dower; and Richard F. Hill, Hitler Attacks Pearl Harbor: 

Why the United States Declared War on Germany, Boulder, CO: 

Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003.

45. Quoted in F. W. Deakin, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, 

Hitler, and the Fall of Italian Fascism, London: Phoenix Press, 1962, 

p. 799.

46. Harrison, p. 10.

47. Quoted in Ray Moseley, Mussolini’s Shadow: The Double 

Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano, New Haven: Yale University Press, 

1999, p. 91.

48. Knox, p. 21.

49. Italy could not even tackle Greece in 1940.

50. Knox, p. 170.

51. Tooze, p. xxv.

52. John Lukacs, June 1941: Hitler and Stalin, New Haven, CT: 

Yale University Press, 2006, p. 2.

53. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s 

Russia, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004, p. 498.

54. For data on Axis vs. Allies’ population, territory, armed 

forces, gross domestic product (GDP), and war production, see 

Harrison, pp. 3, 13-14, 17.

55. Tooze, p. 588.

56. In an address to the House of Commons in 1944, Winston 

Churchill declared that the Soviet Union was “the greatest cause 

of Hitler’s undoing,” and that “the guts of the German Army have 

largely been torn out by Russian valour and generalship.” Quoted 

in Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia and the Second World 

War, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p. 5.

57. Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945, New 

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, p. 316.
49

58. Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the 

Second World War, New York: HarperCollins, 2011, p. 603.

59. Ellis, p. 129.

60. Bellamy, p. 278.

61. Roberts, pp. 598-599.

62. Based on figures appearing in Tooze, p. 639.

63. Ibid., p. xxiii.

64. See Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War was Won: Air-Sea 

Power and Allied Victory in World War II, New York: Cambridge 

University Press, 2015. O’Brien contends that World War II was 

essentially a competition between Allied and Axis war production and that it was decided by the Allies’ success, via air and 

sea power, in stopping most Axis production from ever reaching 

the battlefield. Thus, the outcome of land campaigns was more or 

less predetermined by prior air and sea power successes or failures—never mind generalship, luck, chance, friction, motivation 

and the other eternal intangibles of war. “There were no decisive 

battles in World War II,” he states (p. 1). Equipment production 

and technology were far more decisive than the number of soldiers deployed (see p. 485): 

That the Eastern Front was responsible for the greater human 

suffering is undeniable. But this human suffering should not 

obscure that fact that it was a secondary theater in terms of 

production and technology, where force was actually used 

in a far more limited front-based manner which caused 

considerably fewer choices to be made and smaller amounts 

of equipment to be utilized and destroyed. 

So Stalingrad and Kursk were meaningless! Indeed, if war production alone decides wars, the United States should have defeated 

the Vietnamese communists in 1965.

65. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis, New 

York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000, p. 207.

66. Ibid., p. 229.
50

67. Donald M. McKale, Hitler’s Shadow War: The Holocaust and 

World War II, New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2002, p. 126.

68. Tooze, p. 480. For an assessment of how reckless a gamble 

Hitler took against France in 1940, see Lloyd Clark, Blitzkrieg: 

Myth, Reality, and Hitler’s Lightning War: France 1940, New York: 

Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016. Lloyd contends (p. 391) that the 

“transplanting of Blitzkrieg took little account of the achievability 

of objectives, proper resourcing, and the uniqueness of different 

enemies, terrains, weather and a host of other factors that affect 

the application of force.”

69. Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in 

the East, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2011, p. 67.

70. Tooze, p. 454.

71. Albert Seaton, The Russo-German War, 1941-45, New York: 

Praeger, 1971, p. 222.

72. Fritz, p. xxiii.

73. David Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in 

the East, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 137.

74. Bellamy, p. 166.

75. Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 

1941-1945, London: Hodder Arnold, 2005, pp. 86-87, 102-105.

76. Stahel, pp. 226-227.

77. Bellamy, p. 310.

78. Quoted in Mawdsley, p. 86.

79. See Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and 

the Battle for Food, New York: Penguin Books, 2011, pp. 32-39.

80. Geoffrey Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941, New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 

2006, p. 10.

81. Seaton, p. 216.
51

82. Mawdsley, pp. 63-64.

83. It is difficult to imagine World War II, at least in Europe, 

without Hitler. No other world leader wanted a general war in 

Europe in the 1930s, but he was prepared to risk one to get what 

he wanted. Hitler sought to conquer Europe as a prelude to war 

with the United States, and presided over unprecedented acts of 

genocide. He was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths 

of an estimated 27,000,000 Russians, 6,000,000 Jews, and millions 

of other Europeans, including 7,000,000 Germans. The political 

purges and social engineering debacles of Mao Zedong and Stalin 

killed millions, but their human toll could not equal what Hitler 

inflicted on the world. The sole competition might be Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward” program of 1958-62, which caused 

the death by starvation of as many as 30,000,000 Chinese.

84. Harrison, p. 13.

85. Tooze, p. xxv.

86. Ibid., pp. 510-511; and Kershaw, Hitler, pp. 731-732.

87. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, New York: 

Macmillan, 1970, pp. 227-229.

88. Ibid., p. 228. Also, see Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at 

War, New York: Penguin, 2009, pp. 667-669.

89. Quoted in Clark, p. 391.

U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General William E. Rapp

Commandant

∗∗∗∗∗

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

AND

U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE PRESS

Director

Professor Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr.

Director of Research

Dr. Steven K. Metz

Author

Dr. Jeffrey Record

Editor for Production

Dr. James G. Pierce

Publications Assistant

Ms. Denise J. Kersting

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Composition

Mrs. Jennifer E. Nevil

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