Question: How did the Allies have an advantage?
About the article "World War II", section "Home fronts and production".

Candidate passages:
Hardboiled soon petered out as the Royal Marines were required for an amphibious operation in Madagascar in July 1942.
In principle it had appeared to have had an effect.
During April and May, the Germans had reinforced the region.
However, historian Joshua Levine notes that Hitler had a "near-obsession with defence of Scandinavia" during this period and it is unclear how much the operation had contributed to his strategy.
Michael Howard, who authored the official British history of strategic deception, attributes the lacklustre response to severe setbacks the Allies were then facing on every front.
As a result, it is difficult to imagine the Germans believing that a major offensive operation was being planned.
The operation did not give the Allies any tactical or strategic advantage, though Howard notes that it provided experience for the planners in handling deception and for the Twenty Committee in proving the worth of double agents.
Author Terry Crowdy, writing in 2008, argued that any experience that the LCS attained was limited by the lack of guidance from Cairo and knowledge of double agents.
Dudley Clarke had already shown that the most effective method of deception involved the use of agents and faked wireless traffic, rather than major training and troop movements.
Hardboiled was the first deception plan aimed at Norway.
It would lead into a number of others, including Operation Tindall and Operation Solo, culminating in the 1944 Operation Fortitude North, one of the Allies largest and most successful deceptions.
In May 1942, John Bevan replaced Stanley as head of the LCS, after the latter had asked Churchill for permission to re-enter politics.
At the same time, the committee was given much broader powers.
Hardboiled was sidelined by the new regime, and had been dropped entirely from the LCS programme by the end of May. 
The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (ISBN 0-13-798173-2) is a book by L. Fletcher Prouty, a former colonel in the US Air Force, first published in 1973.
From 1955 to 1963 Prouty was the "Focal Point Officer" for contacts between the CIA and the Pentagon on matters relating to military support for "special operations" but he was not assigned to the CIA and was not bound by any oath of secrecy.
(From the first page of the 1974 Printing) It was one of the first tell-all books about the inner workings of the CIA and was an important influence on the Oliver Stone movie "JFK".
But the main thrust of the book is how the CIA started as a think tank to analyze intelligence gathered from military sources but has grown to the monster it has become.
The CIA had no authority to run their own agents or to carry out covert operations but they quickly did both and much more.
This book tells about things they actually did and a lot about how they operate.
In Prouty's own words, from the 1997 edition of "The Secret Team": :""This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team.
They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, and when needed, the full support of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure.
They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy called "Communism."
It will be interesting to see what "enemy" develops in the years ahead. ""
Fletcher Prouty, Alexandria, VA 1997  
At sea the odds against the German Kriegsmarine were less favorable.
They were much worse in September 1939 than in August 1914, as the Allies had many more large surface warships than Germany.
However, the naval theater, for Germany, was of least significance.
During the entire war there was to be no major encounter between the Allied and the German surface fleets, nothing that resembled the battle of Jutland from the previous war.
Kriegsmarine activities saw only the individual operation of German pocket battleships and commerce raiders, with the rare exceptions of operations like the Operation Rheinübung, and submarine-driven Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945).
That noted, in 1939 Germany did have an advantage over the tiny Polish fleet, and the Western Allies were unwilling and unprepared to challenge the Kriegsmarine on the small, land-locked Baltic Sea. 
The Punjab Rattan Award, is considered so valuable in Punjab that some have made accusations that political parties in the past have used it, by awarding it, to win allies and political advantage. 
At the beginning of the invasion, it is clear that the Persians held most advantages.
Regardless of its actual size, it is clear that the Persians had brought an overwhelming number of troops and ships to Greece.
The Persians had a unified command system, and everyone was answerable to the king.
They had a hugely efficient bureaucracy which allowed them to undertake remarkable feats of planning.
The Persian generals had significant experience of warfare over the 80 years in which the Persian empire had been established.
Furthermore, the Persians excelled in the use of intelligence and diplomacy in warfare, as shown by their (nearly successful) attempts to divide-and-conquer the Greeks.
The Greeks, by comparison, were fragmented, with only 30 or so city-states actively opposing the Persian invasion; even those were prone to quarrel with each other.
They had little experience of large-scale warfare, being largely restricted to small-scale local warfare, and their commanders were chosen primarily on the basis of the political and social standing, rather than because of any experience or expertise.
As Lazenby therefore asks: ""So why did the Persians fail?
""The Persian strategy for 480 BC was probably to simply progress through Greece in overwhelming force.
The cities in any territory that the army passed through would be forced to submit or risk destruction; and indeed this happened with the Thessalian, Locrian and Phocian cities who initially resisted the Persians but then were forced to submit as the Persians advanced.
Conversely, the Allied strategy was probably to try and stop the Persian advance as far north as possible, and thus prevent the submission of as many potential Allies as possible.
Beyond this, the Allies seem to have realised that given the Persians' overwhelming numbers, they had little chance in open battle, and thus they opted to try and defend geographical bottle-necks, where the Persian numbers would count for less.
The whole Allied campaign for 480 BC can be seen in this context.
Initially they attempted to defend the Tempe pass to prevent the loss of Thessaly.
After they realised that they could not defend this position, they chose the next-most northerly position, the Thermopylae/Artemisium axis.
The Allied performance at Thermopylae was initially effective; however, the failure to properly guard the path that outflanked Thermopylae undermined their strategy, and led to defeat.
At Artemisium the fleet also scored some successes, but withdrew due to the losses they had sustained, and since the defeat of Thermopylae made the position irrelevant.
Thus far, the Persian strategy had succeeded, whilst the Allied strategy, though not a disaster, had failed.
The defence of the Isthmus of Corinth by the Allies changed the nature of the war.
The Persians did not attempt to attack the isthmus by land, realising they probably could not breach it.
This essentially reduced the conflict to a naval one.
Themistocles now proposed what was in hindsight the strategic masterstroke in the Allied campaign; to lure the Persian fleet to battle in the straits of Salamis.
However, as successful as this was, there was no need for the Persians to fight at Salamis to win the war; it has been suggested that the Persians were either overconfident, or overeager to finish the campaign.
Thus, the Allied victory at Salamis must at least partially be ascribed to a Persian strategic blunder.
After Salamis, the Persian strategy changed.
Mardonius sought to exploit dissensions between the Allies in order to fracture the alliance.
In particular, he sought to win over the Athenians, which would leave the Allied fleet unable to oppose Persian landings on the Peloponnesus.
Although Herodotus tells us that Mardonius was keen to fight a decisive battle, his actions in the run-up to Plataea are not particularly consistent with this.
He seems to have been willing to accept battle on his terms, but he waited either for the Allies to attack, or for the alliance to collapse ignominiously.
The Allied strategy for 479 BC was something of a mess; the Peloponnesians only agreed to march north in order to save the alliance, and it appears that the Allied leadership had little idea how to force a battle that they could win.
It was the botched attempt to retreat from Plataea that finally delivered the Allies battle on their terms.
Mardonius may have been overeager for victory; there was no need to attack the Allies, and by doing so he played to the main Allied tactical strength, combat in the melee.
The Allied victory at Plataea can also therefore be seen as partially the result of a Persian mistake.
Thus, the Persian failure may be seen partly as a result of two strategic mistakes which handed the Allies tactical advantages, and resulted in decisive defeats for the Persians.
The Allied success is often seen as the result of ""free men fighting for their freedom"".
This may have played a part, and certainly the Greeks seem to have interpreted their victory in those terms.
One crucial factor in the Allied success was that, having formed an alliance, however fractious, they remained true to it, despite the odds.
There appear to have been many occasions when the alliance seemed in doubt, but ultimately it withstood; and whilst this alone did not defeat the Persians, it meant that even after the occupation of most of Greece, the Allies were not themselves defeated.
This is exemplified by the remarkable fact that the citizens of Athens, Thespiae and Plataea chose to carry on fighting from exile rather than submit to the Persians.
Ultimately, the Allies succeeded because they avoided catastrophic defeats, stuck to their alliance, took advantage of Persian mistakes, and because in the hoplite they possessed an advantage (perhaps their only real advantage at the start of the conflict) which, at Plataea, allowed them to destroy the Persian invasion force.