5 Reasons the Allies Won the War

What really tipped the scales in the Allies’ favour during World War II? In this episode, we break down five critical reasons behind the Allied victory - from strategic coordination to Hitler’s own catastrophic mistakes. Joining us to dig into this is James Holland, historian of the Second World War and co-host of the 'We Have Ways of Making You Talk' podcast. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore. Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday, 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career, as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/. You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday (including this one) here https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:32Dan Snow?

  Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It is the greatest and most terrible, destructive war in history. World War II, the Second World War. We've talked about it so often on this podcast. Many of us are so fascinated by its monstrous size, intensity, its scale, its repercussions, but also by the details, the experiences that men, women and children had in the frontline or in factories or in crowded stations of the London Underground, sheltering from the Blitz. And yet, something we haven't really done on this podcast is to just step back. And asked the biggest question of all.

• 2:15Dan Snow?

  Why did the Allies win? And the answer isn't straightforward. First of all, never forget that at the sharp end, victory had to be won, had to be carved out, to be delivered by the young men who waded ashore under fire, who engaged Tiger Tanks, who gripped the steering columns of aircraft, holding straight and level through a blizzard of steel. It had to be won by the men and women on the home front, who hacked at coal, who riveted ships' hulls and crunched data. But victory also needed leadership. It needed resources and organisation, it needed vision and strategy. The winners made better decisions. The Axis powers, they made shocking, crucial mistakes.

• 3:00Dan Snow?

  In this episode, I'm going to explore five big reasons behind the Allied triumph. First, we're going to just look at the strategic overview, the direction. We're going to look at Hitler's mismanagement, essentially, his obsession with control, paranoia, megalomania. He was a cancer that destroyed Germany from within. Second, you know me, I'm a Navy guy, but we're going to look at command of the seas. We're going to look at the global picture. How dominating the world's oceans really allowed the Allies to access every corner of the world. They could move troops and supplies, they could gain information and resources, they could attack where and when they wanted. Third is the importance of collaboration, the shared strategic vision of the victorious

• 3:43Dan Snow?

  coalition, the shared vision that kept Britain and its Commonwealth and empire, the United States, the Soviet Union, other allies working alongside each other despite deep ideological differences. And that's in total contrast to the Axis, who were, in this respect, a shambles. Fourth, let's talk about the overwhelming advantage in resources and production, from American oil and steel, and frankly, many other American resources, the giant output of the American economy at the time, to the wheat of the Canadian plains, to the tanks pouring out of Soviet factories. And last but not least, we're going to talk about the Allied investment in technological innovation, from radar to code breaking to landing craft and the atomic bomb that really

• 4:27Dan Snow?

  helped to tilt the war in their favour. This is the story of how the Allies didn't just survive the greatest conflict in human history, they won it, and they won it hands down.

• 4:47Dan Snow?

  Joining me, I'm thrilled to say I've got one of my oldest friends in this game. I've got James Holland, historian, bestselling author, broadcaster, YouTuber, Instagrammer, host of We Have Ways podcast, legend in the field. He specialises in the history of the Second World War. He's always been such a good friend to me and the podcast. It's a great pleasure to have him back on again. Enjoy, folks.

• 5:27Dan Snow?

  James Holland, good to see you again, man.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, good to see you too, Dan. Always, always.

• 5:31Dan Snow?

  We know the Second World War was the biggest, most costly, destructive, dramatic war in history. We know all that. It defines everything that comes afterwards. It is a vast and fascinating event in the history of mankind. But James Holland, was it close?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Well, actually, I've got this theory that basically the Germans got to a situation probably by October, certainly November 1941, where they were very, very unlikely to win by that point. I don't think the Japanese ever really had a chance. So, no, I don't think it was. But it's interesting, both regimes, both the Nazi regime and the Imperial Japanese, they're both just trying to achieve the impossible because the whole German way of war, traditionally, you know, going back to Frederick the Elector, Frederick the Great, all the rest of it, and into the 19th century, the Prussian, then German, way of war is to win your wars as quickly as possible. And you do it with overwhelming force at the Schwerpunkt, you know, the point of attack.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  You do the Kettelschlag, the cauldron war, where you kind of attack in a pincer movement. You encircle your enemy, annihilate them and win. And it's all over in three days, you know, a week or three months at the most, but all very quickly. The main reason for that is because in the German situation, Prussian situation... They lie at the heart of Europe and they don't have access to the world's oceans and the world is becoming a smaller place with every advancing decade and century. And you need resources and Germany doesn't have a lot of it. So what you have to do is you have to win very quickly before resources come into play. The moment the war extends into a long protracted, drawn out enterprise, the German strict Russians are going to be on a back seat because they can't supply themselves. They don't have those resources. So, you know, that's the whole point about conquering France very quickly and Scandinavia

• 7:15Speaker 02

  and the Low Countries early on in the war, because then you can take a hold of the resources. And that's the whole point of going into the Soviet Union in 1941. So you can have that Lieben's rule, you know, another word for it is colonialism, where you can get all the resources you need from the Soviet Union. But the problem is, getting that is really, really difficult because maintaining your effort, your war effort in the West is hard because you haven't subdued Britain by the end of 1940. Hovering in the wings is America with its huge modernity and industrial capacity and manpower. And of course, the Soviet Union is absolutely vast. So there's all sorts of logistics coming into place. So it makes it very, very difficult. And the same sort of problems are really facing the Imperial Japanese as well. They don't have the resources. They don't have the resources they need.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  You know, everything they do has to be amphibious, which means you need huge amounts of shipping. And unless you win and strike a hammer blow, a really proper hammer blow, and Pearl Harbour in December 1941 isn't that, then you're going to be on the back foot and you're going to lose.

• 8:11Dan Snow?

  Right, exactly. The decisive battle illusion, the dream that you can win it all with one great roll of the iron dice and defeat your enemy.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:19Dan Snow?

  James, having said all that, it is the most extraordinary and fascinating conflict in our history and that's the reason you've devoted your life to studying and communicating about it. And I agree with you. Let's go into some of the reasons we think the Allies won the war. And we're going to, we've sort of identified five or six different fields and I'm going to get you just to break it all down for us. And the one that people will be sort of probably most familiar with, and it is one that's sort of popularly regarded as one of Germany's great weaknesses, is Adolf Hitler himself. His interventions, his meddling, his incompetence, perhaps even his drug-addled sort of madness really by the end. How important is Hitler to the Allied victory?

• 8:58Speaker 02

  I think he is a key component to that. I mean, he's also one of the reasons why the war drags on for basically six years in Europe because his whole mindset, you have to get yourself inside, well, you don't really want to get yourself inside yourself, but you have to understand where he's coming from. So he's got a very sort of myopic worldview. His worldview is one that's of a continentalist. Of course, it's completely rooted in his extremely warped ideology. And his whole way of looking at the world is a kind of us and them, either or, black or white scenario. There's never any grey air of it. There's always that either or. And when he's sort of pushing himself forward as the leader of the Nazis in the early 1920s, he's presenting it as it's us against them. And them is, you know, the Bolshevik

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Jewish plot. I mean, this is absolute nonsense, but I mean, that's what he believes. And so the ideology is at the root of it. But of course, that ideology is a straitjacket as well, because it means you can't do things in a way that you practically should do. I mean, the amount of people that have said to me, you know, if only Hitler had just sort of brought all the Ukrainians into his side in 1941, you know, he won. It's like, yeah, but you're missing the point. I mean, it's a nautical war. I mean, that's just never going to happen because it's Hitler. And so, again, he presents this picture of it's either the thousand year Reich, this is what the Germans deserve, or if they're not man enough and there is no triumph of the will, then it will be Armageddon. And that's the choice. And it's up to the German people to prove that we can be the masters of the world, or we're going to fail. So it's either going to be thousand year Reich or it's going to

• 10:25Speaker 02

  be Armageddon. Again, it's this kind of either or, black or white thing. And that's dictating everything. But that's one of the reasons why the war lasts so long is because usually people give up in wars, you know, they surrender or sign an armistice because they're not going to win and they've run out of cash. Well, as I was saying right up front, that scenario is created effectively by November 1941, or certainly by December 1941. But he doesn't do that because he's Hitler. So on the one side, he is a huge advantage to the Allies because he's such a military numbskull. But on the other hand, it's him and his myopia and his worldview and this black and white kind of Armageddon or thousand year Reich that is ensuring That the war goes on again. But it is really interesting and his meddling gets worse and worse and worse. So first of all, let's go back to August 1939, the order for the invasion

• 11:09Speaker 02

  of Poland. Initially, he gives his commanders, I think that was like three or four days. Originally, it's going to go in on something like the 28th of August, and he tells them on the 23rd. So there's no time at all. Then there's a bit of a delay going on while there's sort of last minute diplomatic negotiations, which he's very irritated about and just finds it a huge pain in the arse. And then he finally goes for it. But you know, the army is simply not ready for it. And actually, although it's completely that they overwhelmed the Poles, there's lots of things that go wrong, and which point to the fact that Germany actually isn't ready for a global conflict at all. And where they've been very clever is this propaganda with all the kind of sort of automaton SS troops and military parades and all the rest of it, which were quite a new thing at the time in the 20th century, and look really impressive. And scared everyone. And you know, there's no question that all

• 11:54Speaker 02

  that film footage that Lenny Reason Paul took and all the kind of newsreels that Nazi did, that played into the paranoia of the West. Yet at the same time, as the West is getting paranoid about it, they're also going, yeah, but you know, Nazi Germany doesn't have our industrial capacity, doesn't have our access to the world's oceans. If they attack us, we've just got to kind of hold fire. And then we can counter attack in our own pace and build up our own strength and overtake the Germans, blah, blah, blah. So there's this kind of sort of mixed feeling about how the war will play out. But apart from that mad decision to go into Poland, when he does go into Poland and putting all his commanders off their pace, he then insists on attacking the West as early as November 1939. And they're just not ready. They're absolutely ready. They've got shortages of ordinance, they've got shortages of all sorts of things. He does listen to his senior military

• 12:38Speaker 02

  leadership at this point, and does accept it. So you know, the Blitzkrieg in the West doesn't start till the attack on Scandinavia and beginning of April, on 9th of April, 1940. And then subsequently, the big one, which is Casey Yellow, which is the invasion of low countries in France on 10th of May, 1940. And thereafter, he starts to meddle. But one of the reasons why the Germans have been so successful in Poland, in Scandinavia, in the Blitzkrieg in the West in May, 1940, is because of the traditional Prussian way, which is to allow your commanders at the front quite a lot of scope. So this is, okay, cross the river Merz and get there in three days and across in four. How you do it is up to you, because you're the commander on the ground and you're the best judge to kind of make those decisions.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  So Guderian, for example, who has got a core of the best trained, most mechanized Panzer troops, and when I mean Panzer troops, I mean all arms, motorized infantry, motorized artillery, anti-aircraft artillery, anti-tank artillery, and of course, tanks and reconnaissance stuff as well, the whole shooting match. He is given quite a lot of latitude, even from his immediate superior, who is General von Kleist. So von Kleist says, I want you to attack across the River Mos here, and Guderian basically goes, no. And once it's successful, there's no recourse for Guderian at all. He then says to, you know, I want you to wait for all the infantry to turn up. And Guderian goes across the Canal d'Orden, and again, goes against what von Kleist has told him to, but again, gets away with it because he's successful.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Then there is a moment on the 24th of May where Hitler starts to intervene, and this is the notorious halt order, where there is nervousness higher up the chain of command from the old school Prussian military elites, that these Panzer units are getting ahead of the infantry, too far ahead, that they're overextending their lines. And so von Rundstedt, who is the Army Group Commander at von Kleist's behest, who is the next stage down, halts the Panzers. And when General Halder hears this, who is the Chief of Staff of the German Army, goes, that's absolutely insane, and rescinds it, and actually takes away this Panzer group from the command of Army Group A and puts it into Army Group B, because he realizes,

• 14:44Speaker 02

  that Halder realizes that this is golden opportunity to encircle all the Allied forces in the north of France, which includes, incidentally, the British Expeditionary Force, the BEF, who are now falling back towards Dunkirk. And the following day, Hitler turns up and says, okay, so how are your Panzers getting on? And von Rundstedt, rather kind of sniffily, says, well, I don't know, my Führer, because the Panzers have been taken out of my command. And Hitler at that point goes, what? You know, how dare these decisions be made without recourse to me? I'm turning them back over to you, and it's up to you when the halt order is lifted. And as a consequence of that, you know, they're out of action for three days and that gives the British a time to kind of fall back to Dunkirk, kind of perimeter, sort themselves out. And the absolute golden opportunity to encircle all of the BF and indeed all

• 15:28Speaker 02

  of the Northern French armies is missed. And as we know, 338,000 British and French troops are lifted from Dunkirk and the BF lives to fight another day, blah, blah, blah. And Britain's able to fight on throughout the summer of 1940 and then wins the Battle of Britain. And subsequently, that means that Hitler then thinks, oh, my God, I've run out of all my resources. I'm running out. I'm, I've still got Britain in the war. America's in the background. I need to go into the Soviet Union two years earlier than I was initially planning with catastrophic results. So there you have it laid on a plate. This terrible, terrible decision by Hitler. And the only reason he makes that decision is because he feels slighted. He feels that his authority has been questioned by Holder making a decision, which is a military decision, rather than a political decision, behind

• 16:11Speaker 02

  his back without consulting Hitler first. But, you know, Holder was unquestionably absolutely right. So there you have it. And of course, what then happens is France does get beaten and completely defeated in six weeks. And it is a strategic earthquake in the nature of the war. And Hitler returns to Berlin at the beginning of July and does this sort of triumph, this sort of Caesarian triumph through Berlin with quarter of a million people lining the streets and swastikas everywhere and the sun shining. And, you know, he just thinks he's the absolute daddy when it comes to military genius to be all to best Hannibal or Alexander the Great or something. And if so, he started to believe his own hype. And this is the problem with autocracies and autocrats is you're surrounded by yes men and sycophants. People tell you what you want to hear, rather than the unpalatable truth. The meddling starts there.

• 16:57Dan Snow?

  And he decides he's going to open a two front war. He's going to invade the Soviet Union. He makes that decision without putting in place necessary plans to make that a kind of multi-year campaign. He thinks, I know, we'll just kick the door down, the whole rotten structure will come collapsing. He's moving units around the Soviet Union battlefield. Isn't he constantly reversing directives, changing directions?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:15Dan Snow?

  And then, as you had mentioned earlier, he also launches a campaign of genocide against the people of Ukraine and elsewhere to just stamp out any chance there might have been of people welcoming them as liberators.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. Is absolutely nuts. So first of all, going into Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they're not ready for this. They actually have fewer aircraft to support them than they did on the 10th of May 1940. So just a little over a year earlier. He also decides to go into Crete in May. So a month before Operation Barbarossa, which is the world's largest military operation, goes into Crete, loses half his transport fleet. You know, he actually lost something like 352 aircraft on the 10th of May 1940, which is the worst single day for the Luftwaffe in the entire war. You know, this is the start of the Great Victory Blitz back in 1940. So it's a nonsensical decision. And yes, I'm sure it would have been jolly useful to have Crete, but not when you're just about to do Barbarossa. And boy, you're

• 18:08Speaker 02

  gonna need those transport planes, which are now sitting in a crumpled heap on Crete or at the bottom of the Mediterranean. And the reason he goes into Soviet Union when he does in June 1941, it's because he hasn't won the Battle of Britain. So he's now thinking, oh, well, we don't want a two-front war, but I'm also, I'm running out of supplies. You know, I'm running out of things because basically the Germans have been like kids in a sweet shop. And all these new territories they've taken in Europe, you know, Scandinavia, France, Low Countries, and all the rest of it, and Poland, the cupboards are bare by the end of 1940. They've half inched it all and there's nothing left. So they're running out of everything. They're running out of oil, they're running out of this, they're running out of that. They haven't got enough resources to protract the war. So he's thinking, okay, well, I've still got Britain there and I've got America hovering in the background. I need to do something quick. I need to get into Soviet Union much quicker than I thought I was going to do. Soviet Union weren't very impressive when they went into Poland at

• 18:53Speaker 02

  the end of 1939. And we defeated France, which is kind of one of the great nations in the world. How hard can it be? You know, well, it's incredibly hard because the Soviet Union is absolutely vast. And actually, it is powerless, who later commanding Sixth Army at Stalingrad, who has to surrender Sixth Army at Stalingrad. He was on the staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Combined General Staff. And he is asked to kind of oversee the plans for Barbarossa and do sort of war game it in the first part of 1941. And he does so and comes back. And he says, it's not really possible. And they go, no, no, no, no, no, go ahead, have another go, make it work. And he goes, all right. So he does. And he comes up with another plan, which sort of does work. But it's bonkers. The whole thing is built on the flimsy.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Foundation. And the truth is, it doesn't matter how successful they are in the first weeks of Barbarossa, they're not successful enough because they might have got to Smolensk by the 15th of July in little over three weeks, but thereafter, they basically move only about 100 miles in the next three months. And that's not enough. And they're running out of steam. The trouble is, is the way the German army is fixed up particularly is it's all about the spearheads. And the spearheads are comparatively few in number. So I think it's something like 20 Panzer divisions are used out of 190 odd or whatever it is in Barbarossa. So it's a comparatively small percentage, but they're doing kind of 80% of the hard toil and 80% of the fighting. And they are being attrited even when they're winning.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  So the 16th Panzer Division, for example, by the 16th of July, a day after the fall of the city of Smolensk, has 12 tanks left, you know, out of, you know, 180 that it should have had. So they're winning, they're capturing vast, you know, millions of Red Army troops, but they're kind of winning themselves to death at the same time. And that's the problem. There's just overreach. It's what's called the culmination point, when you can no longer achieve what you want to do and the way you want to do it, because your supply lines are too stretched and you don't have enough coming through. And they reached that probably in August.

• 20:51Dan Snow?

  So the Allies were lucky in that the opposing warlord, the supreme commander, was pretty hopeless. I mean, and got worse through the war. I mean, just to finish off this section, I mean, Hitler was a massive, massive drain on German resources effectively.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, if you ever want to hear one really, really bad decision, it's Vakhtam Rhein. This is the Battle of the Bulge. It's absolutely bonkers. You know, and everyone always says that the Battle of the Bulge, this is his winter offensive launched in the early hours of the 16th of September, 1944, through the wooded, hilly, river strewn, wintery Ardennes with its narrow network of roads and tracks. You know, everyone says this is Hitler's last gamble, but by calling it a gamble, that's suggesting that it's actually got a sort of chance of success. It has zero chance of success. It is simply not going to achieve what it wants to achieve, which is to split the Allied armies in two and reach Anther. They simply don't have enough to be able to maintain a frost that deep, that big, that successful. It's insane.

• 21:46Dan Snow?

  And he sets fire to vital supplies of fuel, infantry, armour, the whole works in doing so.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Yep, it's a total shower.

• 21:55Dan Snow?

  Hastings the end of the war. Just before we move on, he declares war on America, doesn't he? He made Roosevelt's life very simple. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. The Americans don't yet enter the war against Germany. They're in the war against Japan. And then Hitler declares war on them.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty mad decision. I mean, again, this, it's really interesting because when Pearl Harbor happens, Churchill goes, oh, thank good. That means we'll win the war after all. And when Hitler hear it, he goes, oh, thank God, that means it will win the war after all. Because in Hitler's view, what he's thinking is that the Americans will now turn all their effort to Japan and ignore Europe. And that's because his geopolitical understanding is extremely poor, to put it mildly. And I would say that one of the great advantages that the Western allies have in particular is that they have two men as political leaders who have terrific geopolitical understanding in Churchill and Roosevelt, which is a huge advantage as opposed to a massive disadvantage from the Axis.

• 22:50Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're asking why the Allies won the war. It's important. More coming up.

• 23:00Dan Snow?

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• 23:41Dan Snow?

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• 26:22Dan Snow?

  Okay, so James, that's dealt with Hitler. Hitler, very poor supreme commander, Germany at massive disadvantage. One of the great reasons why Germany and its allies lost the Second World War. You know me, James, I love talking about maritime history. Can we come to control of the seas? Which I guess also we could probably just bundle up in the simple access to global markets and global resource and therefore the just enormous disadvantage that Germany and Italy, for example, in Europe faced. I mean, this is a mismatch for all the vaunted German industrial base. Germany is an enormous disadvantage, particularly because its enemies control the seas.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. There are very, very few nations in the world that have all the resources you need to protract along an arduous war. So how do you get it? Well, you have to go across sea to get it because the main means of transporting anything in bulk is by sea, just as it is to this day. And in 1939, Britain has the world's largest navy and the world's largest merchant fleet and has access to around 80% of the world's merchant shipping. There's a very interesting map of global shipping of 1937. And you can see the little ant lines all coming in and out across the Atlantic and down to the South Atlantic. I mean, there's one very, very strong ant line going between Argentina and Britain, for example. Argentina is not part of the British Empire, but Britain has huge extra imperial assets there.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  It owns most of the railways, owns most of the ports, owns most of the farms there. So Britain's reach is absolutely huge. Second largest navy in the world is the United States. The largest oil producer in the world is the United States. The second largest oil producer in the world by some margin is Venezuela. Azerbaijan, you know, the Soviet Union. And all the rest of it, the Caucasus, that's third, but by quite a long stretch down. The Middle East is way, way, way, way down. So what that means is that Britain has access to the world's oceans at the start of the war. And increasingly with America's huge industrial might, so does America. And these are just enormous advantages. If you look at the map of Europe and you look at Germany, Germany's got a little bit of the North Sea. But there's an economic blockade by the superior British Navy at that time.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  And it's got the narrow sort of network of channels around the Baltic Sea, and that's it. So it doesn't really have that many sources of real fuel, which then means you have to use, create synthetic fuel, which is incredibly expensive and uses coal. But you know, you also need coal for all sorts of other processes as well. So they're constantly getting themselves into a logistical and supply tangle. There's a whole reason for going into Barbarossa in the first place. So command of the seas is absolutely vital. The moment the war goes on for more than a few months. And this is why saving the BEF in nineteen forty is so important and why winning the Battle of Britain is so important. Because what it means is suddenly Germany is committed to a long drawn out war. And in a long drawn out war, the nations with the greatest access to the world's oceans are almost certainly going to win.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Because that's how you can access resources, the resources you need to protract this long drawn out war. And there's no question about it, to my mind, that the Battle of the Atlantic is the single most important theatre of the entire Second World War. Because through the Atlantic flows everything out and in from Britain, you know, you can't do Normandy, you can't do D-Day without the Atlantic. Britain can't survive in nineteen forty without the Atlantic. You can't reinforce Southeast Asia or the Middle East or North Africa without it. And one of the greatest mistakes the Germans make is by concentrating on recreating a surface fleet in the late nineteen thirties rather than a huge U-boat fleet. So amazing though it is, there are never more than thirteen U-boats operating in the Atlantic in nineteen forty.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  And by January nineteen forty-one, that figure is six. The Atlantic is a big old place. And six U-boats is not going to make a big difference. And the truth of the matter is, is that over eighty percent of all sailings across the Atlantic get there from A to B unscathed. In fact, actually, the number of sailings in the Atlantic is is one point four percent, which has sunk. And that sounds absolutely as though the U-boats never got close. Of course, they do. They sink about twenty-five percent of British merchant shipping during the war. But that's of course because each ship is doing more than one sailing, it's doing multiple sailings. But the fact of the matter is that there are never enough U-boats to

• 30:35Speaker 02

  do critical amount of damage to Britain's supply lines. And I think you can say pretty safely by May 1941 with the sinking of the Bismarck, the sinking or capture or killing of three really, really experienced U-boat commanders in Prien, Shepka and Kretschmer, and the capture of an Enigma machine with a code book. Those three things which happened between March 1941 and May 1941, I think that really puts the Battle of the Atlantic outcome beyond any doubt. The Wolfpacks are ultimately defeated by May 1943, so two years later. So it is a terrible, bitter, awful, brutal battle, but it is one where the Germans fail to understand its importance in the big scheme of things and don't do

• 31:20Speaker 02

  enough to make the Allies' life difficult. It's difficult, but it's not as difficult as it could have been. And that's catastrophic. And in the meantime, the Allies, of course, are producing huge amounts of shipping, both of assault shipping, which are required when you're an island nation or you're a nation that's on the other side of an ocean, or when you're protracting a war in the Pacific, which is all about sort of capturing islands and battles and all the rest of it. You need lots of assault craft, and you also need auxiliary vessels, you know, support vessels, and of course, you need warships and aircraft carriers. And all of that requires a huge amount of shipbuilding. But it is amazing that at the start of the war, there are no such thing as landing craft. You know, and it's not until 1941 that the landing ship is developed. It's not until May 1941, I

• 32:01Speaker 02

  think, that the Higgins boat is finally trialed. The Liberty ship is designed by Cyril Thompson, who's a shipbuilder in Sunderland, then exported over to the United States. And a ship that was originally designed, the Liberty ship, that was originally designed to be built in 225 days, in November 1942 is built in five days, 15 hours and 26 minutes. I mean, it's just absolutely astonishing. That's a stunt. And they go back to a much more reasonable 25 to 30 days. But even so, that's just insanely fast. And by the summer of 1942, they're building way more merchant ships than they're losing. The number of warships is To rise both in Britain and in the United States and to a certain extent in Japan, but not at the rate of losses.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  And so the sliding scales are such that shipbuilding is increasing despite the losses for the Allies, but decreasing for the Axis forces in a very, very, very bad way. So shipping is absolutely vital to the whole thing.

• 32:54Dan Snow?

  And we should remind people that controlling the seas also allows you can move stuff around so you can support the Soviets. For example, give them all the food and weapons and vehicles that they need to fight the Nazis. But you can also choose the timing and location of Europe. You land in North West Africa, you land in North West Europe, you can land in Southern Italy, Sicily, Italy, the source of all your wonderful books. And Southern France and indeed in in the Pacific, the Americans have all the mobility. The Japanese have no power to move anything around, men or munitions. They're isolated on those islands because the Americans control the ocean. So you you can actually choose where to go and how to get there.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the main reasons why the war isn't over as quick as it is is because of the lack of shipping. Now, that may sound crazy because I think the figure is something like eight thousand seven hundred and thirteen assault craft are built in the United States alone between May nineteen forty two and April nineteen forty three, which is a phenomenal number. But that increased number has also escalated the speed with which the Americans want to operate in the Pacific. And landing ships, these hundred and twenty meter long vessels, which only have a draft of four foot eight inches, are the key vessel amongst all of them to enable you to do major operations, amphibious operations.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Whether you be landing on a beach in an atoll in the mid Pacific or whether you be crossing the channel and going to Normandy. But one of the reasons why the Italian campaign takes so long, for example, is because there isn't enough assault shipping to be able to do an outflanking manoeuvre. There is not enough to be able to do a simultaneous landing in Normandy and in the Southern France at the same time. And that unquestionably lengthens the speed of the war. So for D-Day, there is four thousand one hundred and twenty seven assault craft. And that sounds like an absolutely vast number. Of course it is, but it's never as much as Allied commanders would like ideally. In other words, what I'm saying is there are the supplies and manpower to support more operations than there are the assault shipping to enable that.

• 34:56Dan Snow?

  Okay, so I think that's control of the seas and shipping and resource, moving resources around and men and material is so important.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely key to the whole thing. It is, I would say, almost the single most important factor of all.

• 35:08Dan Snow?

  Nice. Okay, well, let's come on to the third basket, which is, and you touched on this a little bit, but the coalition's strategy and coordination. You mentioned Roosevelt and Churchill in particular have a very good geopolitical understanding. Explain how that sort of practically works and coordination. And then if you would, contrast it with the astonishing lack of coordination between these so-called Axis powers where they're sort of finding out about each other's offensives, pointing in entirely different directions, not in any way helping each other out whatsoever. I mean, I think people would be amazed to hear that.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Well, yes, and there's been this sort of part of the narrative of the Second World War has been journo historians writing about the Allies and rubbing their hands with glee as they find another diary entry with someone slagging off Monty, or someone slagging off Patton, or whoever it might be, and the Americans bitching about the Limys and the British being supercilious about their transatlantic cousins and all this kind of stuff. The truth is, the Western alliance is a marriage made in heaven. And it is absolutely remarkable. And I think the sort of apogee of coalition warfare is probably D-Day, where the scales of coalition, cooperation, coordination are just second to none. Because actually, Britain and America are quite different. They're quite different

• 36:23Speaker 02

  in their approach, they're quite different culturally, they're quite different in how they're imagining the post-war order is going to be, et cetera, et cetera. And yet, for the duration of the war, they've put that largely, not entirely, but largely to one side. And certainly when it comes to military matters, there are enough checks and balances and enough of an understanding that we need to pull together on this, that the whole show works very, very successfully. So what you've got is you've got a united political front and a united military front. D-Day and achieving victory in Europe by May 1945 shows what can be done. When people are pulling together for a common cause and whether that be sharing

• 37:05Speaker 02

  supplies, sharing resources, similar strategic goals, ironing out differences. It's absolutely amazing and really it is incredible how well the commanders do get on with one another from different nationalities. And quite often, when you look at this in a deep dive, you discover that that actually the clashes are more of a personality rather than on national lines. So I think that has been completely overcooked, if I'm brutally honest. Whereas, as you point out, in contrast, I mean, the way Nazi Germany treated its allies was just appalling, just terrible, was unspeakably awful to the Italians, unspeakably awful to all their other Eastern European partners, paid lip service to the Japanese, little

• 37:49Speaker 02

  more, I mean, there's no sense of a sort of common goal, common purpose, just absolutely hopeless. So again, and that worked very much to the Allies' advantage rather than against it. So I think there does need to be a kind of rethink on how we view all this.

• 38:02Dan Snow?

  People will always find it astonishing that Japan, which borders on the Soviet Union, along with its Axis partner Nazi Germany, they could have attacked when Barbarossa, Operation Barbarossa happened, the Japanese could have invaded Siberia from their empire in northern China, and they absolutely declined to do so. That could have made an important contribution.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, one of the reasons why Marshal Zhukov is able to successfully counter-attack outside Moscow in December 1941 is because he's got two armies that have come from the sort of Manchurian Front. And the reason is because he knows that Japan is about to launch an attack on America and is not interested.

• 38:38Dan Snow?

  This is Dad's Noisy History. Don't go away, more reasons for Allied victory coming up.

• 39:23Speaker 01

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• 40:05Speaker 01

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• 40:21Dan Snow?

  So as well as being geopolitically savvy, Roosevelt and Churchill were pretty good at doing the bits that you said Hitler was so bad at. They were quite good at, yes, they interfered, yes, they overreached, yes, they got in arguments. But there was a good political military understanding. They both worked out how to run modern total war, didn't they?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think by and large, they put the right people in the right positions. Both of them were very keen on using technocrats to help them. And I think they did that very successfully. And they did listen. You know, there were checks, you know, General Brooke, who is the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in his diaries is constantly sort of moaning about Winston and his million and one ideas and, you know, how impossible he is and all the rest of it. But Churchill does listen to him. And also, Brooke is able to influence Churchill. And there's also Hastings Ismay, who's his military advisor. And there's a whole host of people. I mean, it is a slightly truncated version of democracy in Britain during the Second World War, as it is in the United States as well. But there are people there who can say, I think this is a really bad idea, Prime Minister, or Mr. President.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  And there are checks on that power, which I think are really important for making the right decisions.

• 41:26Dan Snow?

  My fourth field I want to talk about, I think we've already covered, but we'll just quickly recap it, which is just resource, which is, it was horrifically unequal, right? In terms of pre-war production figures for steel and coal and oil and anything that you need to make war, it was always extraordinarily unlikely that a combination of motley crew of Germany, Japan, and Italy were going to take on and defeat this vast international coalition.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. This is my whole point about the war being over. I mean, you could almost argue the war's going to be over by the time that Battle of Britain is over, but certainly by the end of 1941. Because let me just give you a scenario. So, middle of June 1941, before Operation Barbarossa, German invasion of Soviet Union. Germany's got one enemy, which is Great Britain, albeit Britain plus dominion and empire. Fast forward six months to the middle of December 1941, it's got three enemies. It's got Britain, dominion and empire, USSR and the USA. I mean, it's just, it's not going to win. It's not going to win against that combined populations, resources, access to the world's ocean, shipping, all the rest of it. And, you know, it is just astonishing. In 1943, the United States

• 42:30Speaker 02

  produces 83,000 aircraft. You know, that is a thousand more than the capacity of Twickenham Stadium. When you think of it in those terms, it is just off the scale mad. I mean, Britain alone builds 132,500 aircraft in the Second World War. That is really going some. It is just astonishing, the rate of supply, you know, and building Willow Run, an aircraft factory that is a mile and a half long. It's the single biggest room in the world. And there's this, you know, fantastic characters like Henry Kaiser, who's been building roads before the Second World War in America. And he's also constructed the Hoover Dam. And British cars would say, you know, we need more shipping, you know, could you help us out? And he goes, well, I'll need to build two new shipyards. But, you know, how hard

• 43:13Speaker 02

  can it be? He builds two shipyards in three months. But it's absolutely incredible. You know, how can Germany compete against that when they haven't got oil, they haven't got enough anything, and they've got ideology getting in the way, and sycophants, and the whole corrupt system of the Nazi state. I mean, it's all counterproductive to mass production.

• 43:30Dan Snow?

  Speaking of which, is there a fifth category which is related to that, which is the stories we tell ourselves about technological innovation? And obviously, the Germans are innovating as well, but the Allies, from landing craft to the size of munitions culminating in obviously, the Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons, radar.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  The cavity magnetron.

• 43:49Dan Snow?

  The cavity magnetron. Is Britain, America in particular, more open to, more effective at pioneering new kinds of technologies that are helping to win the war?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they're more effective. I think that's the key thing. Because obviously, some of the creations that the Nazis do in the Second World War particularly, you know, and you look at something like the battleship Yamato, I mean, it's an engineering masterpiece. But I think what you find is, if you look at the war, by and large, the prioritisation of resources is much more efficiently applied for the Western Allies than it is, and indeed to the Soviet Union to a large extent, than it is to the Axis forces. I'll give you a couple of examples. So the Type 21 U-boat, for example, is a work of absolute genius. And it is basically the model for post-war submarines. It can actually operate faster under the water than it can above, which is something that most wartime submarines can't do. Certainly not the classic U-boat of the Battle of the Atlantic fame.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  It can operate underwater at kind of walking pace, but can do sort of 14, 15 knots on the surface. Well, that's not the case with the Type 21. And yet, the Germans don't prioritise it. So it is only just coming into operation, operational use, in April 1945, by which time, of course, it's all too late. And so that's just a really bad decision. And focusing on V2s, I mean, it's first man-made object to go into space. But if it's not actually achieving your war aims, why invest all that time and effort? I mean, that's the thing. So yes, I think that's a really, really good point.

• 45:10Dan Snow?

  On the Allied side, well, I mean, we've got the extraordinary scale and might of the nuclear programme. But what else we got? Radar? What are some of the war-winning technologies?

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Radar is a point. I think the reason why the cavity magnetron, which is so important, and the Germans never know that we've got it or have developed it, they never developed themselves, is what the cavity magnetron means is that instead of having huge, great radar masts of sort of 360 foot high or 270 foot high, like the one still at Dover, which is part of the old air defence system of Great Britain, you can actually reduce the size of radar, which means you can then put it on a destroyer vessel, or you can put it on a very long-range B24 Liberator. So you can use it for sort of anti-shipping. And that was the whole reason it was prioritised. And so this is my point, really, is that what Britain is doing in the early part of the war is focusing its research and development on winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Okay, what can we do to make our lives better? How can we detect U-boats better? So improving the skill of high-frequency direction finding, you know, sort of HUH-2, HUH-2.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Improving radar, improving anti-shipping weaponry and so on. So it's about going, okay, what is our most important thing here? And what do we need to kind of rectify as quickly as possible? And also, I think the great thing that the Allies learned, which the Germans don't, is that bulk is king, mass matters. So it's great having the Tiger tank, you know, it's whatever it is, 56 tonnes. The problem is, it's also incredibly complex. And the bigger it is, the more kit you need to then service it and maintain it in the field, all of which requires more oil, which is one thing you don't have. But the principle behind it is, if you've got a kind of really super deep tank, which has incredibly thick armour and a very powerful gun, then you don't need many of them. But the fact of

• 46:41Speaker 02

  the matter is, is there's 1,347 Tigers built ever, and 492 King Tigers, as they're called. But there are 49,000 Sherman tanks, which basically means that there is 36 Shermans for every single Tiger. And really, what tank battles prove in the Second World War is that he who fires first generally comes out on top. So having a really, really massive high velocity gun and having thick armour is important, but it's not as important as great optics and being able to see and great manoeuvrability, and also frankly, reliability. And the number of Tiger tanks which are knocked out by a 75mm medium gun on the Sherman is absolutely legendary. I mean, huge numbers. So that kind of rather proves the point.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  And numbers really matter, particularly in a long, drawn out war. You know, this is something that our current leaders are starting to kind of twig, and let's hope it's not too late. But I mean, you don't need the best of everything, you need the perfectly adequate. And most of the Allied kit is perfectly adequate and interchangeable, with lots and lots of interchangeable parts, which means there's lots of them, which means a lot of your battlefield wrecks can be recovered and repaired and put back into action again, or they can be butchered to provide parts for other vehicles and things. So simplicity and mass are really important. That's one of the key things that emerges out of the Second World War from the Allied perspective, I'd say.

• 47:59Dan Snow?

  Famously, the Germans chased out all the Jewish nuclear physicists, or chased out, slash, imprisoned and killed them. Is there a sense in which that there's something about those Western democracies, it's they're more tolerant of creative thinkers, people like Alan Turing, who was gay, worked at Bletchley Park, helped to crack the Enigma Code. Is there a little bit more space for some of the eccentrics and some of the slightly more off the wall people you need if you're going to be innovative?

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, otherwise, how do you get the Mulberry Harbour? The Mulberry Harbour, there's two of them, which are both larger than the port of Dover, and which are built, then sunk off the Isle of Wight, then resurfaced and floated across the Channel, put in place and creating two huge harbours. I mean, you don't get that without tolerating eccentrics and some pretty creative thinking. There was a moment, sort of halfway through, where they're sort of struggling with the logistics of building this unspeakably enormous engineering project. And Churchill famously says, "Don't argue the matter, the problems will argue for themselves." But the point is there, is that, yes, the Allied war effort is full of mavericks and people who are prepared to think outside the box and think creatively.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  But importantly, there is a filter for this, which means that there's not too much time wasted on projects which are never going to come into being. So, the grand idea to create an aircraft carrier out of ice and wood chip, that is kicked into the long grass, very sensibly so. But the bouncing bomb is allowed to happen, the Mulberry Harbours are allowed to happen, the Grand Slam earthquake bomb is allowed to happen, etc. And of course, ultimately, the atomic bomb is allowed to happen.

• 49:32Dan Snow?

  I've got a great fondness for the iceberg aircraft carrier. I'm lucky enough to go and see the, all the plans in the National Archives, they're great fun. Before we get off this topic, you just quickly tell me about, I don't understand it, but in the party, you always talk about high-octane aviation fuel. And that's another innovation, isn't it?

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Oh, well, it's just much more efficient. That's the key thing. So it's about how you process it. And obviously, if it's coming from America, you can process it very, very effectively, because they've got all the kit to do it. And it just means you've got fuel which is kinder to the engine and is more fuel efficient, so you get more miles out of it. So it's just better. Every which way you look at it, it's just better fuel. That's the key thing about high-octane. Whereas, you know, the fuel that the, they don't have the time and the money and the space to properly process the oil that they do have. And most of the fuel they're using is synthetic, and it's just not very good.

• 50:16Dan Snow?

  Thank you so much. You're an absolute pro. I always wanted to get you on the show. Thanks for coming on. Tell everyone what your YouTube channel is. WW2 Headquarters. Well, WW2 Headquarters. Go over and check it out. All sorts of exciting things happening over there. James, good to see you, buddy. See you again soon. Great to see you too, Dan. Thank you.

• 50:34Dan Snow?

  Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube, and you can see me, you can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below, and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen, if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.

• 51:20Speaker 03

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• 51:50Speaker 01

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• 52:31Speaker 01

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• 52:41Dan Snow?

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