Turning the Tide in World War II
El Alamein, Stalingrad, and the Atlantic
Six decades after World War II, historians still debate which battles really stopped the Germans and gave victory in europe to the Allies.
Military offensives of unprecedented power had given Adolf Hitler control of most of Europe and North Africa by the middle of 1942. Historians still debate whiiich of the subsequent contests did most to halt the triumphal German march and give victory instead to the Allies. There are three major candidates.
Italy and Britain were both colonial powers in North Africa at the start of the war. Italian dictator Mussolini, confident in the Axis alliance with Germany and Japan, overreached in attacking British-occupied Egypt. With France subdued and England under what was assumed to be pre-invasion German air bombardment, Hitler felt he had some margin to help his beleagured Italian ally. He dispatched a strong force, eventually under one of his ablest generals, Erwin Rommel, to complete the conquest. By the autumn of 1942, Rommel had raced to within 150 miles of Cairo. In response, British Prime MInister placed one of his best, General Bernard Montgomery, in command of the defense of Egypt and the vital Suez Canal. Montgomery defeated Rommel in a prolonged battle near El Alamein and, with the help of American troops which had landed in French North Africa in November, followed up with a complete rout of German and Italian forces by May of 1943.
Most historians consider Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, to be a fatal blunder. But for the next six months, his armies smashed through Soviet opposition and approached both Moscow and Leningrad by the beginning of winter. Of course, the well-known Russian winter that had frustrated Napoleon in 1812 blunted those offensives, but by the summer of 1942 the Germans had advanced further into southern Russia and had some hopes of linking up with their Japanese allies somewhere in Central Asia. In one of the bloodiest sieges in history, however, the Soviets dug in at Stalingrad and eventually captured an entire German army of 300,000 at the end of January, 1943. The rollback of the German forces which began there ended with the capture of Berlin in May, 1945.
The dark horse candidate for tide-turner is the progressive destruction of the German Atlantic submarine fleet, the dreaded U-Boats. In 1940, 1941, and 1942, they had great success in destroying convoys bringing desperately needed supplies from the U.S. to Great Britain. Merchant marine losses and casualties were staggering, sometimes resulting in less than half of the tonnage getting through. With improved detection devices and depth charges on Allied destroyers, and longer range bombers operating from U.S. and British North Atlantic bases, the casualty ratio turned slowly but dramatically from the Germans to the Allies and ensured safe passage for the supplies and reinforcements that made the 1944 invasion of the continent possible and successful.
Obviously, all three sequences combined to defeat the Nazis. Each has important reasons to be considered the most important.
