Turning Point(s) of the Second World War

George C. Marshall. Was his appointment as Army 
chief of staff the turning point of World War II?

Fighting the Second World War was an immense operation.  Viewing the war as a single event, one must still be cognizant of its many parts and pieces.  These parts and pieces—the war’s battles and campaigns—were the subplots of the overall war.  Each had its own story, its own unique circumstances and challenges, its own turning points.  Like beauty, the construing of any single one of these as the point upon which the entire outcome of the war turned, depends much upon the eyes of the beholder.

A couple of years ago, historian Laurence Rees framed a question for a list of distinguished historians (he doesn’t say how many), asking each of them, “what was the turning point of World War II?”  What is probably not so surprising is that he got a range of answers.  One gentleman, writes Rees, thought the entire war turned upon the Germans’ victory in France in May of 1940.  His argument was that the French and the British had the advantage in terms of terrain and equipment, that attacking with such a disadvantage the Germans assumed a huge amount of risk, and that the outcome of the battle turned upon the superiority of German leadership.  “If the [Allies] had not performed so appallingly in this one fight,” argues this one historian, “then World War II would have ended by the summer of 1940 in an ignominious defeat for the Germans.”[1]

Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was the answer to Rees’s question by two historians, Conrad Crane and Akira Iriye. Crane, a former West Point history professor and current director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, chose Pearl Harbor because that is the point when the conflict became truly a world war.  Mr. Iriye, a Harvard University professor of Japanese descent, chose Pearly Harbor because it “turned out to be such a monumental mistake.”[2]

Six historians, including Robert Dallek and Max Hastings, chose Stalingrad.  "Stalingrad changes everything," said Hastings.  "Once the Germans have been thrown back from Stalingrad, once they've lost that battle, the war was never the same again."[3]  Winston Churchill is said to have exclaimed “we have won!” the minute he learned of what happened at Pearl Harbor.  But another historian, Richard Overy, argued that Stalingrad was “not a turning point necessarily in strategic terms, because a lot more has to be done before the Soviets can be certain of defeating Germany."  But what was made clear there, more than anything else, is that the Germans were vulnerable.[4]

“Several,” says Rees, chose the German operation—BARBAROSSA, “the largest single land invasion in history,”[5] as the turning point.  In choosing BARBAROSSA, one of group, Cambridge professor of international history, David Reynolds, argues that—

"It's this hubristic attack on the Soviet Union years ahead of when the Wehrmacht was in a position to do it and with no preparation for a long campaign. If the Russians could hold on, it was going to completely change the character of the war. I think that [BARBAROSSA] would not have happened in 1941 but for the really heady sense of victory that was generated by the events of 1940, the fall of France and so on, that gave the sense that the Wehrmacht was invincible and that Hitler was a great leader."

Reynolds and the first guy, the one who said the Germany victory in France in May 1940 was the turning point, seemed to see things with the same eye.  But Rees caught a lot of guff from other historians over BARBAROSSA as a true turning point in the war.  The basic problem, according to several, is that many look at BARBAROSSA only through the lens of hindsight and therefore conclude that the defeat of the Nazis was inevitable.  But there were many things, they argue, that the Germans could do, and did do, that might still have turned the course of the war. 

I find it interesting, Rees’s observation that the majority of the historians who gave him feedback on this question, tended to see Germany’s conflict with the Soviet Union as the turning point of the war.  But just at what point, exactly, did events turn, there was no consensus—except that BARBAROSSA occurred too early to be termed a turning point, and Stalingrad happened too late.

Rees, himself views the date of 16 October 16 1941 as the war’s turning point.  Like the majority of the historians he questioned, the event he considers crucial happened on the eastern front.  16 October 1942 was the date—during the dark days of BARBAROSSA—when Stalin, instead of boarding his train out of Moscow to safety, stayed put.  Stalin’s decision was an act of leadership and it gave heart to his generals and through them to his Army.  Given such an example of courage, they stood fast and soon began to push the Hun back.

It is probably true to say that most people’s opinion of what the turning point of the war was is influenced more by their background and experiences than by facts and figures.  Laurence noted that the British tend to focus upon the Battle of Britain and that the Americans sometime see nothing else but D-Day.  With the exception of the two men (and Churchill) who voted on Pearl Harbor, all the events cited occurred in the European theater of the war.  Perhaps that is because there that theater of war received more press coverage during the war, and that, since then, more words have been written on the European war than the Pacific.  But that’s just a guess.  Against the Axis powers in the Atlantic hemisphere, at least, there is room for argument that the Allies’ North African campaign was the general turning point.

Losing the strategic initiative has to count as a turning point of the war.  In his book, An Army at Dawn, Rick Atkinson cautiously intimates the point that in North Africa, that momentum began to swing to the Allies’ favor.  He quotes Churchill saying that “there was, for the first time in the war, a real lifting of spirits.”  He flatly states that, at Tunis, “Hitler … lost the strategic initiative, forever.”[6] 

Hitler’s foreign minister would have agreed.  Robert Conot writes that during his interrogation at Nuremburg, when asked, “when did the war become terrible?” Joachim von Ribbentrop responded—

“It became to me terrible—I can tell you the exact moment.  From the moment of the African landing—I mean, of the English-American forces.”[7]

But it may be that before the African landings, even before Pearl Harbor that the war’s real turning point was reached.  There was a meeting in the White House on 13 May 1940, President Roosevelt and his treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, conferring with a War Department delegation consisting of Secretary of War, Henry H. Woodring, his assistant, Louis Johnson, and General George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff.  This was during the days of Lend-Lease.  War had broken out the previous September with the German’s Blitzkrieg through Poland—but Americans wanted no part of war.  To aid the British, FDR needed a larger authorization from Congress.  And money to aid the British was, apparently, all that FDR thought he needed to do at the moment.  However, this was the meeting—Marshall’s first of significance as the new chief of staff, where the future five-star general stood up to the president and gave him a stern lecture on the state of his armed forces, and what he should be asking Congress for in order to bring them up to snuff for the conflict that was inevitable.  “Mr. President, may I have three minutes?” he began.

“The words spilled out, precisely at first, then in a rush of frustrations.  Barracks, rations, weapons, all in short supply.  New artillery and anti-aircraft guns designed but not in production. Headquarters units unorganized, leaving this an army that could effectively throw no more than 5,000 men into combat at a time.  The germs had 2 million men in 140 divisions massed in the West.  What were their five against that horde?  On and on, well past the three minutes he had asked for, the chief of staff ticked off his army’s deficiencies.”[8]

The result?  Whereas Marshall had been unable to get “$12 million for an airfield in Alaska,” just a month before, the president now asked him to return the next day to discuss a supplemental army appropriation of $657 million.”  It was a turning point, Marshall later decided.”[9]

The truth is all these events were turning points of the war.  From Laurence Rees’s group of historians, to Rick Atkinson, to von Ribbentrop, every man placed the turning point according to that which was right in his own eyes.  Each of their nominations has validity.  But the thing with which all of them share in common is that they all touch only upon the part of war that plays out on battlefields.  General Marshall knew that before war can be won on the battlefield, however, they must be won in the arena in which he fought.  The real turning point of World War II was when General Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, strengthened President Roosevelt’s hand in his appropriations battle with the United States Congress.

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[1] Laurence Rees, “What Was the Turning Point of World War II?” History Net.com, http://www.historynet.com/
what-was-the-turning-point-of-world-war-ii.htm (accessed 28 July 2012).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 539.

[7] Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 55.

[8] Ed Cray, General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990), 155.

[9] Ibid.