Richard Overy > Quotes

“There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important - indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death of whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, 'worth dying for'. If, he continued, 'the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable...our courage must mount'.

Words like 'will' and 'courage' are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese 'were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak...' and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world.

The irony was that Hitler's ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies' will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. The primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just.

The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Fifty years of security and prosperity have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today's perspective Allied victory might seem somehow inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning point in the history of the modern age.”
― Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won

“No one in either system could be unaware that State Security was out there, but for the ordinary citizen, uninterested in politics, lucky enough not to belong to one of the groups stigmatized as enemies, the attitude was as likely to be prudent respect, even approval, rather than a permanent state of fear.”
― Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia

“Moral and ethical questions have no validity in Total War except in as far as their maintenance or destruction contributes towards ultimate Victory. Expediency, not morality, is the sole criterion of human conduct in Total War.’ Dennis Wheatley, Total War, 1941”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The reconstruction of an almost entirely new army on the ruins of the collapse in 1941, one capable of holding its own against the attacker, ranks as the most remarkable achievement”
― Richard Overy, Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort, 1941-1945

“The United States army, wrote another disillusioned recruit, is ‘about as Nazi-like as Hitler’s’.[105] In 1944 the Office of War Information issued a confidential manual to white officers on ‘Certain Characteristics of the Negro’, which included the following: ‘gregarious, extrovertive [sic] . . . hot tempered . . . mentally lazy, not retentive, forgetful . . . ruled by instinct and emotion rather than by reason . . . keen sense of rhythm . . . evasive . . . lies easily, frequently, naturally’.[106] One black soldier writing back from the European theatre at news of racial violence in the New York district of Harlem claimed that black fighters were asking themselves, ‘what are we fighting for?’[107”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The wave of anti-imperial nationalism proved this time to be irreversible, and it was met by the old imperial powers with an uneven mix of expedient compromise and extreme violence. The crises of empire when they came were not unpredictable, like an earthquake, but their effects were seismic. The collapse of the European Asian empires between 1946 and 1954 ended centuries of empire-building in eight years.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The novelist and veteran Vyacheslav Kondratyev recalled on Victory Day, 1990, that the war put a great responsibility on every soldier: 'You felt as though you alone held the fate of Russia in your hands.' After the war that heady obligation no longer mattered. 'Whether I exist,' Kondratyev continued, 'whether I do not exist, everything will flow on as usual.”
― Richard Overy, Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort, 1941-1945

“In December 1941 the Japanese poet Takamura Kōtarō summed up the Japanese view of the conflict with the West: We are standing for justice and life, While they are standing for profits, We are defending justice, While they are attacking for profits, They raise their heads in arrogance, While we are constructing the Great East Asia family.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The high profile now enjoyed by the Holocaust or Shoah in public memory of the Second World War has contributed to the assumption that a major factor in waging the war against Germany and its European Axis allies was to end the genocide and liberate the remaining Jewish populations. This is largely an illusion. The war was not fought to save Europe’s Jews, and indeed the governments of all three major Allied powers worried lest the public should think this to be the case. Liberation when it came was a by-product of a broader ambition to expel the Axis states from their conquests and to restore the national sovereignty of all conquered and victimized peoples. Towards the Jews, the attitude of the Allied powers was by turns negligent, cautious, ambivalent or morally questionable.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The Soviet propaganda effort in the West played on this sentimental view of Russia and the image of Stalin as a man committed to peace and democracy, a view swallowed uncritically by the Western public whose knowledge of Soviet realities was gleaned entirely from the propaganda image. When the bishop of Chelmsford, president of the National Council for British–Soviet Unity, opened a congress in London in November 1944, he talked of the Allies as the ‘three great democracies’. A second churchman at the congress spoke of the ‘truly religious achievements of the Soviet Government’ and the great contribution the Soviet regime had made ‘to the ethical side of life’.[78]”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The development of the RAF strategy of attacking enemy morale through deliberate destruction of the urban area had its roots in the 1930s, when the discussion of future bombing strategy assumed that in modern war there was no distinction any longer between combatant and non-combatant. Civilians were regarded as a target because they contributed materially to sustaining the enemy war effort, a mirror image of the popular civilian conviction that their own staying power was likely to be an objective in any future war.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“Kaiser was new to shipwork. He began life running a photographer’s shop in New York, moved into the gravel business, and ended up in California running a multi-million dollar construction company that built the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge. He had a reputation for tackling the impossible. When the shipbuilding programme started his initial involvement was the construction of four of the new yards on the west coast, but he then began to produce the ships as well. At his Permanente Metals Yards No. 1 and No. 2 at Richmond, on the northern edge of San Francisco Bay, the young Kaiser manager, Clay Bedford, set out literally to mass-produce ships.”
― Richard Overy, Why The Allies Won

“Lemkin regretted comparing the plight of the Jews with that of blacks: ‘To be unequal is not the same as to be dead.’ In the end, the United States government did not ratify the Genocide Convention until”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The failure of the resistance movement in the Vilna Ghetto stemmed from the wide support among the population for the Jewish leader Jacob Gens, whose strategy of compliance seemed more likely to save lives than a fruitless revolt.[202] One Jewish ghetto policeman reflected that nobody would take the heroic step to resistance ‘as long as one spark of hope existed that they would last out’. Hope, observed Herman Kruk in his diary of the Vilna Ghetto, is ‘the worst disease in the ghetto’.[203]”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“It produced a situation where a proper sense of priority and evaluation was replaced with a chaos of demands and programmes. ‘Nobody would seriously believe’, complained a group of German engineers in 1944 based at the research centre in Rechlin, ‘that so much inadequacy, bungling, confusion, misplaced power, failure to recognise the truth and deviation from the reasonable could really exist.’56 As long as the military tail wagged the industrial dog, German war production remained inflexible, unrationalised and excessively bureaucratic”
― Richard Overy, Why The Allies Won

“prevent the crowding of spectators during the mass executions’.[126] At Himmler’s insistence, the perpetrators were supplied with generous measures of alcohol, often available before and during the killing. Ukrainian auxiliaries were notorious for their drunken cruelty, allegedly throwing children in the air to be shot at like birds. After killing sprees, the men were encouraged to spend evenings together carousing and drinking. Following the mass execution of 33,000 Jews and Soviet prisoners in the ravines at Babi Yar near Kiev, the killers enjoyed a banquet to mark the occasion.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945