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The Allied command, in uniform and out, might have wasted Allied superiority in attacks that were costly and futile, delivered too soon or too late, at ineffective places or without proper preparation. They might also have lost the war by failing to cope with critical enemy attacks, such as the U-boat campaign.
Although Allied generalship did not create the vast advantages in manpower and in potential weapon power which won the war, it did exploit those advantages decisively, converting potential victory into actual victory.
But if it was not inevitable that the Allies would win the war, there is a strong presumption that neither was it inevitable that the Germans should lose it. Here again history must open its book before the authorship of the German failure can be assigned.
Many Allied military men believe that the Germans made one colossal blunder: their decision to invade Russia rather than Britain. Not only in the popular British view, but in the view of Allied military men, immediately after Dunkirk Britain lacked the physical means of repelling a determined invasion. The Germans would have found it costly but they would probably have succeeded.
There is every likelihood that in such a case, Churchill was prepared to retire to other parts of the Empire to carry on the war. But if Britain had been lost, there would have been small chance that the U.S. could ever have launched a successful invasion of Festung Europa. For that enterprise, a huge unsinkable aircraft carrier—was almost essential. The none too practical route through Africa would have been far less practical had the Germans not had to divide their defense between the English Channel and Mediterranean Sea.
Why did the Germans not invade Britain? Possibly the German General Staff, which had planned so thoroughly for Europe's conquest, had overlooked the little matter of the actual invasion of Britain. Last week Rundstedt, comparing the German landing barges to those used by the Allies in Normandy, referred to the German craft as "apple barges." He added that as far as he knew, the German High Command's reason for abandoning the invasion of Britain was fear of the British fleet.
At any rate, the alternative which the Germans chose completed their undoing. For they, not the Allies, set the military pendulum swinging against themselves. In attacking Russia they relinquished their quantitative advantage in military power. Making that mistake clearly lost them the war,.
But in the German mind another thought was probably stirring—the thought that if Russia, then rapidly preparing against attack, were not beaten in 1941, Germany would never be strong enough to beat her. Then Germany might have won World War II only to lose World War III to Russia — two years or five years or 20 years afterward.
No one can ever tell whether that calculation was correct. But if it was, then the Germans made the greatest military mistake of all. They should never have started the war in the first place.