Allied leaders of World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 7th of July 1937, a skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing set off a chain of events that would pull dozens of nations into the most destructive conflict the world had ever seen. By the time it ended, the Allied coalition stretched from Brazil to the Soviet Union, from the Belgian Congo to the mountains of Albania, held together by figures as different from one another as John Curtin of Australia, who publicly declared in early 1942 that his country now looked to the United States for its survival, and Josip Broz Tito, a Communist partisan leader who convinced Allied governments that only his forces were mounting credible resistance inside occupied Yugoslavia. The coalition they belonged to was not a single army or a single idea. It was a fractious assembly of monarchs, generals, prime ministers, warlords, resistance chiefs, and colonial governors, each navigating the same catastrophic war through radically different circumstances. How did a Brazilian president whose country had deep economic ties to Nazi Germany end up sending troops to fight in Italy? How did an Albanian Communist lead a liberation movement under Italian and German occupation? And what bound together a Mongolian prime minister defending the steppe at Khalkhiin Gol and a New Zealand prime minister organizing volunteers from the far edge of the Pacific? The answers lie in the individual decisions, contradictions, and turning points of the men and women who led the Allied cause.

• 2. The Weight of Sovereignty

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  Leopold III of Belgium had made extensive preparations against a German invasion before the war ever began, yet when Belgium fell he remained behind while his government fled to Britain. His refusal to cooperate with the German occupiers did not satisfy his own constitution: by staying and declining to follow his government's orders, he was declared "unable to rule," and the crisis he created outlasted the war itself. Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot, who had led Belgium through the Phoney War, fled to London and invoked a clause in the Belgian Constitution to officially suspend Leopold's reign in 1940. The animosity between the Royalist faction in Belgium and the exiled government in London hardened into a lasting political fracture. The same dilemma played out differently in the Netherlands, where Queen Wilhelmina escaped to Britain and became the symbol of her government in exile, while her prime minister Dirk Jan de Geer, wanting to make peace with Nazi Germany, was forced to resign. In Norway, King Haakon VII refused the demands of the German invaders outright, went into exile in London, and remained there for the rest of the war as the legitimate head of state. Peter II of Yugoslavia faced the most dramatic version of this choice: a British-supported coup positioned him against the Axis in 1941, but he was forced to leave the country after the invasion, and by 1944 he had signed the Treaty of Vis to share power with Tito's Partisans. After the war, he was deposed in a referendum.

• 3. The Generals in the Field

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  Bernard Montgomery accepted the surrender of German forces on the 4th of May 1945, but the road to that moment ran through some of the most fiercely contested ground of the war. Montgomery commanded Allied forces in North Africa before leading the 21st Army Group and all Allied ground forces during Operation Overlord. He was also the primary architect of Operation Market Garden, which failed. Georgy Zhukov, on the other side of Europe, led the Red Army through the liberation of Soviet territory and on into Eastern Europe, eventually commanding the forces that captured Berlin. Vasily Chuikov defended Stalingrad with the 62nd Army, a defense that became one of the war's pivotal engagements. Dwight D. Eisenhower, known as "Ike," served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, overseeing the planning and execution of the liberation of France and the invasion of Germany. In the Pacific, Douglas MacArthur served as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the South West Pacific Area from 1942 to 1945, accepted Japan's surrender on the 2nd of September 1945, and then became Supreme Commander Allied Powers. The Australian general Thomas Blamey commanded Allied land forces in the same theatre and in 1945 signed the Japanese surrender document on behalf of Australia; he became Australia's first and only Field Marshal. Sir Thomas Blamey's counterpart in the naval sphere, Chester Nimitz, commanded the United States Pacific Fleet and became supreme commander of Allied forces in the Pacific Ocean Area.

• 4. Alliances Under Strain

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  John Curtin became Australia's prime minister on the 7th of October 1941, and within months was openly redirecting his country's strategic loyalties away from Britain toward the United States in the face of Japanese advances. He formed a close working relationship with General MacArthur and directed the Australian military to follow MacArthur's orders as if they were his own. This strained his relationship with Winston Churchill, with whom he had repeated disagreements over defense policy. William Lyon Mackenzie King of Canada had initially favored appeasement of Adolf Hitler, yet when Germany invaded Poland he consulted the Canadian parliament before advising King George VI to declare war, preserving the principle that Canada entered the conflict on its own accord. In China, the coalition between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Mao Zedong's Communists was born of necessity after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and began breaking down by 1939. The Communists' Red Army was reorganized into the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army, placed under nominal Nationalist command while the Communist Party retained full control; the cooperation effectively ended after the New Fourth Army Incident in 1941. In Yugoslavia, the Allied-backed royalist Chetniks under Draža Mihailović eventually lost British support in August 1944 when the government in exile switched its backing to Tito's Partisans under British pressure, even as Mihailović held the Legion of Merit from both France and the United States.

• 5. The Colonial Dimension

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  Pierre Ryckmans, Governor-General of the Belgian Congo, faced a specific and pressing problem at the start of the war: there were real fears that the colony might follow the lead of Leopold III and attempt to remain neutral. Ryckmans, working with the Minister of the Colonies Albert de Vleeschauwer, brought the Congo into the war on the Allied side. Congolese troops were subsequently sent to support British forces in East Africa, and the colony made what the source describes as a substantial economic contribution to the Allied effort. In India, the Viceroy Archibald Wavell had already demonstrated what was possible against a numerically superior enemy: at the start of the war, Italian forces in North Africa greatly outnumbered the Allies, yet Wavell repelled their attacks, defeated them, and occupied their colonies, before being replaced by Claude Auchinleck in 1941. Auchinleck himself had earlier, as a Major-General in 1938, chaired a committee whose recommendations formed the basis of the 1939 Chatfield Report on modernizing the British Indian Army. By the end of the war, that army had grown from 183,000 to roughly 2,250,000 men. Félix Éboué, governor of French Chad, played a different but equally consequential role: instrumental in building support for Free France throughout French Equatorial Africa, he served as acting Governor-General of that territory until 1944.

• 6. Architects of Victory and Aftermath

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  George Marshall, as Chief of Staff of the United States Army, oversaw the largest military expansion in American history, coordinating Allied operations across Europe and the Pacific. After the war, he became Secretary of State and led the post-war reconstruction effort in Europe, the plan that bore his name earning him the Nobel Peace Prize. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944, was the key architect for establishing the United Nations and also received the Nobel Peace Prize. Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War oversaw the raising and training of thirteen million soldiers and airmen, supervised the spending of a third of the nation's GDP on the Army and Air Forces, and took personal control of building and using the atomic bomb. Jan Smuts of South Africa had served in the Imperial War Cabinet during the First World War, became South Africa's first Field Marshal in 1941, and after the war represented his country at the drafting of the United Nations Charter. Władysław Sikorski, Prime Minister of the Polish Government in Exile and commander of Polish armed forces, had worked to restore diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union; in July 1943, he was killed when his plane crashed into the sea sixteen seconds after takeoff from Gibraltar. In the Pacific, William S. Parsons served as weaponeer of the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945; he had worked on the Manhattan Project alongside Paul Tibbets, who piloted the aircraft.