Traditionally, New Year marks a moment when fresh resolutions are made that anticipate a better tomorrow. During wartime, however, even the best-laid plans and hopes can be cruelly dashed amid chaos, destruction and uncertainty. Present-day Ukrainians know this only too well, and it was certainly true, for all sides, in World War Two. It's no accident that both the Nazis and the Allies tended to use the turn of the year to announce new initiatives that would, depending on their situation, consolidate present success or reverse disappointing failures. From 1939 to 1942, Hitler regularly made a major public speech in January, usually in the Berlin Sportpalast, celebrating German military triumphs and threatening further destruction on his enemies. Conspicuously, in the New Years of 1943 and 1944 - when the tide was turning decisively against the Axis, respectively at Stalingrad and then as the Red Army crossed the pre-war Polish border - the Fuhrer was silent, re-emerging belatedly in January 1945 to make two defiant radio addresses that could not hide the scale of German defeat. The Allies tended to hold strategic planning summits around the end of one year and the start of the next - successively in Washington (December-January 1941), Casablanca (January 1943) and Teheran (November-December 1943) - before the pace of Axis retreat made them redundant, leaving the Potsdam conference of July-August 1945 to focus on the new post-war world order. One thread that features in all three earlier Allied summits was planning for D-Day: thus Washington agreed on a strategy of 'Europe first', Casablanca (in the midst of Operation Torch in North Africa) established an Anglo-American team to work on the details of the operation, while Teheran set an actual date for the landings of May 1 (later moved to early June as Overlord was scaled up). Yet all these plans were bedevilled by bitter Anglo-American divisions and the realities of war, not least the loss to the Japanese of all American, British and Dutch territories in the Far East in the early months of 1942 and the bloody, grinding pace of the Allied campaign in Italy in 1943-44. In contrast to Hitler, Stalin made few public pronouncements (perhaps the most famous was his defiant radio address of July 1941 as the Red Army reeled before the onslaught of Barbarossa), confining himself largely to orders of the day directed at his generals, both threatening and exhortatory in tone, but single-mindedly focused on holding on and pushing the enemy back. He, no more than the other leaders in this war, could not predict the outcome with any certainty, but at least the Big Three used their yearly get-togethers as a way of staying together until the job was done. Whatever else divided them, defeating Hitler was their common priority - and in the event that proved to be one resolution that, stuck to through thick and thin, was fulfilled to make a better tomorrow.
If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again.
An Understanding History Podcast
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