In the early years of World War II, the Axis powers had the upper hand. The tide turned when the Axis leaders overreached and the Allies steered their more massive economies and populations into wartime mode.
Bombers and anti-aircraft guns
By 1942, the Axis powers seemed invincible, but the course of the war soon changed in ways that offer lessons for the U.S. and its allies in today’s world, said Victor Davis Hanson, a Hoover Institution senior fellow. (Image credit: narvikk/iStock)
Understanding how miscalculations by Germany and Japan led to their defeat offers lessons for world leaders today on how to avoid another major conflict, a Stanford scholar said.
“The once ascendant Axis powers were completely ill-prepared – politically, economically and militarily – to win the global war they had blundered into during 1941,” writes Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and a Hoover Institution senior fellow, in a new book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.
