Turning Points of WWII

By the summer of 1942, the Axis powers controlled more territory than any coalition in human history. Germany held Europe from the English Channel to the Volga. Japan occupied a crescent of land and sea stretching from Manchuria to the Solomon Islands. Italy, the junior partner, clung to North Africa and scattered Mediterranean positions. On paper, the war looked settled.

It was not. The Axis had won every early campaign through speed, surprise, and concentrated firepower. But speed is not the same as sustainability. Germany and Japan had seized enormous territories they could not garrison, supply lines they could not protect, populations they could not pacify. Their economies, formidable in peacetime, were not structured for a prolonged global war against the combined industrial output of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire.

The turning points of World War II did not arrive as a single dramatic reversal. They came as a sequence of battles, fought on frozen Russian steppes, on the open Pacific, on the beaches of northern France, where the fundamental asymmetry between Axis ambition and Allied resources finally asserted itself. Each of these battles had contingent moments, junctures where different decisions or different luck might have produced different outcomes. None was inevitable. All were decisive.