Freedom Academy Lecture #4 The Allies On The Offensive (March 1942 - March 1945)

On the defensive early in World War II, the Allies claimed key victories in 1942 at El Alamein in North Africa, Guadalcanal in the Pacific and Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. This reversal of fortunes, along with an edge in industrial production and wartime technology, led to a change in strategy. The Allies decided to take the war to the Axis homelands. This fourth lecture by Victor Davis Hanson guides viewers through the Allied invasion of Italy, the island-hopping toward Japan and the landing at Normandy. Hanson also explores a great irony of the war -- that the Axis powers did not work well together despite their shared fascist ideology and that the Allies clashed philosophically but overcame their differences to battle a common enemy.