Why are Two front wars hard to win?

Answer 1

Because your forces have to be divided. For example, Germany in both World Wars ended up fighting on both their eastern and western borders - against the Russians in the east and the French, English and other allies in the west. Both times, fighting on two fronts cost the Germans a victory, and in WW2 it was particularly good that it did because I don't think most people disagree that the Nazis were an evil, criminal power that had to be stopped.

In the First War, the German Shlieffen Plan in August 1914 was to drive two whole armies down through neutral Belgium and take Paris, knocking France out of the war. The plan was a good one and might have worked, except that the Russians mobilized far earlier than the Germans expected them to and attacked the Germans in the east, which came as a very unwelcome surprise. Despite the fact that the Russians had started too early, before they were really ready, their attack forced the Germans to take two entire army corps away from the western front and move them to the eastern front to stop the Russian onslaught. This weakened the Germans by two corps in the west, which probably was just enough lack of strength to make possible what became known as the "Miracle of the Marne," when the French and British stopped the German army on the Marne River and prevented them from taking Paris. After that, the war in the west became the horrible trench stalemate that killed hundreds of thousands over a few yards of ground, and even though the Russians revolted and withdrew from the war in 1918 it was too late to do the Germans much good. They'd been fighting on two fronts for too long, and once the U.S. entered the war in 1917 it was really only a matter of time before the Central Powers would have to give up.

At the beginning of WW2, Hitler thought he was smart. He would avoid a two-front war. The Germans started by signing a mutual non-aggression pact with the Russians (Soviet Union) to prevent there being an eastern front, then attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, which caused the French and the English to declare war. Poland collapsed almost immediately, and because Germany was now fighting on only the western front, she could concentrate her forces and, once again deliberately violating Belgian neutrality, in 1940 swept down and around the end of the French defenses of the Maginot line and forced the French and English back to the beaches at Dunkirk. French Marshal Pétain signed an armistice with the Germans to prevent further bloodshed in France (making Pétain forever a traitor to France), and what was left of the British and some of the French forces managed to escape from the beaches of Dunkirk to England in a miraculous boatlift that included rowboats and yachts ferrying the troops out to larger vessels offshore, but they had to leave all their equipment behind. Nazi Germany now controlled virtually all of Western Europe and had a non-aggression pact with the Russians to protect them in the east.

For the rest of 1940 and well into 1941 England fought on pretty much alone in the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic (although she had a more or less secret ally in the United States, and we helped England stave off complete disaster even before we were in the war). But then Hitler made what turned out to be a fatal mistake: since he controlled all of western Europe, he thought he could attack his erstwhile friend Stalin in the east. Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin, for reasons unknown, apparently never saw it coming, although many of his generals did.

But Hitler thought he was secure. There was little fighting in the west because the Nazis controlled most of it, and England was fighting just to hang on, so Hitler believed he could now throw his full strength into a single front in the east. But Hitler didn't count on Britain holding out and the Americans coming into the war. He also didn't count on the Russians holding out, which they did into the winter of 1941-42, and it was the devastating Russian winter that had defeated Napoleon in his bid to conquer Russia in 1812. Terrible Russian winters, with a lot of help from a very resourceful and determined Red Army, helped defeat Hitler in the east as well.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, Hitler stupidly declared war on the U.S., which was all the excuse President Roosevelt needed to throw most of the American strength behind England to first beat the Germans. This was part of a grand American strategy, to take out the Nazis first, then finish the Japanese. At the time, no one knew if it would really work and there was much criticism, but England, with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and all the other countries of the Commonwealth, allied with the free forces of captive European countries, had already been counterattacking in Italy and North Africa. Now the Allies with the Americans could build up to June 6, 1944, D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, France, making WW2 a true two-front war. At that point, although Hitler refused to quit, the Germans had effectively lost the war since they hadn't the manpower to effectively fight on two fronts, just as they hadn't in WW1. Nazi Germany, and Hitler himself, had less than a year to live. So that's why two-front wars are hard to win.

(Incidentally, a personal note: when this writer was in the army I was posted to Germany in 1962. I was on a troopship crossing the Atlantic, and they gave us a little booklet telling us all about Germany and Europe and the two World Wars. In the booklet was a map of Germany, with a map of the State of Texas superimposed upon it. Germany, we learned, is smaller than the State of Texas! The country that was deemed responsible for the two most devastating wars in human history, in a single half-century, within a single generation, was smaller than our second largest state.Interesting, no?).

Answer 2

The number one issue of having to fight a two-front war was deciding on how to best divide the U.S. forces. Secondly, was finding on how to best protect the two sides of the United States.