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Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War, listener questions

episode number four. And with how this list of questions is looking,

this will not be the last. We have a few big questions this time, including war aims,

strategic bombing, and the economics of German occupation. As always, if you have questions

you would like answered, you can send me those questions via email at History of the Second

World War at Outlook.com. Our first question comes from longtime listener Cecil.

What were the war aims of each participant, and how did they develop over time?

To what extent did they achieve those aims?

Were the aims ever achievable?

I know these develop over time and that leaders can be reluctant to talk about what

they're trying to do, but what do we know?

Finally, for the smaller powers, the countries that Germany and Italy conquered, or the countries

like Hungary or Bulgaria that became co-belligerents, simply staying alive must have been their first

priority. So I think there often is a desire to try and define war aims in a way that make them

easy to understand and discuss, particularly

when it comes to looking back through history. There's just something so comforting in being

able to look at events in history and to give them a binary success or fail grade based on what

they were trying to do and what they were actually able to accomplish. However, as often is the case, it's a bit more

fluid than that. There were really two primary types of war aims throughout the war, those

of defending countries and those of countries that were launching the attacks. For the defenders,

the aims were often quite simple, stopped the German invasion, and rarely did they move

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