[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I think that C.S. Lewis probably said it best:

These things were not devised to reflect any particular situation in the real world. It was the other way round; real events began, horribly, to conform to the pattern he had freely invented.

Some, then, did recognise that there were parallels with real events, although as has been said most of them are only applicable in a very general sense. Tolkien's own application of his work to the world he inhabited was expressed to those attending a "Hobbit party" in Rotterdam in 1958:

I look East, West, North and South, and I do not see Sauron; but I see that Saruman has many descendents. We Hobbits have against them no magic weapons. Yet, my gentlehobbits, I give you this toast: To the Hobbits. May they outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees.

Tolkien had already described the Second World War as "The first War of the Machines" in a letter to Christopher Tolkien, and if anything his attitude to it had been ambivalent. He regarded the real victors in the struggle to be mechanism and materialism; globalisation and loss of national identity for all countries involved; forces that remind me very much of Saruman. He said, as the Red Army drew within sixty miles of Berlin:

The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world catastrophes.

His reaction to nuclear weapons was one of great trepidation, although by this late stage the nature of the One Ring was already long-established:

The news today about 'Atomic bombs' is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope 'this will ensure peace'.

He also told Christopher Tolkien that in his opinion the Second World War had been lost.

When we compare these views with the rather more positive outcome of The Lord of the Rings, it becomes much easier to see why no parallel can be more than superficial: the situations of the Ents, and of Rohan and Gondor are general ones, applicable as much to individual people as to countries, and to more than one historical situation. That seems to me the main objection to this search for correlations in the Second World War: it really tells us nothing about Tolkien, his work or the war itself, which as I have said above he regarded largely with despair.