I buy into the interpretation that says “in as much as Tolkien is writing about a real war, it’s the Great War more than WWII.” But I think the influences are general rather than specific. It’s definitely not an X-Men/Civil Rights kind of allegory, it’s a little more like the relationship between the American Revolution and Star Wars.*

To add another layer of meta-analysis, I’m definitely overcharitable to Tolkien when he gets it right (as with Laketown’s trading prosperity) because I know my bias against him. I also suspect that were he (still) sui generis, I’d cut him a lot more breaks. But his imitators tend to fall into two camps: either they double down on “who cares how the world works, aristo murder-bohos are all that matter” (which has the result of sensitizing me to how obnoxious and fucked that is) or they make it a point to do better (which reduces the excuse-making I’m willing to do, since obviously it can be done. Perhaps unfair, since I’m applying that retroactively, but still.)

*Which I guess maps Admiral Ackbar onto de Grasse? In my head, I will now assume that on first meeting Luke, Ackbar kissed him on the cheek and exclaimed “mon cher petit chevalier de Jedi!”