As a former soldier, I am naturally drawn to the great battles of World War II. Stalingrad, El Alamein, Midway and Normandy seem to be the places where the war turned and victory or defeat was determined. In How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, Phillips Payson O’Brien makes a compelling and thoroughly documented argument that we veterans and history buffs have been looking in the wrong places.
The war was won as much on factory floors, rail networks and shipping lanes in the United States and Britain—and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union—as it was on the great battlefields. Conversely, Germany, Japan and Italy lost the war in smashed factories, broken transportation systems, dwindling fuel supplies and cargo ships sent to the bottom of the sea.
O’Brien does not argue that soldiers or land battles were unimportant. Rather, he challenges the traditional emphasis on armies destroying one another in decisive battles. Modern industrial warfare depended upon an immense flow of aircraft, ships, tanks, trucks, ammunition, fuel and replacement parts. Destroy that flow and eventually even a formidable army becomes incapable of fighting effectively.
This makes some of the war’s most famous battles look different. Stalingrad was a catastrophic German defeat, and El Alamein was an important British victory, but O’Brien demonstrates that the losses of men and equipment in such battles were smaller than their legendary reputations suggest when measured against total wartime production. The decisive struggle was increasingly over whether the Axis powers could manufacture equipment, obtain fuel and transport both to where they were needed.
Aircraft production illustrates the point beautifully. Germany and Japan entered the war with sophisticated aviation industries, yet neither successfully developed and deployed a true strategic heavy-bomber force. Germany struggled with ambitious but unsuccessful designs and eventually abandoned much of the effort. Japan barely pursued the capability.
The Allies made very different choices.
Before the United States even entered the war, it had designed and deployed the B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers and had already begun the enormously expensive development program that produced the B-29. Britain entered the war relying heavily on twin-engined bombers but went on to develop the extraordinarily successful four-engined Avro Lancaster. These were not simply technological achievements. They reflected decisions about what kind of war the Allies intended to fight.
This leads O’Brien directly into one of the most disputed questions of World War II: strategic bombing.
Critics have long argued that the bombing offensive failed to break German morale and that German industrial production continued increasing remarkably late into the war. O’Brien does not deny those facts. Instead, he asks a different question: what would German production have been without the bombing?
His answer is persuasive. Allied air power forced Germany to divert enormous resources into fighters, antiaircraft guns, ammunition and air defense. Bombing devastated oil production, attacked transportation networks and eventually made movement within Germany extraordinarily difficult. Factories were dispersed and production driven underground. The Axis was increasingly forced to spend its shrinking resources defending the industrial system upon which its armies depended.
The same logic applied at sea. Japan possessed an enormous empire rich in raw materials, but those resources were useless unless they could reach Japanese factories. American submarines and aircraft systematically destroyed the merchant fleet carrying oil and other essential materials to the home islands. Japan’s war economy was strangled.
O’Brien’s argument becomes even more convincing when viewed from the opposite direction. The United States possessed not merely enormous industrial capacity but the ability to transport its production across two oceans. American factories produced staggering quantities of aircraft, ships, vehicles and weapons while American and Allied shipping delivered them around the world. Britain contributed a sophisticated industrial and technological base, while the Soviet Union produced immense quantities of land weapons and absorbed terrible human losses fighting Germany in the east.
The result was an imbalance the Axis powers ultimately could not overcome.
What I found most compelling about How the War Was Won is that O’Brien does not merely assert this counterintuitive thesis. He buries the reader in evidence for it. Production figures, aircraft losses, shipping tonnage, fuel supplies and manufacturing priorities accumulate until the traditional picture of World War II begins to change.
That is what an excellent work of history should do.
I would still like to believe that great battles decide wars. Soldiers understandably see history through the ground they fought over and the comrades they lost there. Stalingrad remains Stalingrad, and nothing in O’Brien’s argument diminishes the courage or suffering of the people who fought there.
But courage cannot fuel a tank, replace an aircraft or move an army hundreds of miles.
By the final years of World War II, the Allies could replace almost everything they lost. Germany and Japan increasingly could not. The great battles mattered, but behind those battles stood an industrial war of factories, fuel, transportation and shipping.
O’Brien convinced me that this was where World War II was ultimately won—and lost.
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