London: A superior air and sea power, not the titanic land battle as is generally believed, ensured Allied forces’ victory in the Second World War, according to a new ground-breaking research which presents the historic event in a completely different light.
The research, published today in a major new book titled How the War was Won – ‘Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II’, represents a major rethinking about how the Second World War was decided. The research undertaken by Phillips O’Brien at the University of Glasgow, using thousands of pages of original documents, has shown that the Allies developed a predominance of air and sea power which put unbearable pressure on Germany and Japan’s entire war-fighting machine from Europe and the Mediterranean to the Pacific.
The project uncovered evidence that air and sea power dramatically expanded the area of battle, allowing the Allies to destroy over half the Axis’ equipment before it had even reached the battlefield. “There were no decisive battles in World War II. When we look at the figures, what we see is that the daily attritional loss of equipment was far more damaging to the German army than any great battle,” said O’Brien, Reader in History at the University of Glasgow.
“The pressures that the Americans and British put on the Germans and the Japanese meant that by 1944 the Axis powers were losing a quarter of the aircraft they built without firing a shot,” O’Brien said. “This was far higher than the aircraft lost in any of the well-known battles,” O’Brien added. World War II is usually seen as being a titanic land battle decided by mass armies, most importantly those on the Eastern Front.
Pitched battles such as El Alamein, Stalingrad and Kursk have become written into history as the arenas where the course of the war was decided. For instance, the Battles of Kursk and El Alamein, which are often seen as decisive, actually destroyed relatively small amounts of German production.
Combined, the loss of German tanks in both battles represented about 0.3 per cent of annual German armament output. At the same time, individual air raids could destroy almost ten times as much production. “It has become the conventional wisdom that the Soviet Union won the Second World War with only minor contributions from the United States and Great Britain. O’Brien has written a superb rejoinder to such nonsense in a work that represents a major contribution to our understanding of that terrible conflict,” said Williamson Murray, author of ‘A War to Be Won, Fighting the Second World War’.
