I borrowed How the War Was Won, a 2015 history of the Second World War by Scottish historian Phillips Payson O'Brien, because it was praised to the skies by Paul Krugman, who is an economist but has good taste in historical literatures. With that in mind, I was not surprised that How the War Was Won does focus on economics (very much macro-economics). But I was surprised by how engagingly written it is, and even more by how much it enlarged my sense of how to write military (and other kinds of) history.
O'Brien starts with a provocative sentence: "There were no decisive battles in World War II." Most military histories of that war, he observes, focus on Stalingrad, El Alamein, Midway, and D-Day, the titanic battles that became turning points in the conflict. But he directs our attention to the numbers.
In 1943, Germany devoted about 7% of its weapons output to armoured fighting vehicles - and its enemies did much the same. All the combatant powers, in fact, devoted more than half, sometimes up to 70%, of their production to air and sea forces, and only the leftovers to the land forces. At the start of the war, the United States projected an army of more than 250 divisions (a division, the basic building block of land warfare, is infantry, armour, artillery, logistics, and command -- often 15,000 men in total). Manpower and materials could have been found for 250 US divisions. But quite soon the American army reduced its objective: to 100 divisions. On all sides the money went elsewhere: to ships and planes.
Now sea power has always been a big story in military history, and much has been written about fighter combat and bombing campaigns in World War II. What O'Brien really does is hammer home is the numbers, in ways that battle narratives rarely can, and what the numbers say about air-sea warfare in the 1940s.
Victory in warfare comes from preventing one's enemies from assembling forces and moving them where they are needed, while at the same time maximizing and moving your own forces successfully. Despite the horrific destruction of lives and equipment at a Stalingrad or a Midway, the numbers pale into insignificance compared to what it meant and what it cost for the sea power that enabled the Allies to move their forces into place, and for the air and sea power that increasingly prevented both Germany and Japan from producing what it needed and from transporting it to the vital battlefields. Not by a little bit, but by huge orders of magnitude.
O'Brien's method confirms some familiar views about the Second World War: defeating the U-Boat threat and successfully moving troops and materials across the Atlantic was indeed vital to victory and has long been acknowledged. But his book presents many new angles.
During the great battle in Normandy in 1944, the western allies were also engaged in something called Operation Crossbow. Crossbow was the attempt to stop the launching of thousands of V2 rockets from Germany toward Britain and the bridgehead expanding from Normandy. It succeeded; relatively few V2s flew successfully, and Crossbow may get a few lines in standard D-Day and liberation histories. What O'Brien shows is that Germany had spent as much developing the V2 as the US spent developing the atom bomb. And the air power the allies sent against the V2 was as large and costly as that devoted to supporting the armies in Normandy. Crossbow insured that the vast German expense on the V2 -- money that might have been spent elsewhere -- was almost entirely wasted. In terms of enemy power destroyed, it was a second Normandy at least, almost unnoticed
O'Brien has a thousand examples like this. (In the latter stages of the war, more than half, often much more, of all the fighter planes that Japan and Germany struggled to produce and send into battle were destroyed before they ever got into combat against the allies.)
How the War Was Won is a reminder to historians -- and O'Brien is a historian not an economist -- that in any kind of history the dramatic moments are not necessarily the decisive moments.
