In the latest anonymous review at Astral Codex Ten, the book to be considered is How the War Was Won by Phillips Payson O’Brien:
To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?
- It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front.
- That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW.
- I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one.
I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship.
The Wikipedia-Level Story of World War II (and O’Brien’s Counterargument)
To understand why O’Brien’s argument is so novel, you need to know the modern-day conventional understanding of the story of World War II. Here is my summary of the conventional narrative of World War II:
- Germany conquered Poland and France. It tried to bomb the UK into submission/maybe enable an invasion. That effort failed when Germany was defeated in the Battle of Britain, thanks largely to the plucky efforts of British airmen (memorably summarized by Winston Churchill: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”.)
- Stymied in the West, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, won a bunch of crushing victories, but then got turned back at the gates of Moscow. The Soviets moved all of their factories east of the Ural Mountains and produced a vast tide of T-34 tanks that overpowered the Germans.
- The Germans suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad and a bloody strategic defeat at Kursk, after which the Soviets relentlessly pounded Germany to defeat.
- The US and the UK sent a lot of material help and eventually fought the Germans too, most notably in the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. However, most of the fighting was done by the Soviets.
- It is very difficult to say how important the aerial bombing campaigns of the Western Allies were in defeating Germany. The Germans moved much of their production underground, insulating them from truly disastrous effects.
- The U.S. mostly fought alone against Japan, which won a series of impressive early victories (e.g., Pearl Harbor, the conquest of Singapore) until the decisive Battle of Midway, after which the vastly larger US industrial base outproduced Japan into oblivion.
- The US bombed the Japanese into submission by destroying Japanese cities, ultimately by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By examining where the Axis focused their productive capacities and how the Allies disrupted those capacities, O’Brien challenges virtually every part of that narrative:
- The Battle of Britain was not a close-run thing. The fact that British fighter planes were flying over their own territory meant their attrition rate of pilots and aircraft were far lower than the Germans’.
- American and British bombing mattered far more to the war’s outcome than the battles of the Eastern Front, which consumed a much smaller portion of German expenditures.
- American and British airpower made German battlefield victories on the Western Front virtually impossible and dramatically limited the force Germany could bring to bear in the East.
- Japan (really, Japan plus the giant empire it conquered at the beginning of the war) was an industrial behemoth to rival the Soviet Union. However, the destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet by American air and sea forces wrecked Japan’s economy.
- The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war.
