{"id":64058,"date":"2026-10-22T01:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T05:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=64058"},"modified":"2026-10-21T09:37:33","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T13:37:33","slug":"qotd-the-numbers-fallacy-in-world-war-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-the-numbers-fallacy-in-world-war-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The “numbers fallacy” in World War II"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Some historians, and many politicians, have simplified World War Two into a few stupid statements. “The war in the west was won on the Russian steppes” is one that springs to mind. They usually base such statements on traditional political incompetence — bad use of statistics. The truth is that numbers have rarely overthrown a technological edge (though the Americans under Custer and the British at Isandhlwana might have reservations on this), and World War Two is certainly not the best sample case to argue such a thing.<\/p>\n

During the war the smaller campaigns tended to get less credit — though it is sometimes suspicious that numbers are valued in some circumstances, and area in others. The Mediterranean Front against the Axis was an extraordinarily long campaign over an extremely large area, yet many \u2013 particularly Americans who often fail to understand the Mediterranean’s importance to intercontinental strategy \u2013 discount its scale and significance. (A British general visiting the Soviets responded to toasts about the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow by offering a toast to El Alamein. The bemused Soviets asked how big the battle was, and then commented “we would call that a skirmish” \u2013 a point which emphasises the fact that the hundreds of Soviet divisions embraced by historians of the Eastern Front were rarely as big as a British brigade or American Regimental Combat Team. To get a real comparison western divisions should be compared to Soviet corps.)<\/p>\n

Similarly the Burmese and New Guinea theatres are incredibly undervalued in their role against Japan. There were more Japanese divisions fighting longer and harder in either place than everywhere that American troops fought the Japanese put together. (The fact that in New Guinea it was Australians rather than Americans who did most of the successful fighting \u2013 the American troops first assigned disappointed their vainglorious Füaut;hrer<\/em> MacArthur enormously at first \u2013 might have had an influence on this ranking.)<\/p>\n

By contrast the Western Front against Germany in 1944 to 45 is overstated both in the area it covered, and in the number of troops involved (almost half the US troops listed for that campaign did not arrive until it was already almost over. A dozen divisions had barely landed in France before the Germans surrendered.) Which puts it in the same category as the Pacific campaign, which, if the allied troops are discounted \u2013 as they so often were by the Americans \u2013 rarely saw more than a couple of American divisions at a time engaged anywhere.<\/p>\n

The confusion is added to by the enigma that remains China, which is simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. It is undervalued in that China and Manchuria occupied the attention of 80% of the Japanese army throughout the war. Which means that by the standards applied by some historians, China was the Soviet Union of the East, and deserves all the glory that was lavished on communist Russia by the trendy historians of the last generation. On the other hand it was overvalued, in that China achieved virtually nothing in the war against the Japanese apart from occupying large numbers of very low-grade garrison troops. In fact when the US Air Force in one of its fits of vainglory, attempted to bomb Japan into submission from bases in China: the Japanese garrison troops stirred themselves enough to sweep forward and conquer \u2013 without any trouble at all \u2013 the provinces being used as bases (Operation Ichi-Go).<\/p>\n

Nigel Davies, “Oversimplification: The Numbers Fallacy in WWII”, rethinking history<\/em><\/a>, 2009-03-08.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some historians, and many politicians, have simplified World War Two into a few stupid statements. “The war in the west was won on the Russian steppes” is one that springs to mind. They usually base such statements on traditional political incompetence — bad use of statistics. The truth is that numbers have rarely overthrown a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[331,4,22,1118,7,24,5,1119,13,230],"tags":[347,1066,433,290],"class_list":["post-64058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-britain","category-china","category-germany","category-history","category-japan","category-military","category-russia","category-usa","category-ww2","tag-debunking","tag-logistics","tag-sovietunion","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-gFc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64058"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105446,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64058\/revisions\/105446"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}