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How the war was Won

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book systematically cuts through all the bravado and battlefield-centric focus of World War 2 history and focuses on the things that mattered Manufacturing, logistics, and control over the air-sea theatre. It also provides insight into how the leaders of both the Axis powers as well as the Allies thought and how they argued against themselves, for better or worse.

🎨 Impressions

It was a really good book; I must say it was a bit dull when describing the relationships between the commanders of WW2, but else it was a really good read If things are correct in this book, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, the way we have thought and discussed WW2 is completely wrong. All the production capacity that could be designed for aircraft was control over the skies meant that you more or less could control the enemy's movement.

It also says when Germany/Japan could not affect the supply system of the Allies, the war was basically lost for them When the U-boat war was done, the German chances of victory followed their Uboats to the bottom.

I was really astonished by how much resources were delegated to aircraft and vessels and how little to armoured vehicles It was pretty much everything they could. Furthermore, it was also important for me to understand how the leaders thought and fought over which initiatives should be prioritized, which is something that is not discussed too much and I did not know that much about.

It is insane to me that the enormous losses of the Soviets and also the Germans to an extent on the east front were, at the time, not that relevant We humans were reduced to a small portion of what war really was about. I think the industrialisation of war has made us small cogs in the system, with the horrendous consequences that it has entailed.

One thing I learned later in Turn the Ship Around was the massive impact of the American submarine force during WWII. In this book this is debated and it is not certain the amount of impact the submarine warfare against Japan.

A podcast on the same topic

✍️ My Top Quotes

  • There are two targets the bombing of which brings everyone to their knees: fuel and communications

  • German army lost at most 350 armoured fighting vehicles (AFV) during the first ten days of the Battle of Kursk, when the fighting was most intense During all of July and August 1943 on the Eastern Front the German army lost 1,331 AFV. Yet, during 1943 as a whole, Germany produced just over 12,000 AFV. This means that the Germans lost less than 3 % of the AFV they built in 1943 during the Battle of Kursk, and only 11 % of annual AFV production during all of July and August. El Alamein was even less damaging. At the start of the battle on October 23, 1942, Rommel’s famous Panzerarmee Afrika had 249 German tanks. By November 4, 36 of these were left. The Germans thus lost just over 200 AFV in two weeks. Within the context of German AFV production, El Alamein barely registered.

  • Industrially and technologically, the war was primarily a competition of aircraft development and construction In Germany, the construction of airframes, air engines, and the weapons and machinery needed to power and arm aircraft made up at least 50 % of German production every year of the war, and at certain times reached up to 55 %.

  • The German V1 and V2 campaigns, which the Anglo-Americans tried to counter with enormous air assets under the codename Operation Crossbow, represented a far greater economic exertion on both sides than did land battles such as Stalingrad or the invasions of Sicily and Italy The design and construction of the V2 rocket, for instance, probably cost as much as all German AFV construction between 1939 and 1945. On the other hand, the RAF and USAAF actually dropped more ordnance on Crossbow targets in the summer of 1944 than they dropped in support of Allied armies in Normandy – in the end it represented 3 % of the Anglo-American air effort in all theaters throughout the entire war.

  • One of the other reasons losses mounted in the second half of 1944 was even more seriously degraded pilot training Even as the need for more and more pilots became pressing owing to increased production and increased losses, the Luftwaffe had no fuel to train them. In July 1944 the number of hours a German pilot trainee needed before being sent on operations was reduced to approximately 100. Of this, only 30 were spent in aircraft with the power of operational fighters. At the same time, both the RAF and USAAF required at least 300 hours before operations, and almost all the flying time was in aircraft with engines as powerful as they would have when on operations. However, it does seem that in certain cases the Germans couldn’t even supply enough fuel to give their pilots the 100 hours of training. Lt General Gerd von Massow, who directed German pilot training in 1944 and 1945, admitted that as fuel ran low, he simply stopped training certain pilots. “Eventually I arrived at the state where, with the small amount of petrol still remaining to me, I trained only those who were instructors with me and those who were half finished – all the rest, thousands and thousands of them, I handed over, men of the very best material whose training I simply couldn’t complete anymore.”

  • In 1965 a major movie was made about Operation Crossbow which epitomizes everything that is wrong about the daring-do vision of World War II Starring George Peppard and Sophia Loren, it tells the story of an American secret agent being infiltrated into an underground German V2 factory that looks more like the lair of a James Bond villain than the real caves of misery and death in which the rockets were built. From the inside, this brave secret agent proceeds to sabotage German rocket production. However, within the context of winning World War II, the real problem with the movie is that it hardly mentions the real Operation Crossbow, which was the enormous allocation of air resources against German V1 and V2 production and launch facilities.

  • As late as the first quarter of 1943, 11 % of German war output was made up of submarine production. The figure then declined steadily in the second half of 1943, after Germany had lost the Battle of the Atlantic.

  • By 1944, Germany and Japan were losing between one-quarter and one-half of their produced aircraft trying to deploy them to their operating areas These extraordinary losses show how air and sea power operated on a far more profound level than land warfare. One of the main paths to these losses was laid in 1943, when the pressure of the air and sea war forced both countries to try to produce many more pilots while severely reducing their access to fuel.

  • Of course, the Nazi state was responsible for many of these shortcomings German science blossomed during the tolerant Weimar Republic, but under the racist and anti-Semitic Nazi dictatorship, many of Germany’s finest scientific minds, most famously Albert Einstein, left for the United States and Great Britain where they would do important work against the country of their birth.

  • When it comes to overall losses of AFV from D-Day through August and the full-scale German withdrawal over the Seine, numbers vary from 1,500 on the low side to 2,000 on the higher end. Manpower losses also became extreme, and beginning in August, those in the west surpassed those in the east for the first time in the war.

  • However, in 1944 and 1945 the Germans experienced a dramatic leap in casualties, losing more men killed in 1944 alone than they lost during the entire time between 1939 and 1943 In 1945 these losses continued at this extreme pace, with the Germans losing almost as many men between January and April of that year as they lost in 1942 and 1943 combined.

  • For much of the war there was one group, interestingly led by Churchill, which argued for the creation of specialized hunter-killer groups of anti-submarine vessels Such groups would be unencumbered from convoy duty and sent out to try to find submarines. While conceptually this might sound sensible, it ended up being an almost total failure. Submarines were simply too difficult to locate on their own, and these hunter-killer groups achieved little. On the other hand, by 1943, the convoy itself could be turned into the hunter-killer group – by appearing to be an enticing prey. Periodically, or so the reasoning went, a different convoy, preferably a large one, could be escorted by twice the usual allotment of escort vessels. The submarines that attacked such an over-escorted convoy would be facing extreme danger.

  • Disagreeing with Alanbrooke was sure to be seen by him as a sign of a lack of intelligence, which seems to have been particularly the case for George Marshall Both Marshall and Alanbrooke had a rather low opinion of the other’s intelligence, but for Alanbrooke, pointing out Marshall’s supposed stupidity was a regular event, especially when the two disagreed about strategic priorities: “A very disappointing wire from American COS – Marshall absolutely fails to realize what strategic treasures lie at our feet in the Mediterranean and always hankers after cross Channel operations.

  • Much of his bile was reserved for Churchill, for not recognizing Alanbrooke’s strategic genius When Churchill first conceived of an operation to capture northern Sumatra, Alanbrooke reacted as if the Prime Minister had lost his mind.

  • Roosevelt’s exact thinking in 1941 is still elusive On the one hand, there are those who believe that he was determined to get the United States into the war by whatever means, Machiavellian or not, that lay at his disposal. He thus broke international and national law to help Britain and the USSR, tried to goad the Germans into firing on American warships on the high seas, and when all this failed, ended up forcing the Japanese into attacking the United States by embargoing the sale of oil to Japan.

  • At Trident itself, the British walked into this trap, only partly aware of the gravity of their actions In his memoirs of World War II, Churchill speaks openly about the British heading to Trident determined to thwart American plans for aggressive action in Burma. During the meetings Churchill listed supporting China as Britain’s sixth highest priority, and even then was probably being disingenuous.

  • Hinsley makes the fundamental mistake of not differentiating between merchant ships sunk in convoy and those sunk outside of convoy In the first six months of 1941, while sinkings were high, they were still primarily sinkings outside of convoy. At this time, 344,000 tons of merchant ships were sunk sailing independently, only 147,000 tons were lost in convoy, and another 66,000 were lost straggling behind. The idea that somehow this figure for convoy losses would have gone up by 750 % without Ultra seems questionable.

  • If there was one great opponent of the bombing of submarine installations it was Air Marshal Harris Beginning in late 1942, Harris began to complain strongly that the intense American effort to bomb submarine facilities, including the “impermeable” submarine pens, was a great waste of resources. He regularly lobbied Portal and the Americans to stop attacks on the U-boat pens, which he considered impervious. Of course, being Harris, his solution was to abandon almost all defensive efforts and expend resources on attacks on German cities, which he assumed would lead to a collapse in German submarine production. He wanted to withdraw much of the air protection devoted to convoys and switch these resources to strategic bombing. His monomania led him to take a basically correct position on the inability to bomb German U-boat pens and turn it into one that would have made things worse.

  • During 1943, the construction of anti-aircraft guns made up 28 % of German weapons production, or almost 3 % of overall munitions output These weapons also consumed a massive amount of German ammunition production, which was the second highest category of munitions production in Germany after aircraft. Between January 1943 and September 1944, antiaircraft ammunition made up about 17 % of overall German ammunition production. As ammunition production made up approximately 30 % of German munitions output, producing ammunition for anti-aircraft guns in 1943 would have been almost 5 % of overall output – so that building and arming anti-aircraft weaponry in 1943 would have been approximately 7 % of overall German munitions output. This would have put it almost exactly on a par with German AFV production (not including ammunition) for the year.

  • Beyond that, the damage wrought by a small number of German submarines in early 1942, much of which was the result of conscious choices, resulted in many billions of dollars being spent on both escort vessels and merchant ships in late 1942 and 1943 Spending on each was increased by at least a combined figure of $3 billion in late 1942 ($1.8 billion extra for merchant ships and $1 billion extra for small naval vessels). These billions, especially for the huge number of new escort vessels, were to a large degree wasted, even if that wasn’t realized when they were allocated. By the summer of 1943, it was clear that a drastic over-production of escort vessels had been undertaken.

  • This simple fact of speed differential should also help correct one of the other misunderstandings about the war at sea, and that is the relative uniformity of merchant tonnage The tonnage that the Germans were able to sink for much of the war was older, unescorted vessels or ships that were taking part in slower convoys. The loss of such vessels, while serious, was being made up by new construction that was considerably faster, such as the Liberty ships. The tonnage of these newer, faster vessels was worth considerably more than the tonnage of older, slower ships. Not only could they bring goods and supplies across the Atlantic more quickly, they were inherently safer. For instance, between October 1942 and May 1943, the faster convoys (those averaging around 9 knots) suffered a 50 % smaller casualty rate than slower convoys (those averaging around 7 knots), even when they were attacked at approximately the same rate.

  • Before the month was out, Doenitz had decided to abandon the North Atlantic – which for all intents and purposes meant that Germany was definitely going to lose World War II

  • In the end, the 100th suffered more than any other 8th Air Force unit during the Regensburg raid, losing nine of its twenty-one B17s This was an unsustainable casualty rate, and it is one of the reasons that the Anglo-American strategic air offensive of 1943 is almost universally seen as a failure. And yet, for all its heavy losses, this one raid on Regensburg destroyed far more aircraft than the Germans lost during the Battle of Kursk, perhaps more than they lost on the Eastern Front during all of the summer of 1943.

  • Perhaps the COA’s most famous, and controversial, industrial target, which heretofore had rarely been mentioned in USAAF war plans, was the German anti-friction bearing (ball-bearing) industry Ball-bearings appealed to the COA for a number of reasons. They were indispensable elements for all modern war equipment (aircraft, submarines, tanks, artillery). Most importantly, however, most of Germany’s ball-bearing production was concentrated in the vicinity of the town of Schweinfurt. By the COA’s estimation, at least 40 % of all ball-bearing production within Germany and Germanoccupied Europe was in three facilities around this town. The actual figure was even larger, with the three Schweinfurt plants in August 1943 accounting for 57 % of German manufacturing capacity in anti-friction bearings, and when it came to ball bearings of the crucial size of between 8 and 150 mm, they produced 95 %. Destroying them and a handful of other targets, it was hoped, would send shockwaves throughout all Germany’s munitions production.

  • Up until 1942, German pilot and non-operational aircraft losses were manageable However, in late 1943 and early 1944 losses resulting from poor pilot training grew significantly. According to Galland, a German fighter pilot had a 5 % chance of being killed or wounded badly per month in 1942. By 1944, this had reached 30 % per month, with the great acceleration being in the second half of 1943.

  • Dispersal caused real problems for the Luftwaffe in more than just lost production A major problem was that the new factories, built with great haste, produced aircraft with more structural flaws. Goering believed that this was a particular problem that plagued the Luftwaffe in 1944. The quality of aircraft built in the dispersed factories “suffered considerably. It happened, for instance, that the fittings at the assembly were not accurate enough, and similar things. Sometimes it was just that the fittings on the wing section were rough, in other cases the two landing wheels were different.”

  • Using Milch’s calculations above, supported by the evidence from the different industrialists, it would be conservative to say that the total number of German aircraft, mostly fighters, destroyed before production because of factory destruction, relocation and aluminum losses in 1943 was somewhere between five and six thousand This estimate is in line with Strategic Bombing Survey calculations and the differences between German intended and actual outputs. The USSBS estimated that between July 1943 and December 1944, German aircraft production was reduced by 18,492 units because of strategic bombing, of which 14,353 were fighters. This all makes sense when one looks at how the rise in German aircraft construction stopped immediately in July 1943, and leveled off (with some noticeable declines) until February 1944.

  • Speer calculated that by 1944, 28,000 workers were devoted to building constructions to protect Hitler from British and American bombs148 The Fuhrer was so terrified by the prospect of being killed in an air raid that the concrete roof thickness of these structures ultimately reached 16 feet, or more than 5 meters. However, Hitler’s personal safety only tells part of the story.

  • These modern fortresses range from the Fuhrerbunker and flak towers in central Berlin to the U-boat pens that populated the western European coast. They were built to and did withstand multiple direct bomb hits. To this day many of them remain indestructible, such as the U-boat pens constructed in Trondheim, Norway, which have proved too difficult and expensive to dismantle even after repeated attempts.

  • Morale in a totalitarian society is irrelevant so long as the control patterns function effectively. The Nazi party controls have functioned well. Air raids have produced temporary local outbreaks, but the opposition has had little opportunity to take advantage of the breakdown of communications, transport and services in these periods. Social control is required to re-establish the conditions where life is possible. This the Nazi party has been sufficiently adaptable to provide.

  • Overall, the V2 was the most expensive weapon system the Nazis ever undertook The USSBS estimate was that the effort that went into the project in 1944 and 1945 alone was equal to the cost of production of 24,000 aircraft. Another estimate is that the development and production of the V2 cost Nazi Germany RM 2 billion In that case it would have cost Germany in relative terms as much as the Manhattan Project cost the United States. Actually this latter estimate might be too low, as production costs alone would have reached that level. In per unit costs, according to Speer, the first V2s cost RM 1 million each. Later, when production became more efficient, the per unit cost dropped to somewhere between RM 250,000 and RM 300,000. The actual number of V2s built was between 6,000 and 7,000. At the end of the war, documents from Speer’s ministry claimed that in 1944, 4,145 were completed, with an additional 2,165 finished in 1945. However the director of the main assembly plant, the Mittelwerke at Niedersachswerfen claimed that a larger number was built, more than 7,000. Even if we accept the lower estimate on production and cost, more than 6,000 V2s were built, at an average cost of something close to RM 300,000 each, which alone would have cost close almost RM 2 billion. If the higher estimates for number and cost are right, the overall cost could easily have reached 3 billion RM.

  • It seems that at least 60,000–70,000 slave workers were forcibly put to work at the main production facilities for the V2156 Tragically, 10,000 of these workers perished from the extraordinary brutality they were shown by their Nazi captors, making them the single largest group of human victims killed by the V-weapons.

  • Individual air raids on Hamburg and Tokyo killed many times more civilians than all the V1s and V2s together One of the reasons for this relatively limited loss of life was the effectiveness of Crossbow, especially against the launch sites.

  • Whilst in September 1943, an average of 19,900 wagons of coal were transported daily in the Ruhr Area, this allocation of wagons has fallen in the last few days to 8700 and 7700 wagons due to air attacks Consequently, after about 8 to 12 weeks the industrial stocks, which are based on 4 weeks’ supply, will be exhausted.

  • Together, all of these attacks on German army mobility resulted in a cataclysm of losses that dwarfed those of earlier in the war As mentioned previously, German casualties before 1944 were actually manageable and running at a pace below that of World War I. In 1944, however, casualties became catastrophic. In just two months of 1944, July and August, the Germans reported 563,973 deaths in their armed services. This was equal to the number of deaths in all of 1942 and 70 % as many deaths as suffered by the Germans in all of 1943. German ground equipment losses followed suit and, for the first time in the war, progressed at a rate far higher than replacement production

  • Such a plan appealed to Marshall for two main reasons The first was his honest and strong conviction that bases in China were a necessity for the defeat of Japan. The second was the need to give Douglas MacArthur a major command that would appease his enormous ego. Marshall had many prima donnas to deal with during World War II, but MacArthur was especially gilded. He was desperate for glory in general, but specifically focused on leading a major campaign to retake the Philippines.

  • American submarines were the most effective weapon that the United States had in the trade war, and they did extract a large toll on Japanese merchant shipping However, it seems difficult to reach a consensus on their value. Morison paid only a small amount of attention to this trade campaign, giving only eleven pages in one of his volumes. On the other hand, others imply that they could almost have won the trade war by themselves and shut off Japanese trade throughout the empire.

  • Many within the Japanese power structure also realized that the loss of the Marianas was so profound that, had it been politically possible, Japan should have sued for peace at that time. Rear Admiral Soichi Takaga began studying the potential impact of the loss of the Marianas on Japanese power in 1943. What he discovered was that losing the islands, regardless of any further operations to take the Philippines or Singapore, would effectively end Japanese trade with their southern empire.

  • Almost immediately after Peleiu, was taken, it was realized that the effort was unnecessary. Admiral Halsey for one claimed it was a waste of time and they should have been bypassed, even if the Americans were going to the Philippines. Avoiding Peleiu would have saved many American lives, for instance on Iwo Jima. That famous island was defended by just a small number of unprepared Japanese troops when the Marianas fell. Saburo Sakai, when he made his emergency deployment to Iwo Jima after the news of the invasion of Saipan broke, was surprised to see how poorly the island was protected. American air attacks on Iwo as part of the Marianas operations left the forces on the island unable to react, and in his view it would have been conquered easily at that time. However, the diversion of effort to the Philippines saved the island for Japan, for now.

  • Hitler continued to have great hopes in the effectiveness of the Type XXI until the moment when he put a bullet into his head One of the reasons that the German dictator ordered German forces in the Courland pocket to hold their positions (thus depriving Germany of many troops that could have been stationed in front of Berlin) was because the navy needed a safe area along the Baltic coast in which it could test the Type XXI.

  • Even though heavy mining around Japan did not start until March, in 1945 as a whole it was responsible for sinking more tonnage than US submarines

  • That their leaders, to try to prolong their political authority, would not take the honorable step that the leaders of imperial Germany took in 1918 speaks volumes about both the horrible and yet grotesquely petty nature of both regimes

  • Throughout the war, the economies of Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States were geared by very large majorities towards the manufacture of air and sea weaponry In every case, the construction of aircraft was the single greatest priority for each economy, composing at a minimum one-third of output, as for the United States, to more than half, as for the United Kingdom. When the equipping and arming of the aircraft was added to the mix, these figures were increased. Because of this, during the war, the Luftwaffe received more than half of German production. When one adds to this the enormous German effort in antiaircraft construction from 1943 onwards, the vast majority of which was for the air war over Germany, approximately 60 % of German production was made up of armed aircraft and anti-air weaponry when munitions output reached its peak.