Phillips O'Brien in his book 'How the war was won' has produced an attractive new way of understanding the Second World War in which he claims the Western Allies were the main contributors to victory by their creation of a new type of warfare - an air-sea 'super battlefield' and their destruction of the lion's share of the production of the German and Japanese war economies. He makes the valid point that by comparison the war's main land battles, such as Kursk only involved relatively small amounts of territory and destroyed only small amounts of cheap equipment such as tanks while the air-sea supper battlefield covered large parts of the globe and consumed well over half the German and Japanese economic output in aircraft alone before we take account of shipping. This destruction occurred on every day of the war and involved both the factories that produced the machines, the large non-operational losses of machines, for instance during the training of pilots and in vast battles of months duration such as the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-Boat. Nor is this a re-writing of the old air power argument since the act of fighting this new warfare stopped the enemy for moving and in so doing stressed both the German and Japanese economies to the extent that they failed and ultimately collapsed rather than were destroyed by air power.
While this is a convincing new way of looking at the Second World War at its heart it conceals an age old question, how do you value a war fought by rich, maritime countries based around high technology machines against an older form of warfare of poorer, continental nations based around First World War technology and men. Petrol and aluminium versus steel and coal. Mark Harrison has looked at some of these issues in his 2015 article "World War II: Won by American Planes and Ships, or by the Poor Bloody Russian Infantry?" (doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2016.1144460) and this article aims to build on this foundation and cover other aspects.
The air-sea super battlefield may have been a new style of warfare but it was not open to all nations, it was an option of maritime nations as you needed the safety of a moat to avoid direct land confrontation with your enemy both to give you the time to create the weapons to fight this war and because the war itself took years to stress the enemy. This option was not open to continental countries such as France with a large chunk of their economy sitting only a hundred kilometres from their north eastern border and by the same token the USSR found itself in December 941 having lost 900 km of territory, 60 million people and 40% of its industry after a campaigning lasting less than 6 months, while countries such as Poland were snuffed out in the same number of weeks. In that sense land warfare could be just as damaging and effective in military warfare as the air-sea battle was in economic warfare. No, a moat was essential to survive the transition from military warfare to economic warfare and to fight an air-sea super battlefield.
The second prerequisite of the air-sea battle was wealth. The USA and British Empire were the most wealthy nations on the planet measured in an absolute measure and by head of population, between them they represented a large portion of the technological capability and innovation. There were marked differences between the costs of the two elements of the air-sea battle, as sea warfare was remarkably cheap, shown by a British Committee attempting to assess the relative values of battleships and airpower came to the conclusion that one battleship was equivalent to 25 heavy bombers, as the battleship had an operational life of 30 or more years while bombers only a couple, ships to be refurbished and updated but aircraft were relatively fixed in their capabilities and each bomber required a ground organisation of 100 men every day to keep the 8 men in the air while battleships crews were 1500 men and required only occasional dockyard support. This was just as well as Britain could use her cost effective, pre-war built fleet to hold the enemy at bay while she spent two and a half years successfully developing a high technology heavy bomber force that could finally hit targets in Germany.
By contrast air warfare was immensely expensive. Of course most countries could build a plane and had innovative designers to fabricate the engines and airframes, it was the need to provide a continuous stream of both planes and aircrew in large numbers that took all the effort and nowhere more so than in heavy four engine bombers. Only two nations , the USA and British Empire managed to create heavy bomber forces and a good part of the British effort was sustained by some two thirds of all the Lend Lease sent out by America. It was not so much the cost of the aircraft as the technology that went into them. Air warfare required precision to both find and strike their relative small targets and as we have seen in our own time, precision is very expensive with a modern day cruise missile costing over a million dollars to deliver a 1,000 kg payload on target. The real cost was in the optics and electronics that delivered the payload on target. Less wealthy countries such as the USSR were able to build planes such as the Pe-8 but could not raise the resources to build then in the thousands to create a bomber force and Germany's attempt in the He-177 was only reached the experimental stage compared with Britain which built a huge force of three types of bomber, Stirling, Halifax and Lancaster and the USA which also crewed three types in the B-24, B-17 and B-29.
In many ways the air-sea super battlefield is a self-fulfilling prophesy in that rich nations fought the war using their geographic advantage to pick the time and place of their battles and their economic and technological strength to fight a war of machines against poorer enemies that could not marshal these resources to the same extent. They destroyed more machines simply by virtue of having more machines themselves and concentrating on this aspect of warfare. It would be extraordinary if a country such as China or the USSR who both relied on poorly equipped mass land forces managed to destroy sufficiently large numbers of German or Japanese aircraft to have an economic effect.
The case of Japan is illustrative from a geographic point of view, as a maritime nation she could have adopted a similar approach to the air-sea super battlefield. However she lacked the necessary wealth or economic strength to field large numbers of advanced aircraft and naval weapons, although she did gather an irreplaceable, highly trained naval air force that did have some early successes. Instead Japan relied on a large but cheap main battlefleet which failed to protect her from the actual weapons that caused her downfall, the submarine and the air dropped sea mine. Japan had neither the technological base to find solutions to either threat nor the productive capability to marshal a suitable force to oppose these threats. The result was that her battlefleet was forced to operate well away from the homeland where they could obtain oil which the homeland was cut off from its army in China and its food imports. Here army though large was equipped in a very basic way and fared badly against the Soviets in 1939 and 1945 though it was more than sufficient to conquer most of metropolitan China.
Similarly Germany, although a richer country than Japan and one with a more developed economy and technology base, by nature of her geography needed to maintain a large land force which in 1941 numbered 3 million ground troops and 150 divisions compared to the US Army which was limited to 90 division and the British Army to 50 divisions. As Adam Tooze has pointed out in his study of the German economy, that Germany had to pursue a step by step approach, first creating a large land army to conquer the raw materials she needed to fight the war and once these had been obtained, switch both manpower and production to build a large air force to fight the USA and British Empire. The failure to defeat the USSR in December 1941 by a short military campaign doomed this effort and forced Germany into an economic war where she had to divide her effort between a mass army and an air-sea campaign. She was unable to concentrate on an air-sea super battlefield, yet even so it is doubtful if a medium sized European state had sufficient economic resources to pursue a mass air campaign on the scale of the US effort. Moreover Germany's limiting factor was not economic production, it was human capital as Germany had to bring workers in from across Europe to man her factories as so much manpower was devoted to the mass army.
The influence of human capital on the way the war was finally won is significant. Japan did not surrender although most of her aircraft and ships were destroyed, she continued to fight the war even though her cities were being firebombed and large numbers of her population were being killed. Nor did Germany buckled under the combined weight of Allied air offensive even though more bombs were dropped on Germany in 1945 than at any other time during the war. Neither war was won by destroying machines, limiting movement or economic privations although these were contributory factors. Wars are ultimately about people and making people do what you want. The threat of death from the air was viewed in much the same way as populations view disease, something that strikes some members of the population and others, the majority, survive So the really the only way to make people submit to your will is at the point of a bayonet, personal, specific to you and immediate. Firebombing of Japanese cities did not change the leaderships attitude it took the dropping of the two atomic bombs to make that happen, due to the rational that these weapons killed everyone and everything within their zone. Likewise Germany surrendered only once Soviet troops entered Berlin, her ability to resist the air campaign has collapsed months earlier, her armies had been failing to halt the Soviet advance since January and the last real counter offensive had been the Battle of the Bulge and the Lake Balaton offensive earlier that winter.
The balance sheet of human capital shows that the USA lost 400,000 dead, the United Kingdom 450,000 (both less than France which lost 600,000) while Germany lost around 4.5 million military, 1 million civilian (with another 2 million killed in post war expulsions,) while Japan lost a bit over 2.3 million military and 800,000 civilian dead. In total the Second World War cost over 50 million lives, the question is what relevance did this human toll have on the overall outcome of the war?
Central to this discussion is an understanding of how wars are won, the factors that influence leaderships to surrender, capitulate or cease the fighting and negotiate. The Second World War saw a wide variety of reasons which ranged from:
Loss of home territory and its occupation by enemy troops such as Poland in 1939, Norway 1940 and Germany in 1945
Defeat of a large proportion of military forces such as France in 1940 and to a large extent, Germany in 1945
Threat of mass death of population such as Japan faced after the dropping of the two atomic bombs
Death of leader, political collapse or revolution as in Russia in First World War
Loss of a perceived, large amount of own sides human capital as seen in Vietnam War
Of interest is the fact that neither economic collapse, nor other limiting factors such as shortage of critical resources such as oil, loss of weapons caused leaderships to surrender as both Axis countries felt that they could use their remaining power to inflict such losses on the attackers as to get better terms - a negotiated peace or a strategic miracle would reverse the situation. So in that sense the air-sea super battlefield would always need some level of assistance from more traditional warfare methods to bring the war to its conclusion as simple destruction of the enemies machines and stopping them moving was insufficient pressure.
Moreover, land territory remains important as both the US and British Empires had to fight for land to establish airbases from which to fight the air-sea super battlefield. Aircraft carriers could not carry sufficient large aircraft and their own territory was in the wrong geographic place and so lacked range to critical targets, the main German oil supply at Ploesti being a prime example as it finally took an air campaign between April and August 1944 to affect production by which time the Red Army had arrived and Soviet tanks stopped production entirely. As we have seen earlier short campaigns capturing territory are remarkably effective in producing large economic effects as both France and the USSR found out to their cost. Another example of a campaign to establish airbases mentioned by O'Brien is the US campaign in China, were air and modest military commitments by US ground forces were supposed to push the Japanese back sufficiently in north eastern China so that air bases could be established so that B-29s could bomb the Japanese Home islands. It failed because the Japanese Army pushed back and recovered the narrow strip of land territory.
By contrast most of the vast "territory" of the air-land super battlefield was actually never visited by a ship or a plane and its importance lay in a handful of routes and key nodes which were the focus of concentrated activity. The Pacific is the classic example here as most of it was just water, with key locations being centres of human occupation, linked by trade routes. Nor was this importance fixed in time as locales such as Henderson Field in Guadalcanal might be vital one month and a forgotten backwater the next.
So the nature and value of "territory" is different between land and air-sea, the former fixed, dense and concentrated, its variable value determined by either its geological assets, human habitation or ease of access for transport, such as rivers and flat plains. By contrast the value of air-sea is transient, with varying levels of activity across its surface concentrated at nodal points or routes. Capture a piece of land and generally it has some level of importance; capture even a large piece of sea and it may be entirely worthless. Other than trade routes, the most important air-sea assets were actually land such as islands, ports and airfields and their importance lay in their geography, their placement in relation to one another and the routes between them. For instance, Okinawa's high value lay in its distance from Japan and the characteristics of the B-29 bomber, had the US designed a bomber with different characteristics, this island's value may have been completely different.
Another point in the discussion about territory is O'Brien's choice of exemplar battles, which seem to show that even seemingly large amounts of loss of men and materiel in a particular battle are in reality dwarfed by the day to day losses up and down the front line. He chooses Kursk and Stalingrad as exemplars since these were strategic turning points, however it is worth making the point that in fact both were defeats of offensives and hence defensive victories. Choose instead offensive victories such as Case Barbarossa or on the Soviet side, Operation Bagration and a different picture emerges where these offensives gain large amounts of territory and cause huge destruction in short periods of time.
Which leads us back to the loss of human capital and its importance in warfare together with loss of territory as the main means of wining wars and bringing them to a conclusion. Because while the US and British Empire and the Luftwaffe might be fighting a war of machines on the air-sea battlefield, the real power behind the Germany Nazi state was the Army. It has been argued by historians such as Freisner and DiNardo that the German Army was in reality a First World War army with a thin veneer of modernity in its Panzer arm, the main bulk of the force was horse-drawn, armed with artillery and little different from that of the First World War. It main power came from its millions of soldiers as it in June 1941, it deployed over 3 million men and a total with Allies of 4 million men against the USSR as it advanced on three strategic directions against the smaller force of the Red Army deployed on the frontiers. However Germany began to lose its advantage in 1942 as it struggled to maintain its army above 2.5 million men and Allies began to withdraw their own troops at the same time as the Red Army steadily grew in size to 6 million men. With the balance of human capital reversed, only German military efficiency allowed the Ostheer to continue its offensive albeit on two strategic directions for 1942 and further improvements in Soviet military efficiency reduced this to one strategic direction in 1943. The further decline in Axis fortunes in the East was inextricably linked to manpower as the Soviets maintained theirs despite their high loss rate while the German forces shrank with every defeat during 1944.
We know that this land war in Russia could be conducted with inexpensive weapons such as the older technologies of tanks and artillery because so much of the German economic output went into the air-sea battle without serious consequences. This was a war of coal and steel, resources of which Germany had in abundance. It was a similar situation for the Japanese Army in China where so many of the two million military casualties occurred. These were not unimportant wars and they had strategic significance however they require a different basis of calculation from a purely economic one. For instance an infantryman with a rifle, cost the life of the man, his equipment and sustenance, training and transport by railway and had the ability to kill one other soldier at a time. By contrast, a fighter pilot in his plane had many of the same costs but could kill dozens at a time. However the plane itself had costs, maintenance mechanics, spares parts, engineers and bulldozers to build airfields, replacement drop tanks manufactured back in the US and of course, the petrol to power all this activity which had to be shipped from the Caribbean. Similarly the costs of amphibious warfare were equally high as it was estimated that to get one US Marine onto an island beach required 28 others behind him in support. A German soldier on the Eastern Front required nothing like this level of support and was as equally effective as his Marine counterpart.
Another contemporary American measurement was the 'Divisional Slice' whereby all the logistical forces and close support air forces for a theatre were parcelled out across the number of divisions. For Normandy a US division had a slice of over 36,000 men when the actual division had 14,000 men which means that there were two men in support for every divisional soldier or 62% of soldiers in support. Post war German calculations using US methodology showed that divisional slice of 27,000 men for a division of 12,500 in 1944 with one soldier in support of every divisional soldier or 52% of soldiers in support. A similar type of calculation made from Soviet records shows the support forces of a mid-war Guards Army of 55,000 to number 3,000 with perhaps another 1,000 at Front level which translates into one supporting soldier for every 15 divisional soldiers. Even when construction and transport troops are taken into consideration, Soviet Armed Forces only had 30% of its troops devoted to support.
These are good illustrations of the high costs in both economic and human capital terms of the approach to warfare of the Western Allies and air warfare was even more expensive. To look at it another way, the US Armed Services mobilised 12 million men which produced in 1944 a land force of about 2 million men in the field who suffered 400,000 dead. By contrast, the USSR Armed Services was 11 million men strong and produced a field army of 6 million however they mobilised in total 35 million of whom 10 million were killed. A high proportion of the men in the Soviet Armed Services were there to replace casualties so we could envisage it costing the US six men to get one into battle while for the USSR it was one man to get another into battle.
What this illustrates that economic cost is not a good measure of military output as different methods of warfare and different methodologies have varying levels of overhead.
To gain a fuller picture of the costs of the war, it is necessary to include both economic output and human capital and find a way however crude of resolving the costs between them. There is a whole subject devoted to 'Value of a Statistical Life' but modern methodologies would put the value of one life at around $4 million in today's prices or $250,000 in 1940 prices. This would produce the following order when looking at financial costs alone.
These are not supposed to be actual estimates as VSL varies so widely, simply an indication of the real overall cost of the war over and above the straight economic cost.
How the war was won presents a view of the war dominated by values of economic output and machines in the air-sea super battlefield. What I have tried to demonstrate is that land warfare might have occupied a smaller area but in many ways that area was far more valuable per acre than empty stretches of water. Similarly destruction of economic output and denying the enemy the opportunity to move was important, however many of the features of actually winning the war revolved around human beings, killing them or dominating them and this was most effectively done by soldiers. The cost of human capital cannot be excluded from these calculations since it had such an effect on the outcome. This debate is important because on its conclusion hangs our view of the war, was it the USA that was most important with its money and machines or perhaps China and the USSR with their poverty and people?