IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cge/wacage/251.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

World War II:Won by American Planes and Ships, or by the Poor Bloody Russian Infantry?

Author

Listed:
  • Harrison, Mark

    (CAGE, University of Warwick, and the Hoover Institution, Stanford University)

Abstract

This short paper reviews a new book about World War II. In most such books, what is new is not usually important, and what is important is not new. This one is an exception. How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, by Phillips Payson O'Brien, sets out a new perspective on the war. An established view is that World War II was decided on the Eastern front, where multi-million armies struggled for supremacy on land and millions died. According to O’Brien, this neglects the fact that the preponderance of the Allied productive effort was devoted to building ships and planes for an air-sea battle that was fought to a limited extent in the East and with much higher intensity across theWestern and Pacific theatres. The Allies’ air-sea power framed the outcomes of the great land campaigns by preventing Germany and Japan from fully realizing their economic potentials for war. Finding much to be said for this reinterpretation, I reconsider the true significance of the Eastern front.

Suggested Citation

  • Harrison, Mark, 2015. "World War II:Won by American Planes and Ships, or by the Poor Bloody Russian Infantry?," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 251, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cge:wacage:251
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/251-2015_harrison.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    attrition; air-sea power; strategy; war losses; WorldWar II. JEL Classification: F51; N40;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F51 - International Economics - - International Relations, National Security, and International Political Economy - - - International Conflicts; Negotiations; Sanctions
    • N40 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - General, International, or Comparative

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cge:wacage:251. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jane Snape (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewaruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.