A few days after I passed my comp exams for my Ph.D. in WWII history, my professor told me to read this book. I finally go around to it. For decades the accepted historical interpretation of WWII was that the eastern front, the battle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia was the critical theater of the war. The massive land battles and tremendous amounts of resources involved ultimately determined the outcome of the entire Second World War. This was seen as a corrective to the traditional British view of the war, which was essentially one that told the story as Dunkirk to D-Day via El Alamein, and the American view which also focused on the Mediterranean and Northwest European theaters.O'Brien blows this view apart with facts and figures, arguing that the air/sea war was far more important in the long run that events in Russia. His primary argument is that production was always heavily tilted in virtually every major belligerent nation (with the possible exception of the Soviet Union), toward building aircraft, warships, and cargo vessels. He often notes many battles traditionally viewed as decisive such as Stalingrad and Kursk, and asserts that the total amount of production that went into such battles was negligible for when compared to each nation's overall war production totals. This sounds quite simplistic, but O'Brien argues quite convincingly. Additionally, he looks at the development of Germany's V-2 rocket program, which drew significant resources away from other production areas, and the Allies response, Operation Crossbow. Crossbow was a massive bomber campaign designed to take out V-2 sites across northwestern Europe. This operation likewise dwarfed land battles that occurred at the time in terms of production. Indeed, the total number of tanks, armored vehicles, and non-anti-air artillery pieces was negligible compared to the production needed for Crossbow.O'Brien also does make some other wonderful, and undoubtedly controversial, assertions. For instance, he notes that the Battle of Britain had been won long before the fighting began, and that Churchill's dramatic declarations, "This was their finest hour," and so forth were certainly stirring, but ultimately irrelevant. Production, not heroism, determined the course of the battle. My own research has been about U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, and I appreciated O'Brien's remarks on him as well. He notes that Marshall was probably the least-effective policy maker in Roosevelt's orbit during the Second World War. For instance, Marshall disapproved of Roosevelt's call for expanded production of aircraft in 1942, which ultimately went through and ensured that the U.S. could battle effectively in both the Pacific and European theaters in 1943. He also notes that Marshall's insistence on an invasion of France in 1942 largely fell on deaf ears, even as Admirals Leahy and King consistently convinced the president of the need to drive the war home to Japan. O'Brien presents Marshall as an Army man who valued tanks and artillery far more than aircraft and warships, and thus failed to appreciate the tools needed to defeat the Axis.O'Brien presents his argument as one of modernity. The Allied air and sea wars, with their constant innovation in production, doctrine, and tactics, represented a truly 20th century kind of warfare, while many military men and policy makers still viewed the war as one that would be decided by great land battles, a backward looking approach. Again, O'Brien is quite convincing in his arguments, and has forced me to rethink many of my conceptions of the war. I wrote my MA thesis on the Eastern Front, and have had to recontextualize much of what I thought at that time. One area that I can really criticize is that I think too often O'Brien fails to account for manpower at the front. He discusses manpower needs for production frequently, but does not really discuss the impact of the loss of manpower to the army after, say, a battle like Stalingrad. Such an examination would have been very welcome and added considerably to this work. Also, O'Brien's discussion of the morality of air power and civilian bombing in the war is quite good at points, but ultimately leaves the reader unsatisfied. He notes the book is not about the morality of the bombing campaign, but then offers several pages on it. Yet, if he chose to address it, I think he needed to take it a bit further.O'Brien's final statement is quite correct. Ultimately, whichever side controlled its own ability to move and was able to inhibit the enemy's movement won the war. Air power and sea power was able to do just that, not the headlong crash of armies in Russia.