• The later German-Italian-Japanese axis was far less impressive than the alliance that would soon emerge of Great Britain, America, and Russia—having only little over a third of the three Allies’ combined populations, not to speak of their productive capacity. After all, the United States by war’s end in 1945 would achieve a wartime gross national product nearly greater than that of all of the other Allied and Axis powers combined.

• “I’m an isolationist. What concerns me is the fate of the British Empire! I want the Empire to remain intact, but I don’t understand why for the sake of this we must wage a three-year war to crush ‘Hitlerism.’ To hell with that man Hitler! If the Germans want him, I happily concede them this treasure and make my bow. Poland? Czechoslovakia? What are they to do with us? Cursed be the day when Chamberlain gave our guarantees to Poland!”

• “there can be no more positive neutrality than there can be a vegetarian tiger.”

• The actual or symbolic supreme commanders of three of the most powerful belligerents—King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia—were all related (the British monarch was first cousin to both the Kaiser and the Tsar) and indeed were almost identical in appearance and dress.

• National Socialism was to be a force multiplier of Prussian militarism. Italian fascism boasted it alone could restore the old Roman Empire. In Asia, the samurai code of Bushido gave credibility to warlords in Tokyo who had destroyed Japan’s incipient parliamentary government and promised a new Asian order under a Japanese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Imperial Russia of the tsars was to be reinvented as the Soviet Union, trumpeting a new man and a new national secular religion based on state coercion and moral relativism—and especially the Red Army and American-style methods of mass industrial production.

• In addition, by early December 1941, the Wehrmacht was already stalled outside Moscow. Hitler wrongly assumed, along with the Japanese, that an ill-prepared America might be an easy alternate target—a Napoleonic habit of starting new wars before old ones were finished that had also prompted him earlier to turn attention to Russia when his Blitz over Britain had failed.

• radical improvements in naval and land warfare. If it had taken three hundred years for clumsy matchlocks and harquebuses to displace crossbows and longbows, in just the twenty years between the world wars, air power was completely reinvented.

• Between D-Day and the end of the European war on May 8, 1945, American fighters and fighter-bombers flew an incredible 212,731 sorties against German forces, and expended twenty-four million rounds of .50 caliber ammunition at the German army—over seventy thousand rounds every day and about twenty bullets per enemy combat soldier.

• In 1939, London was still the largest city in the world, with a population slightly larger than New York’s, at well over eight million inhabitants in the Greater London area.

• General Heinz Guderian noted of his visits with Goering at his Karin Hall castle: “He either wore red boots of Russian leather with golden spurs—an item of dress scarcely essential to an aviator—or else he would appear at Hitler’s conferences in long trousers and black patent-leather pumps. He was strongly scented and painted his face. His fingers were covered with heavy rings in which were set the many large gems that he loved to display.” No such character would have enjoyed supreme air command in either the British or American air forces.

• If the Panzers were let loose on a vast landscape with tactical air superiority, then the Wehrmacht could at will repeat decisive victories like Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) or Tannenberg in World War I (1914) and destroy the Red Army.

• General George S. Patton noted in his diary the common consensus of Army generals: “We all feel that indiscriminate bombing has no military value and is cruel and wasteful, and that all such efforts should always be on purely military targets and on selected commodities which are scarce. In the case of Germany, it would be on oil.”

• In fact, American carriers never lost a single carrier-to-carrier air battle against their Imperial Japanese enemies, despite entering the war in December 1941 with only four fleet carriers (USS Hornet, USS Enterprise, USS Lexington, and USS Saratoga) in the Pacific. (The USS Wasp was not transferred from the Atlantic until June 1942.) Yet by November 1942, despite the great victory at Midway and the loss of four Japanese carriers, for a time only the Enterprise was left operational in the Pacific.

• The Japanese did not come close to matching that number. Japan entered the war with ten battleships, while building just two more, the seventy-two-thousand-ton behemoths Musashi and Yamato. They were the two largest, most costly warships in the world, but proved relatively useless in battle before being swarmed by American carrier planes and sunk. The estimated construction costs of a Yamato or Musashi battleship were around 160–170 million Japanese yen each. For such a sum, the Imperial Japanese Navy might have built ten of its latest excellent Akizuki-class destroyers (approximately 18 million yen apiece), invaluable in escorting merchant ships and waging antisubmarine warfare, and considered among the best destroyers built during the war. A fleet of twenty of them would have done far more damage than the twin Yamato-class white elephants that sucked resources from Japanese naval air programs and often sat idle for want of fuel.

• In Japan’s peak production year of 1944, it manufactured a total of 28,180 military aircraft, quite an impressive number had Japan been at war only with China or perhaps just Britain or the Soviet Union. Although budgeting for a two-front war, that same year America sent ninety-six thousand new planes abroad to Europe and the Pacific. By war’s end, the US Navy’s carrier fleet and support bases alone had received eighty thousand planes, which was more aircraft than Japan produced for all branches of its military during the entire war. Such production reflected vast industrial disparities. In terms of steel and coal, America had outproduced Japan by margins of well over ten-to-one. Oil output was even more dramatically one-sided: the United States entered the war pumping over seven hundred times more domestic oil per year than Japan.

• The B-29 squared the circle of gigantism by being both huge and numerous—the only gargantuan weapons system of its class that was nonetheless built in plentiful numbers (about 4,000). The Boeing Superfortress is forever remembered as conducting the lethal napalm raids over Japan and as the first and only plane in history to drop atomic bombs during wartime.

• The solution, contemplated even before the beginning of the war, was not cheap. The B-29 Superfortress program probably cost more than the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb: somewhere between $1 billion and $3 billion, depending on how various associated research and development costs were allotted. The most sophisticated plane in aviation history to that point entered mass production less than two years after the flight of the first prototype on September 21, 1942. The bomber was enormous. Its 141-foot wingspan (well over twice that of most German bombers) and over 130,000-pound maximum loaded weight dwarfed its large B-17 Flying Fortress predecessor (103-foot wingspan, 54,000-pound loaded weight). With a crew of eleven, just one more than on most models of the B-17, the Superfortress was faster (top speed 365 mph), normally carried almost twice the payload (10 tons), and vastly extended the nature of round-trip operations (in theory between 3,200 and 5,800 miles).

• And when four B-29s came into Stalin’s hands, he immediately ordered them reengineered as the Tupolev Tu-4, the Soviet Union’s first successful, long-range heavy bomber. Between 1947 and 1952, over eight hundred Tu-4s were built and then later deployed as nuclear bombers well into the 1960s.

• The misplacement of resources into the V-2 program, as in a litany of other grandiose German projects, proved a disaster of enormous proportions for the Wehrmacht that even today is not fully appreciated.

• The human brain proved far more adroit in finding a strategic target than did the primitive guidance systems of the V-1 or V-2. In the narrow strategic sense, like the V-weapons, kamikazes were evolutionary and would reappear decades later (albeit in a bizarre form), most prominently in the West on September 11, 2001, when Middle Eastern suicide hijackers of passenger jets were able to do more damage at little cost inside the continental United States than any foreign enemy since the British torching of the White House during the War of 1812.25

• Hitler’s initial wishes, to focus on destroying Allied heavy bombers rather than using the Me 262 as a multifaceted bomber, ground supporter, or dogfighter. The relationship between early jet aircraft in World War II and late-model, high-performance, piston-driven fighters was analogous to fifteenth-century firearms and archery: gunpowder weapons were harbingers of a military revolution, while bows were at an evolutionary dead end. Nonetheless, as far as cost-benefit analyses and ease of use and maintenance, bows for a while longer were preferable to early clumsy harquebuses for widescale use.

• (The drug-addicted, obese, and sybaritic Goering, for example, once purportedly floated the idea to Albert Speer of building concrete locomotives, given shortages in steel production.)

• In moral terms, there is no difference in the losses of soldiers in particular branches of the military. In a strategic calculus, however, the deaths of skilled pilots represented a far greater cost in training and material support than did the losses of foot soldiers.

• Nevertheless, on some points the use of high-altitude bombers solicits surprising unanimity. Its use by all sides in the early war was not initially as cost-effective in terms of achieving immediate results as the employment of fighters and fighter-bombers in tactical and ground-support operations.

• What was true in ancient times has remained valid in the modern era: the most lethal battles at sea have been nowhere near as deadly as those on land.

• The loss of a single battleship like the Bismarck was the rough equivalent of the loss of seven to eight hundred Tiger I tanks, or about 60 percent of the entire number of Tigers ever produced.

• In sum, once fleets neutralized their maritime enemy counterparts, their goal, even if it were largely to strangle imports and blockade the coasts, was ultimately to enhance land operations.

• Despite their formidable guns, the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Yamato, and Musashi were the stuff of prewar romance and collectively achieved relatively little in the war;

• Proof of the romance of the super-battleship was illustrated by the plans of all the major navies at the outset of the war to build even larger dinosaurs, such as the envisioned American Montana class (about 70,000 tons, with twelve 16-inch guns), the Japanese A-150 class (70,000 tons, with five 20-inch guns), the British Lion class (43,000 tons, with nine 16-inch guns; one ship of the class built), and some of the huge German H class (H-42: 90,000 tons, eight 20-inch guns). All were eventually canceled either because of staggering projected costs or due to the growing evidence of battleship obsolescence during the war, mostly in terms of not being able to protect these huge projected investments from fleets of cheap naval fighter-bombers.

• Still, on paper the Italian navy was impressive. The Regia Marina boasted six battleships, led by the huge flagships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, each over forty thousand tons and armed with nine 15-inch guns. They were supported by nineteen heavy and light cruisers as well as fifty-nine destroyers and 119 submarines.

• But the capital ships of the Regia Marina lacked modern radar. The fleet had little night-fighting capability. It had neither the oil stocks nor material support comparable to the infrastructure of the Royal Navy. The Italian navy had no realistic plans to strike comprehensively at the heart of British sea power in the Mediterranean at Suez, Malta, and Gibraltar. It could not cut off the British from their oil supplies in the Middle East.

• would take at least a year before America’s newly formed Joint Chiefs recognized that a “Germany first” policy did not necessarily apply to the navy in the same fashion it affected the army and air forces. In other words, America could prioritize sending armor, airborne, and motorized divisions and strategic bombers to Europe, while deploying the great bulk of US submarines, surface vessels, aircraft carriers, Marines—along with several crack Army infantry divisions—to the Pacific, where the US Navy would achieve near preeminence quite unimaginable in the European theater.

• In sum, Axis ships like the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Yamato, Musashi, Roma, or Vittorio Veneto were majestic examples of nautical engineering, but they remained largely wasted assets and were never utilized in amphibious operations in the fashion of the Tennessee or New Jersey.

• AS EARLY AS 1939, strategists had warned their publics that the looming war would be fought on all fronts far differently than was World War I. Such apprehensions largely arose because of new medium strategic bombers and the use of reliable, fast tanks that might turn static warfare into a conflict of mobility and encirclement.

• Anything a battleship could do—blow up surface ships, bombard shore positions, show the flag—a carrier could usually do better and almost as cheaply.

• Battleships proved an evolutionary dead end in World War II, and after a century of preeminence gradually disappeared from most of the world’s fleets in the postwar era. The firepower of the grand ships of “Battleship Row” that were put out of commission at Pearl Harbor—most of them first deployed during and right after World War I—was not all that different from that of their modern successors of 1943.

• Battleships were beautiful, “sacred” vessels. Their size and guns were a testament to national power. Rare though battleship duels were, there was something about such raw, unambiguous displays of lethal force that captivated admirals and tended to cloud their judgment about the cost-to-benefit values of such majestic dinosaurs.

• For most of World War I—before and after the Battle of Jutland—the Germans had parked their surface fleet, but their submarine fleet had attacked the Allies all over the globe and sunk over five thousand ships.

• German submarines accounted for far more sunken enemy merchant shipping and warships—well over fourteen million tons worth—than all the battleships, cruisers, air power, and mines of the Third Reich combined (7 million tons). The cost-to-benefit ratios of submarines versus large surface ships explained why subs proliferated and battleships became calcified, and why the Germans soon regretted diverting precious resources from submarine construction to their surface fleet. When the Bismarck went down in May 1941, so too did an investment of some 200 million Reich marks and 2,200 sailors.

• The Kriegsmarine suffered horrendous losses (781 of over 1,100 U-boats built, entailing about 33,000 of some 40,000 deployed U-boat crewmen). Nonetheless, this was less than Allied lives lost on merchant ships and warships (approximately 72,000). All German losses from U-boats—men and equipment combined—proved a fraction of what was consumed in a number of major land battles.

• When the war was over, the contours of postwar fleets were established for the next seventy years, anchored by submarines, destroyers, and carriers. Battleships and World War II type cruisers all but vanished from the seas.

• Whereas the Imperial German U-boat fleet destroyed nearly thirteen million tons of Allied shipping by November 1918 at the cost of 178 submarines and five thousand crewmen lost in combat, the Third Reich, at war for six, not four, years, would do little better (14 million tons) while losing over five times as many crews (approximately 33,000 submariners) and over four times as many U-boats (781).

• In the first eight months of the new U-boat war against America, the Germans in Operation Paukenschlag (“Drumbeat”) sank over six hundred ships, totaling over three million tons of shipping, at a loss of little more than twenty U-boats. Such lopsided totals should have broken the back of any incoming belligerent without sizable reserves of merchant ships.

• While Germans worked on long-term technological breakthroughs like snorkels and hydrogen-powered propulsion, the Allies implemented more incremental and practical advances: multiple-firing depth-charge throwers, powerful new airborne searchlights, small escort carriers that could bring their own air cover along with the convoy, and, always, improved radar and sonar. By mid-1943 these changes had at last all but doomed the entire U-boat effort.

• Second, the British and Americans falsely assumed that the Japanese were mere emulators of Western science, copycats always one step behind in all categories of naval design, aviation, and technology. Americans were soon to be stunned, for example, by Japanese optics and skilled night gunnery in their one-sided victory at Savo Island. For a supposedly parasitic power, Japan’s navy, despite the usual absence of onboard radar, had somehow started the Pacific war with more numerous carriers, the world’s largest battleships, the best torpedoes and destroyers, and the most skilled aviators flying in naval bombers, fighters, and torpedo planes that were all comparable with or superior to American models.

• Third, in part because of the racial dimension, there was often little quarter given in the Pacific and Asia. The Japanese executed captured American seamen, often after harsh interrogations, both as a reflection of their own martial code and as a way of terrifying Western soldiers.

• As noted earlier, in addition to a new fleet of escort (122) and light carriers (9), the US also turned out twenty-four large, Essex-class fleet carriers (each some 27,100 tons, with 90–100 planes). The carriers were soon aided by new generations of Hellcat, Helldiver, and Avenger fighters and torpedo and dive bombers—each model superior to their Japanese counterparts. By war’s end, the US Navy would train over sixty thousand naval pilots and deploy some ninety thousand naval aircraft of all types.

• Not since the Battle of Trafalgar had one navy so damaged its enemy (2,403 Americans killed, four American battleships submerged, four damaged) at so little cost to itself (64 killed), and yet achieved so few strategic results.

• The loss of four Japanese fleet carriers at Midway would almost equal the sum total of all new replacement fleet carriers built by Japan during the entire war. The verdict at Midway now meant that the Japanese could no longer expect accustomed naval superiority in any of its projected expansions in the South Pacific.

• That proved an unsustainable ratio, given that the US economy at the start of the war was already ten times larger than the Japanese.

• The United States, for example, although it had mobilized a far larger active military than during World War I (12.2 million versus about 4 million), and deployed it in far more theaters of operation, nevertheless for a variety of understandable reasons (most prominently the huge size of air and naval forces and the need for skilled workers in the vast archipelago of American industry) fielded fewer active US combat infantry soldiers on its central front in Europe by May 1945 than it had by November 1918.

• The need to transport weapons long distances by sea was both an additional expense and also a catalyst for innovation and experimentation.

• Or as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of all British, Canadian, and American forces that landed in Normandy in 1944, summed up in bureaucratese the American way of war: “War is waged in three elements; but there is no separate land, naval, or air war. Unless all assets in all elements are efficiently combined and coordinated against a properly selected, common objective, their maximum potential power cannot be maximized.”

• Even at the moment of the German invasion, the Soviets in mid-1941 possessed more armored vehicles than Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States combined.

• By early 1943, the Red Army had over twenty thousand tanks at the front, and were adding them at the rate of two thousand a month, and did this after losing almost all their existing prewar fleet of armored vehicles in 1941 and reconstituting much of their tank production beyond the Urals.

• The United States, Britain, and the British Dominions sent over fourteen thousand tanks to the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1945, at least a few of them upgraded diesel Shermans with the British 17-pounder gun, which was more than all German Panther and Tiger tank production combined.

• German prowess was defined in part by anachronistic ideas that infantry superiority was achieved by ground troops killing more ground troops than they lost, and downplayed the more important Allied advantages of numbers, equipment, supplies, ships, and planes.

• It was ironic that the autocratic Nazis gave more initiative to their junior officers than the democratic British and Americans did to their majors and colonels.

• While the Germans for a time may have found some preeminence in personal weapons and armor, their margin of technological superiority over Allied guns and tanks was hardly enough to offset their increasing numerical inferiority in men and machines.

• By the 1930s Japanese militarism had combined traditional strains of samurai culture, Bushido, Shinto Buddhism, and emperor worship with contemporary fascism to excuse military atrocities.

• Over a decade, the Japanese army may have been largely responsible for the loss of over twenty million Chinese, Indian, and Indochinese unarmed civilians. Yet in nearly four years of war, the Japanese military managed to kill only about 120,000 British and American soldiers, and capture some seventy thousand, while losing in the process nearly two million dead to enemy arms. The Imperial Japanese Army fairly earned the reputation for cruelty: no army in World War II killed so many civilians while being so inept at killing its better-armed enemies.

• The Italian wartime economy was the weakest of all the major nations fighting in Europe, taxed especially by Mussolini’s insistence on building a huge Mediterranean surface fleet of battleships and cruisers that would ultimately prove of little strategic advantage. Italian industry produced little more than 10 percent of the vehicles turned out in France and Britain. Italy had only a fraction of the strategic materials—oil, coal, and iron ore—that were available to its enemies.

• Another theme characterized the two great European continental wars against France and Russia: the French army, the presumed principal obstacle to German expansionism, crumbled in weeks, while the assumed incompetent Red Army ended up in Berlin. Never in military history had a great power so overestimated the ability of one existential enemy while so underestimating the capability of another. The meat grinder of the Western Front in World War I was replayed in World War II in the East, and the collapse of the Eastern Front in 1917 and the ensuing vast German occupation of 1918 was somewhat repeated in the West in 1940.

• The chief German paradox of World War II was that it feared the French in 1940 far more than it did the Russians in 1941.

• French population (50 million) and industry (1938 GDP of about $186 billion) were smaller than the Third Reich’s (80 million, GDP of $351 billion), even before the second round of German conquests and occupations of 1939 and early 1940.

• The German General Staff had advanced and rejected various (and mostly predictable) plans of attack before agreeing on a more unexpected approach, in part due to fears that original, traditional agendas of a broad assault had been compromised and that their plans had fallen into the hands of the Allies. The quite radical element of the new version of attack, the so-called Manstein Plan, was a central strike through the supposedly rugged Ardennes Forest into Belgium—well above the Maginot Line—and an assumption that once the Allies saw that they were not so much outflanked to the north in Belgium but rather sliced by sickle cuts from behind through the Ardennes, strategic chaos would follow.

• The huge invading force, in characteristic German fashion, was divided into three groups (A, B, and C). And the senior army group commanders—Gerd von Rundstedt (45 divisions), Fedor von Bock (29 divisions), and Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb (18 divisions)—were the Wehrmacht’s superstars. Von Rundstedt and von Bock had supposedly already changed the face of battle in Poland the prior autumn and now were charged with conducting large encirclements on an even grander scale.

• Whereas morale in the West imploded, it rebounded in the East. Historians ever since have argued over this strange disconnect, especially given the inverse experiences of World War I that had seen the democracies survive and Russia capitulate. They often correctly cite the vast expanse of the Soviet Union that allowed strategic retreat. The murderous authoritarianism of the Soviet state certainly made capitulation a capital crime. The harsh weather of Russia aided the defenders.

• The Axis army of nearly four million was not just the largest invasion force in history, but also the greatest European invading army that has ever been assembled anywhere—six times larger than Napoleon’s force that took Moscow.

• The army groups would enlist regional allies in their own particular geographical spheres of interest—Finns in the north, Hungarians and Romanians to the south—each spurred on by their own traditional border disputes with Russia and the possibility of recovering lost territory.

• As it was, June 22 marked the beginning of the most horrific killing in the history of armed conflict, a date that began a cycle of mass death and destruction over the next four years at the rate of nearly twenty-five thousand fatalities per day until the end of the war.

• Hitler entirely misread Stalinism, thinking it an incompetent globalist communist movement rather than a fanatically nationalist, and, in some sense, tsarist-like imperial project.

• “In Libya an Italian general has allowed himself to be taken prisoner. Mussolini is taking it out on the Italian people, ‘It is the material that I lack. Even Michelangelo needed marble to make statues. If he had had only clay he would have been nothing more than a potter. A people who for sixteen centuries have been an anvil cannot become a hammer within a few years.’”

• North Africa was the swashbuckling Rommel’s landscape: flat, clear, and ideal for Panzer operations—and distant from both the controlling Hitler and the yes-men of the German General Staff. Yet Rommel’s supplies were inadequate, his tanks near obsolete.

• “Possunt, quia posse videntur” (“They can, because they think they can,” Aeneid 5.231).

• The United States then had declared war on April 6, 1917, likewise with an army of less than two hundred thousand. Yet from June 26, 1917, to November 11, 1918, the United States had deployed over two million soldiers in France, finally arriving at the rate of ten thousand a day. The huge buildup led to the general collapse of the Imperial German Army.

• Rommel flew home in March, hoping either to obtain more reinforcements or a decision to evacuate. He achieved neither and never returned to North Africa. The Axis surrendered nearly a quarter-million men on May 13, 1943—a loss comparable to the destruction of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad—although propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels sighed that at least most of the Third Reich soldiers were captured by Western forces rather than sent to their certain deaths in Soviet camps, as was true after Stalingrad. For the duration of Rommel’s life, he would receive forwarded letters of encouragement from his old veterans of the Afrika Korps—but from their imprisonment in the American South.

• Between the twin disasters of Stalingrad and North Africa, the German army lost over half a million of their best soldiers and never recovered.

• World War II in the Anglo-American mind has now often crystallized into the iconic eleven months from D-Day to the motorized race through Germany in April and May 1945. Such chauvinism is often ridiculed, given that the terrible cost on the ground of destroying the German army in World War II was largely the story of Armageddon on the Eastern Front.

• Hitler, for all his fantasy talk about a superior race of Übermenschen, miracle weapons, and the role of willpower, ironically had no idea of the mettle of the Russian people, who had suffered enormously before the war from Stalin’s purges, state-induced famines, and brutal industrialization, and could withstand hardship in a way that perhaps only the Japanese could match. Nor did he appreciate the talent of the residents of Leningrad itself, which in terms of civic achievement, scientific excellence, university life, and cosmopolitan culture was the equal of any European city.

• Most of his generals seemed to have lacked all historical perspective that a failed siege often meant not the withdrawal but the ruin of the attacker.

• The bastion and indeed the city itself were left in rubble, hit by more than thirty thousand tons of artillery shells, the largest German bombardment of the war.

• SINGAPORE, THE BRITISH island bastion at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, was often dubbed the Gibraltar of the Pacific. But it was hardly that, either in terms of strategic importance or impregnability. Although the base was praised as a showcase British port fortress, and likewise autonomous from the surrounding Malaysian mainland, Singapore was no strategic choke point. To enter the Mediterranean from the west, every ship had to pass within about eight miles of Gibraltar’s defenses. In contrast, there were ways of navigating between the Australian and Asian continents, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans, without entering the straits near Singapore.

• Corregidor was the land version of hugely impressive but largely irrelevant battleships such as the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Musashi, and Yamato.

• Tanks, like ancient elephants or modern battleships, were formidable weapons, and the stuff of deadly romance. But their achievement ultimately rested more with routine considerations than the impenetrability of their armor, the power of their guns, and the heroics of their crews.

• The German Mark I tankettes 9 (less than 6 tons, 2 light machine guns, and less than an inch of armor) that rolled into Poland in September 1939 bore little resemblance to the so-called Tiger IIs (“King Tiger”), the huge monstrosities that appeared just four years later (70 tons, an 88 mm cannon, and up to 7 inches of armor). In between the two models were hundreds of thousands of dead tankers and their victims, from whose fatal lessons would finally emerge a rough consensus at war’s end as to the properly designed tank.

• As the commander of the 2nd Armored Division, Major General Ernest H. Harmon, put it in 1945: “First: gun power; Second: battlefield maneuverability; Third: as much armor protection as can be had after meeting the first two requirements, still staying within a weight that can be gotten across obstacles with our bridge equipment.”16 That archetypal tank by 1945 was expressed in various ways by the upgraded Russian T-34, the German Panther, the American Pershing, and the British Comet. The apparent common minimum denominators were weights over thirty tons but less than fifty; a long-barrel, high-velocity cannon of between 76 mm and 90 mm; relatively low silhouettes and cast turrets; wide tracks, and sloped armor of about 100 mm thickness or over. Indeed, seventy years after World War II, and despite revolutions in armor and armament, a twenty-first-century T-90 Russian tank or an American M1 Abrams does not look all that much different from a German Panther, while, in contrast, a 1945-vintage P-51 Mustang bears little resemblance to a twenty-first-century F-22 Raptor.

• Germans sought craftsmanship and size, Americans reliability and practicality, Russians mass production, and the British specialization.

• At the epic tank battle of Kursk (Operation Citadel, July 5–16, 1943), both the Russians and Germans deployed quality tanks to prevent their enemy from slicing through infantry. But given that superior Russian numbers were matched by German marginal quality and training advantages, the two armored forces neutralized each other without either side achieving a breakout. The Russians suffered three times as many casualties and seven to ten times the number of tank losses. Yet they still ensured both a tactical and strategic German defeat, a fact that might suggest numbers rather than the quality of Russian tanks and the training of the crews were pivotal. Of the masses of Russian infantry and armor at Kursk, a despairing Panzer crewman thought Russian tanks were scurrying “like rats” all over the battlefield.

• Generals Model and Manstein, to paraphrase Pyrrhus’s lament of Asculum’s strategic consequences, might have sighed, “if we prove victorious in one more such battle with the Russians, we shall be utterly ruined.”

• One veteran anti-tank battery crewman’s recollection of first meeting a T-34 proved surreal: “Half a dozen anti-tank gun shells fire at him which sound like a drum roll. But he drives staunchly through our line like an impregnable prehistoric monster.” In a December 1941 shootout with T-34s, a German tanker said of the effect of his 50 mm gun on Russian tanks: “But there was no visible effect. Damned peashooter!” The fright of German Panzer crews at unaccustomed Russian weapons was a trope throughout the history of warfare. It was felt just as much by Philip V’s confident Macedonian cavalry, who on first encountering the lethal swordplay of Roman horsemen, were shocked at the carnage that a Spanish gladius might inflict on supposedly invincible troops such as themselves: “For men who had seen the wounds dealt by javelins and arrows and occasionally by lances, since they were used to fighting with the Greeks and Illyrians, when they had seen bodies chopped to pieces by the Spanish sword, arms torn away, shoulders and all, or heads separated from bodies, with the necks completely severed, or vitals laid open, and the other fearful wounds, realized in a general panic with what weapons and what men they had to fight.”

• Gigantism—the psychological disorder that ever bigger is always better—had been historically a bane of military technology, from Demetrius the Besieger’s outlandish Heliopolis siege engine to the Japanese super-battleships Yamato and Musashi that likewise led to a colossal waste of men and material, and yet were scheduled to be superseded by a “super-Yamato” of ninety thousand tons with 20-inch guns. Hitler suffered especially from the disease that seems to infect autocrats with a special vengeance. Tigers were too large for many bridges and roads, and wore out their tracks and transmissions quickly. They were expensive to transport. They gulped fuel at record rates. They were costly and time-consuming to produce, built to exacting specifications, required extensive training to operate and maintain, and ultimately were produced in too few numbers (1,350) to make much difference on the Eastern Front, despite their feared reputation among enemy tank crews. Most important, they took over ten times as many man-hours of labor to produce as American or Russian medium tanks.

• Panzer brigade commander, Heinrich Eberbach, summed up the typical German reaction at meeting a few KV-Is in January 1942: “Our tanks encountered a Russian tank brigade, which was exclusively outfitted with heavy tanks—T-34’s and KV-I’s. The steel giants were overwhelmingly superior to our Panzer III’s and Panzer IV’s.… I had to give my soldiers, who were accustomed to victory, the order to pull back twice in order to avoid being destroyed.”

• Despite the parity of late-model T-34s and the superiority of heavy Stalin IS-2s, German Panther tank crews on average tended to be more highly trained and skilled even late into the war. In March 1945 in a not-unusual tank battle, two Panthers near Danzig wiped out an entire column of Russian heavy tanks. During the three days of fighting, twenty-one heavy and super-heavy enemy tanks were destroyed by German Panzers without a single loss.

• Typical was the experience of Sherman tanker Corporal Patrick Hennessy, who watched his tank round bounce off a Tiger tank: “I thought: ‘To hell with this!’ and pulled back.” Another Sherman tanker noted: “The Sherman was a very effective workhorse, but as a fighting tank it was a disaster.”

• If the reputation of a tank rests on its ability to support infantry rather than overcoming enemy tanks, then the Sherman proved invaluable—a fact that was never fully appreciated during and only rarely after the war.

• All these problems notwithstanding, American armored forces in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Western Europe ultimately defeated enemy tank and infantry forces. The United States prevailed in Europe because of ubiquitous and reliable Shermans that more often fought Axis infantry rather than enemy armored units. And when they met superior German tanks, Shermans could often rely on close air and artillery support. It prevailed in the Pacific, where armored thrusts were not a part of island and amphibious warfare to the same degree as in the European theater. Shermans proved superior to all Japanese tank models, and provided invaluable support in the major landings from Tarawa to Okinawa.

• During the First Gulf War, US Abrams M1A1 tanks, in the last major tank-to-tank duels of the twentieth century, helped to destroy well over 160 Iraqi Russian-built tanks in a series of engagements on February 26–27, 1991, without losing a single American tank to enemy tank fire. It was as if the Americans had finally married the reliability of the Sherman with the lethality of the Tiger.

• “Moltke would turn in his grave at Hitler’s military tactics, particularly his tactics in the so-called Rundstedt Offensive, which Rundstedt said should be known as the Hitler Offensive.”

• Blowing a tank track off a T-34 with a Panzerfaust—a weapon that an American tank officer dubbed the “most concentrated mass of destruction in this war”—was a far better investment than building and deploying a seventy-ton Tiger II to outduel a Russian tank. By war’s end, heavy tanks were increasingly risky investments of capital and labor; the Americans and the Russians best squared the cost-benefit circle of the expense of tanks versus results achieved in enhancing infantry by focusing on just one or two simple designs, mass-producing them and at relatively cheap cost, and ensuring that they were reliable and easy to maintain.

• Toward the end of the war, the Germans began installing great numbers of high-velocity, long-barrel, rapid-firing, and high-powered fixed 75 mm assault guns on supposedly obsolete Mark III tank chassis. The resulting turret-less but up-armored Sturmgeschütze IIIs were highly mobile, low-profile, and easily maintained anti-tank guns that survived on average seven times longer on the Eastern Front than did late-model German tanks. Over ten thousand were built at costs far cheaper per unit than tanks.

• Even more impressive than the unique 88 mm gun, the Germans finally saw the wisdom of mass-produced, cheap weapons as they turned out some six million Panzerfausts (“tank fists”). At close distances, these cheap, single-shot, disposable anti-tank weapons in their final incarnations proved deadly to most Allied tanks on either the Western or Eastern Fronts. And when taken together with another three hundred thousand Panzerschrecks (“tank frighteners”)—a German up-engineered copy of the American bazooka—single German soldiers often had the ability with an inexpensive weapon to knock out thirty- to forty-ton tanks.

• Over ten thousand Russian Katyusha platforms were produced during the war, in calibers most commonly ranging from 82 mm to 300 mm.

• Hitler at moments seemed aware of his own failings, manifested in self-doubt. To Albert Speer, Hitler confessed shortly before his death that he had always known that Hermann Goering was a drug addict, corrupt, and a delusional sybarite, but apparently he had been too timid to confront Goering, given his earlier key service to the Nazi cause, even as the latter’s buffoonery cost tens of thousands of Luftwaffe air crewmen their lives. At the height of the Wehrmacht’s reputation in October 1940, and after marathon deliberations, Hitler could still neither cajole nor force a recalcitrant General Francisco Franco to enter the war or even to allow transit for German troops through Spanish territory.

• The early stunning transformation of the British economy to produce war materiel on par with the Third Reich was mostly due to Churchill’s confidence in his ability to harmonize private entrepreneurs like Lord Beaverbrook with trade union bosses like Ernest Bevin.

• Britain was to fight much longer than in World War I (roughly 70 versus 51 months) on two distant fronts against a much more formidable coalition of enemies. Yet it suffered far fewer deaths (approximately 450,000 versus nearly one million fatalities) in achieving a far more lasting victory than in 1918. This was an extraordinary achievement, given that Britain had a continental army far smaller than those of either Germany, Russia, or the United States. Although Churchill may have despaired frequently—after the fall of France when an inglorious defeat seemed likely, the ignominious surrenders at Singapore and Tobruk, and in negotiations about the postwar world with undemocratic Joseph Stalin creating facts on the ground throughout Eastern Europe—he was the first Allied leader to see a way to beat Hitler and the only one to fight him from the beginning to the end.

• Roosevelt lacked the historical vision of Winston Churchill. But he possessed a superior political savvy in domestic matters. He had an uncanny intuition of what the American people would tolerate, and how to push programs and objectives through guile, deception, and stealth that they would not have otherwise embraced if fully apprised. Whereas Churchill was defeated and left office before the final victory over Japan, even an enfeebled Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term.

• Instead, his style was to solicit advice, create commissions and boards, and brainstorm with advisors by teasing out contrary positions, playing devil’s advocate, and at times misleading his own advisors about his ultimate decision that could overrule even the consensus of his Joint Chiefs.

• The wholesale transfer of Soviet industry far to the east of Moscow still staggers the imagination. So do the harsh conditions under which Soviet workers vastly outproduced their pan-European counterparts—a continuation of the increase in Soviet war production centered in the Urals that was already under way in the late 1930s.

• More mysterious, the Soviet command economy produced not only vast amounts of munitions and weaponry, but also high-quality tanks, artillery, rockets, and fighter-bombers. Capitalism encouraged individual genius to produce unmatched technology in a way impossible in authoritarian societies and command economies. But during World War II, Stalin’s Russia had so borrowed, stolen, or invented new weapons and processes of industrial production that its later armies were often the best equipped of the war.

• At war’s end in September 1945, Churchill had been humiliated by being voted out of office. Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini were dead; Tojo, discredited, bereft of supreme power, and fated to meet the gallows. In contrast to them all, the old dictator Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in recorded history, was thriving and would live on another eight years to threaten the two allies that had helped save him.

• These were only ideals and allowed latitude for notable exceptions, such as General Gebhard von Blücher, who saved Waterloo when seventy-two. General Dwight D. Eisenhower appeared a consummate bureaucrat and undistinguished in uniform, never speaking with much panache or turn of phrase. Omar Bradley or Courtney Hodges in uniform appeared naturally commonplace rather than commonplace by volition; neither was an orator (nor a great captain). The architects of earlier German victories in World War II, such as Generals von Bock, von Leeb, von Rundstedt, and Manstein, looked like ordinary bureaucrats.

• In other words, there was neither a master template for generalship across time and space nor any certainty that battlefield genius could trump the larger landscape of the war. We are left with a banality of a golden mean between youth and experience, education and pragmatism, knowledge and natural brilliance, and audacity and circumspection, along with the caveat that, other factors being roughly equal, a genius always beats a fool—and a captain with lots of money, weapons, manpower, and supplies at his back more often wins.

• ERICH VON MANSTEIN is ranked as the most brilliant of Hitler’s generals. Yet his career in World War II serves as an illustration of both the genius and limitations of German generalship, and he serves as a model of why Germany’s technocratic generals scored early tactical victories and yet found themselves so often in a strategic blind alley. Manstein’s revisionary plan, with input from Heinz Guderian, to invade France in 1940 through the Ardennes turned a probable eventual German victory into a swift Gallic catastrophe; his madcap Panzer drive to Leningrad reflected the realization that the war had to be won in months. Yet Manstein’s most impressive victory was the so-called Third Battle of Kharkov (February 19–March 15, 1943), when, after the disaster at Stalingrad in early 1943, Manstein, against all odds, cut apart a reckless Soviet pursuit, trapped over fifty Russian divisions, retook Kharkov, and bought six months respite for soon-to-be vastly outnumbered forces on the Russian front. Only a handful of World War II generals could have matched such a feat. Manstein proved absolutely unshakeable when threatened with a general collapse, and saw how careful defense could wound the Red Army far more than had even blitzkrieg.

• Given these constraints, the resurrected German General Staff and Prussian military aristocracy produced perhaps the war’s largest group of tactically and operationally competent army generals. It is hard to find among senior German field commanders many abject mediocrities like Friedrich Paulus, or many who were as undistinguished as British General Arthur Percival or Bernard Freyberg, or American Lieutenant General Lloyd Fredendall or Major General John P. Lucas; or a theater commander as unimpressive as General Mark Clark or perhaps even the iconic General Omar Bradley. But while the sheer number of highly gifted German army generals such as Hermann Balck, Heinz Guderian, Gotthard Heinrici, Albert Kesselring, Walter Model, Erwin Rommel, Fedor von Bock, Günther von Kluge, Wilhelm von Leeb, Erich von Manstein, or Gerd von Rundstedt was unmatched by any other army, their efforts were often diminished by both their cause and superiors.

• Despite Hitler’s wild strategic fantasies and erratic supreme command, German officers and soldiers were able to exact devastating losses on all three major Allied armies, inflicting casualties on British and American troops at a higher rate than the losses they incurred, and on the Eastern Front exacting over three times as many Russian fatalities for each German fatality incurred. Whether early or late in the war, on the defensive or offensive, either enjoying numerical superiority or outnumbered, the German army consistently killed more of the enemy than the enemy killed Germans.

• In sum, Japanese commanders had originally assumed the Western Allies’ two-front war with Germany would mean fewer Anglo-American resources devoted to the Pacific. They failed to realize that Marines, carriers, and naval aircraft were not so sorely needed in Europe, and that a belligerent like the United States with twice the manpower and well over five times Japan’s industrial capacity could easily fight a two-front war that nearly bankrupted Japan. Japanese naval commanders were pioneers in carrier operations and yet had no plan for the mass training of replacement naval aviators, much less matching American carrier production and fighter output.

• Yet amid the wreckage of Soviet generalship—from prior purges, executions, and the dark days of summer 1941—emerged some of the most brilliant commanders of the entire war, especially the famous triad of Ivan Konev, Konstantin Rokossovsky, and the iconic Georgy Zhukov. The criticism of Russian military leadership during World War II was that it sought to bury the Wehrmacht through largely frontal, artillery-backed assaults on a broad front, on the theory that Germany would run out of reserves and supplies before the Soviet Union, and that the United States and Britain would bleed Germany from the air and in the Western and Mediterranean theaters far more than Japan and the Italians would erode the Americans and British.

• such as John Lucas, Lloyd Fredendall, and Lesley McNair.20 American commanders were indoctrinated in two tactical traditions. One was made famous by Ulysses S. Grant and later John J. Pershing, emphasizing finding the enemy, then confronting and destroying him through overwhelming firepower. However, even by 1944 American soldiers did not always possess either overwhelming firepower—superior machine guns, tanks, anti-tank weaponry—or the battle experience to smash through German entrenched forces, whether in the bocage beyond Omaha Beach, in the Hürtgen Forest, or against urban strongholds such as Metz. Attempts to do so could prove bloody and counterproductive.

• Third, by early 1943 almost all American, British, and Russian factories, transportation, and fields were beyond the reach of German Panzers and bombers, even as Allied air power—soon to be augmented by ground forces—began pounding Axis production.

• When the global war commenced in full in late 1941, the majority of the world’s population was either neutral or on the Allied side. Great Britain and its active Dominions, the United States, and the Soviet Union possessed a combined population of over four hundred million persons, more than double the manpower available to the three major Axis powers, without consideration of the huge populations of an allied China or a British-held India. The ensuing imbalance in the value of what people made for the war was even more staggering. Despite the Germans’ vast occupation of Western and parts of Eastern Europe and European Russia, by 1943 the three Allies together were producing an aggregate gross domestic product over twice the totals for Germany, Italy, and Japan combined. Indeed, the United States eventually produced a gross domestic product of approximately $2.6 trillion (in 2016 dollars), almost the same as what the British, Germans, Italians, Japanese, and Soviets produced together ($3 trillion).

• For example, the Allies needed not necessarily to produce a tank superior to the superb German Mark V Panther (6,000 produced) or nearly unstoppable Mark VI Tiger (over 1,300). They had only to ensure that the number of effective T-34s (over 80,000 of all types produced) and less formidable M4 Sherman tanks (over 50,000 produced) were fielded in numbers that would engulf German armor.

• The unprecedented expansion of the total US economy—it increased 55 percent between 1939 and 1944 as military expenditures went from 1.4 percent of GDP to 45 percent—was such that even civilian outlays in real terms were almost as large in 1944 as they were in 1939. Whereas all the other economies of the war saw budgeting as a rivalry between guns and butter, in the United States the economy grew so vast that there was room for both the largest military and civilian economies in the nation’s history.

• Some estimates put combined Axis and Allied mobilized military manpower at its peak at an aggregate seventy million people during six years of war.

• Death rates varied among prisoners, depending on the type and status of the enemy. Japan imprisoned fewer civilians than Germany. The Japanese were far more brutal to captured enemy soldiers than was Germany outside of the Eastern Front. About a third of all who were interned in camps by the Japanese perished. The worst survival rates of the war were among Soviet prisoners of the Germans (almost 60 percent, or over 3 million deaths), as well as Germans held by the Soviets (up to 1 million). American and British prisoners in German hands rarely died (3–5 percent). Nor did Germans and Japanese fare poorly under the Western Allies (1–2 percent death rates).

• Indeed, the German armed forces may well have suffered nearly as many casualties in the single month of January 1945 (451,742) as it had during the entire fighting of 1939, 1940, and 1941 combined (459,000).

• Yet by war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.

• By war’s end, the Navy had grown to 3.3 million men and women, and yet suffered only sixty-six thousand fatalities or missing in action, or a little over 15 percent of the dead incurred by the much smaller Imperial Japanese Navy.

• Germany went to war in 1939 with horse-powered infantry divisions, bolt-action rifles, and piston-driven propeller planes armed with traditional high-explosive bombs. Six years later, along with the Third Reich, Imperial Japan, the last of the Axis, went down to defeat in September 1945 in a brave new world of motorized transport, assault guns, jets, napalm, cruise and ballistic missiles, and nuclear weapons, along with suicide bombers and extermination camps. And because the two greatest wartime producers of military technology and weaponry, the Soviet Union and the United States, almost immediately entered a nearly half-century-long Cold War, their proxy conflicts saw previously relatively unarmed peoples now equipped with a plethora of high-quality arms unimaginable in the past.

• But their collective advantages accrued also because of the stupidity of the Axis: the surprise attacks on the Soviet Union and then the United States, together with the German and Italian declarations of war against America, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of mainland China, mark the five greatest strategic blunders of the war—and perhaps of any major war in history. The Axis, not the Allies, radically redefined the relative resources of the belligerents of 1939–1941, and in doing so ensured that the Axis powers would have no chance of strategic resolution.

• Hitler’s armies were still poised at the doorsteps of Leningrad and Moscow. Army Group South was barreling forward, seemingly unstoppable on its way to the oil fields of the Caucasus, with few enemies ahead—and fewer supplies behind. Rommel’s advances in North Africa and the fall of Tobruk raised the specter of Afrika Korps Panzers in Egypt and perhaps eventually beyond Suez. In terms of manpower and territory under its rule, the Third Reich, now greater than Rome, stretched from the Arctic to the Sahara and from the Atlantic to two thousand miles east of Berlin on the Volga River. The majority of the key neutral European powers by mid-1942—Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and colonial France—remained either anti-British, or pro-Axis, or were stealthily facilitating the war aims of Germany. Many of the major prewar Allied cities—Amsterdam, Athens, Belgrade, Brussels, Copenhagen, Kiev, Oslo, Paris, Warsaw—were firmly in Axis hands. The few that were not, like Leningrad, London, or Moscow, were either besieged, had been bombed, or remained in dire peril. In contrast, Europe’s other great cultural or industrial metropolises such as Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Istanbul, Lisbon, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Naples, Prague, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna, and Zurich were largely untouched and were either part of the Axis or neutral but often sympathetic to Nazism.

• That paradox may have explained why Japan, despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suffered fewer civilian casualties than did war-torn Poland and Yugoslavia, and why Japan did not as unequivocally as Germany renounce its wartime fascist past. In the Western world far less was known of the extent of Japanese savagery in China than of Germany’s exterminations in the East.

• Although Italy waged a brutal and inhumane war in Africa—with more than one million poorly equipped Ethiopian, Somali, and Libyan soldiers and civilians killed—the Eurocentric Allies were less likely to equate Italian savagery against Ethiopians and Somalis with the German crime of slaughtering European civilians.

• The postwar world seemed to have forgotten that Stalin had killed almost as many of his own Russians as did Hitler.

• All of these incongruities logically followed from the most profound irony: the war against fascism was won only with the help of the greatest totalitarian power of all.