研究会記録 Why the Allies Won the Air War, 1939-1945
Sabin Why the Allies Won the Air War, 1939-1945 研究会記録 Why the Allies Won the Air War, 1939-1945 Philip Sabin For nearly three decades, first in Queens’ College Cambridge and then in King’s College London, I shared a college with Richard Overy, one of the most eminent historians of World War Two. The title of this paper melds the titles of two of Overy’s most well-known books – The Air War, 1939-1945 from 1980, and Why the Allies Won from 1995.1 My aim is to review his arguments after a generation of further scholarship, and to see whether his insights retain their validity today.2 Two fundamental and inter-related scholarly debates may be identified with regard to the overall issue of Allied victory in World War Two. One concerns whether (as Paul Kennedy and John Ellis have suggested) Axis defeat was all but inevitable because of the overwhelming economic and industrial advantages of the Allies, or whether, as Overy himself argued strongly in Why the Allies Won, ‘There was nothing preordained about Allied success’ and ‘Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war’.3 The second, related, debate concerns which aspect of this massive struggle was the most decisive. Norman Davies argued in 2006 that the devastating and bloody land war between the Axis powers and their totalitarian rivals in the USSR was the key to Axis defeat, and that the efforts of the Western democracies (especially in Europe) were little more than a sideshow in comparison.4 Phillips O’Brien, by contrast, argued in 2015 that the war was decided primarily by production, technology and economics rather than by blood-letting among massed armies, and that this made the air and sea contest in which the Western powers achieved growing dominance the most decisive aspect of the struggle, to the point that 1 R J Overy, The Air War, 1939-1945, (paperback edition, London: 1987), and Why the Allies Won, (London: 1995).
[Show full text]