War Against Germany Chapter 2 Analysis

The theater of war with Germany was very different from the war with Japan in the Pacific as described in Chapter 4, The War against Germany: What Was Needed and What Was Done, in Major Problems in the History of World War II . This Chapter describes the strong disagreements among the Allies, and individual services, regarding the prioritization of strategic military goals, and the resulting implications, and consequences on post-war diplomacy. One of the most intense debates involved the best utilization of aircraft, with the United States and Britain urging use of massed aircraft for strategic bombing to guarantee Allied victory by destroying the German industrial capacity and breaking the will of the German people. In particular, the American Air Force favored daytime precision bombing of targets to incapacitate the German industrial base, while the British favored nighttime area bombing of German cities to break the determination of the German masses.

The Army and Navy disagreed, maintaining that the only way to achieve Allied victory was in the tactical utilization of air resources in support of Allied ground forces to crush the German Army, in conjunction with Allied naval forces destroying the German submarine fleet in the

The American shipyards were able to supply the United States Navy with 1,672 major naval vessels, and the British Navy with 1,065 major warships and 2,907 minor vessels, while also supplying 21 million tons of merchant marine shipping. Overly suggests that the battle of Midway was won by the Allies against overwhelming Japanese dominance in warships, preventing the Japanese Navy reentry into the