1941–45 Air and Maritime Power in Allied Victory over Germany and Japan (AI Study Guide)

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1941–45 Air and Maritime Power in Allied Victory over Germany and Japan 

Overview
Between 1941 and 1945 the Allies increasingly fought a global war framed by control of the air and the sea. Air forces and navies destroyed Axis forces, shipping and fuel before they reached the battlefield, enabled secure Allied mobilisation across oceans, and mounted strategic bombing and blockade campaigns that crippled German and Japanese war economies. Land campaigns on the Eastern Front and in North-West Europe remained indispensable, yet growing scholarship argues that air–sea power provided the decisive strategic envelope within which those ground victories became possible.

Glossary of terms
• Air superiority: A degree of control of the air that permits friendly operations by land, sea and air forces without prohibitive interference from enemy air power.
• Air supremacy: The highest level of control of the air, where the opposing air force is incapable of effective interference in any dimension of friendly operations.
• Strategic bombing: Air operations directed against an enemy’s war-sustaining capacity—industry, transportation, fuel, cities or leadership—rather than against fielded forces alone.
• Interdiction: Air attacks on enemy movement, supply and reinforcement routes to isolate the battlefield and reduce the effectiveness of front-line forces.
• Close air support CAS: Air action against hostile targets close to friendly forces, requiring detailed integration of each air mission with the fire and movement of those forces.
• Sea control: The condition in which one side can use a given sea area for its own purposes and deny its effective use to the enemy through naval and air power.
• Maritime blockade: The systematic use of sea and air power to prevent an enemy importing resources or moving forces, progressively strangling its economy and military capacity.
• Combined Bomber Offensive CBO: The Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against Germany, coordinated through the Casablanca and later directives to exploit complementary day and night attacks.
• Battle of the Atlantic: The prolonged air–sea campaign in which Allied naval and air forces defeated German U-boats and surface raiders to keep transatlantic supply lines open.
• United States Strategic Bombing Survey USSBS: A wartime and post-war US government inquiry into the effectiveness and consequences of Allied strategic bombing in Europe and the Pacific.

Key points
• Historiographical debate: O’Brien, How the War Was Won, challenges what he calls the “universal view” that land campaigns, particularly the Soviet–German struggle, were the primary determinant of victory, arguing instead that air and sea campaigns which destroyed Axis equipment and controlled mobility were strategically dominant. Weinberg, A World at Arms, by contrast, embeds air and sea power within a wider global system of mobilisation, alliances and land warfare, resisting single-cause explanations.
• War of production and equipment destruction: O’Brien, How the War Was Won, argues that the war was fundamentally a contest of industrial output in which air and sea weapons—aircraft, ships, submarines and their munitions—dominated production priorities and destroyed most Axis equipment before it reached front-line battlefields. He stresses that the decisive attrition occurred in the air and at sea—merchantmen sunk, aircraft destroyed in the air or on the ground, submarines hunted down—rather than in tank-versus-tank engagements on land.
• Strategic bombing versus Germany: Overy, Bombers and the Bombed, and the USSBS show that early area bombing inflicted huge urban damage but only partially constrained German industrial output, whose growth continued into 1944. They highlight, however, that campaigns against oil, transport and the Luftwaffe’s fighter force in 1944–45 were strategically significant, constraining German mobility and air defence. Gray, Airpower for Strategic Effect, uses this case to argue that bombardment can yield major strategic effect but almost never decides a war unaided.
• Air–sea victory in the Atlantic: Winton, Air Power at Sea 1939–45, details how radar-equipped aircraft, escort carriers and improved convoy doctrine turned the Battle of the Atlantic from a near-run crisis into a controlled, though costly, Allied success, pushing U-boats beyond effective reach of convoys. Olsen, Global Air Power, notes that RAF Coastal Command and US air units eventually expelled the U-boats from the North Atlantic, underscoring air–sea integration in sustaining Britain and projecting US power to Europe.
• Mediterranean and joint campaigns: Olsen, A History of Air Warfare, traces how Allied air forces in North Africa, Sicily and Italy progressively learned to integrate air superiority, interdiction and CAS with naval and land operations, turning the Mediterranean into an Allied “air–sea lake” that constrained Axis reinforcement and supply. These campaigns illustrate how control of the air and surrounding seas enabled amphibious operations, sustained logistics and ultimately the grinding land offensives that forced Italy from the war and tied down major German forces.
• Maritime–air war against Japan: Van Creveld, The Age of Airpower, emphasises that navies supported by powerful carrier and land-based air arms ruled the oceans, while those without such aviation, like Germany and Italy, fought gravely disadvantaged; Japan’s initial naval air superiority eroded as US industrial strength surged. He notes that US strategy focused on securing Pacific sea lanes, then cutting Japan’s maritime communications and tightening a siege of the home islands—tasks executed by submarines, carriers and long-range aircraft whose effectiveness depended on sea and air control.
• Blockade, bombing and Japan’s defeat: O’Brien, How the War Was Won, highlights Admiral King and Admiral Leahy’s belief that once the US had seized the Marianas and secured command of the surrounding seas and skies, Japan’s defeat was assured through blockade and conventional bombing, even without invasion or atomic weapons. USSBS Pacific and later scholarship underline the combined effect of submarine warfare, mining operations and strategic bombing in collapsing Japanese industry and shipping, making continued resistance militarily hopeless.
• Firebombing, B-29s and strategic air war in the Pacific: Burke et al., Military Strategy, Joint Operations, and Airpower, frame the strategic bombing of Japan—B-29 raids, firebombing of cities and mining of harbours—as the operational realisation of inter-war US airpower theories about striking an enemy’s industrial web directly. O’Brien, How the War Was Won, notes that Japanese leaders often emphasised the psychological and economic impact of city raids, yet he situates bombing within the broader maritime–air strangulation that left Japan short of fuel, food and raw materials.
• Tactical airpower and land offensives: Spires, Air Power for Patton’s Army, shows how XIX Tactical Air Command’s flexible use of air superiority, interdiction and close support enabled Patton’s rapid advances and later helped contain German offensives such as the Ardennes. He describes how, during the Battle of the Bulge, Ninth Air Force redirected large fighter-bomber forces to close support and battlefield interdiction, blunting German spearheads once weather improved. Wielhouwer, Trial by Fire, situates such cooperation within a broader, often painful, evolution of American CAS doctrine.
• Air–sea power and its limits: Gray, Airpower for Strategic Effect, stresses that while long-range bombing and maritime airpower can generate major strategic advantages—disrupting economies, constraining manoeuvre and shaping campaigns—they cannot occupy territory or by themselves resolve political conflicts; bombing “should not be expected to decide by its own unassisted kinetic effort who will win a conflict.” Van Creveld, The Age of Airpower, reminds us that armies and navies still provide control of land and sea, and that boots on the ground and command of the oceans remained essential to victory.
• Assessing ‘main factor’ claims: JB Airpower Reference overviews of Overy, Gray and Van Creveld train us to avoid polarised claims of airpower as either wholly decisive or marginal, emphasising instead cumulative, multi-domain effects. O’Brien, How the War Was Won, makes the strongest case that control of air and sea, and the associated destruction of Axis equipment, formed the decisive framework of Allied victory, especially against Japan; Weinberg and Olsen caution that this framework interacted with vast land campaigns whose human and political weight cannot be reduced to an air–sea narrative alone.

Official Sources and Records
• United States Strategic Bombing Survey Reports: https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/ (Ibiblio)
• United States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report European War: https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/ETO-Summary.html (Ibiblio)
• The Army Air Forces in World War II series: https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/index.html (Ibiblio)
• The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939–1945 British official history series: https://www.generalstaff.org/WW2/Hist_UK/UK_Official_Histories.htm (General Staff)
• History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Admin-Hist/USN-Admin-Guide/USN-Admin-Guide-1.html (Ibiblio)

Further reading
• Burke, C, et al. 2022, Military Strategy, Joint Operations, and Airpower, 2nd edn, Air University Press, Maxwell AFB.
• Gray, C S 2012, Airpower for Strategic Effect, Air University Press, Maxwell AFB.
• O’Brien, P P 2015, How the War Was Won: Air–Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Olsen, J A (ed.) 2010, A History of Air Warfare, Potomac Books, Washington, DC.
• Overy, R J 2014, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe 1940–1945, Penguin, London.
• Spires, D N 2002, Air Power for Patton’s Army: The XIX Tactical Air Command in the Second World War, Air Force History and Museums Program, Washington, DC.
• Van Creveld, M 2011, The Age of Airpower, PublicAffairs, New York.
• Weinberg, G L 1994, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Wielhouwer, P 2014, Trial by Fire: Forging American Close Air Support Doctrine, Air University, Maxwell AFB.
• Winton, J 1976, Air Power at Sea 1939–45, Sidgwick & Jackson, London.