“Infantry wins battles; logistics wins wars.” This statement is attributed to World War I commanding general John J. Pershing (although I have yet to find the source). Military logistics means getting soldiers and equipment in place for battle or replacing casualties and destroyed equipment.
In 2015, Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote a book about World War II that supports Pershing’s claim. He began his book by saying, “There were no decisive battles in World War II.” [1]
“Industrially and technologically, the war was primarily a competition of aircraft development and construction,” he wrote. [2] The Allies won the war because they were able (in 1944, especially) to use air and sea power to destroy substantial production and transport of airplanes.
O’Brien’s analysis of World War II is controversial, of course, but his thinking sheds light on earlier history and alerts us to the future.
Let’s Start with the American Revolution
In 1780 General Charles Cornwallis began his Southern campaign against the colonists. Until then, most of the battles had been in the North, where the two sides were at a stalemate. Some British felt that even if they lost the northern colonies (as for New England, good riddance) they could hold onto the South. They were counting on the Loyalists in the South to swell the numbers of soldiers.
They were wrong about local reinforcements, and the logistical problems were worse.
As historian Rob Orrison writes:
“One of the constant challenges for Great Britain in the American Revolution was maintaining a reliable, sustainable and safe supply line to support their men in the field . . . . The British over-relied on resources from their homeland, which strained their supply lines and hampered troops in the field. Successfully established supply lines became targets for Patriot partisans’ constant actions.” [3]
Strangely, to move quickly and catch up with the Patriots, Cornwallis even destroyed his supply train after his defeat at Cowpens, South Carolina (January 17, 1781). [4]
At the battle of Guilford County Courthouse in North Carolina (March 15, 1781) the British won a Pyrrhic victory—taking the field but losing men and equipment, and without a way to replenish them. Nick McGrath summarizes: “The British had been stretched to their limit by the chase, and their supply lines were under constant attack by American guerrillas.” [5]
So, did logistical issues win the war for the colonists?
William Tecumseh Sherman
In the Civil War, moving men and troops was even more of a challenge because the armies were so large—tens of thousands of troops compared with hundreds or a few thousand typical of the American Revolution. And then George Tecumseh Sherman showed how to destroy a region with hardly a battle at all. His 1864 “March to the Sea” from Atlanta was devastating.
Officially, his goal was to destroy the railroads to cut off supplies, and he did that. But he also convinced white Georgians that the Confederate Army would not protect them. He did this by having his men forage the countryside, taking whatever they wanted, thus eliminating the need for a supply train. “[O]rganized soldiers and others fanned out in all directions, looking for food and booty. Very quickly, these foragers came to be called ‘bummers,’ and it was they who did the most damage to the countryside and provided the most food for the troops,” writes John F. Marszalek.[6]
Sherman didn’t need many supplies and equipment because he was marching through the rich farmland and he met little Confederate opposition. As he went along, he further destroyed the Confederacy’s ability and will to fight.
World War II
Now, back to Philips O’Brien and his argument that aerial bombing and sea power won World War II—not battles.
He starts out recognizing that most historians think the war was won, first, because the Soviet Union kept fighting, symbolized by the battle of Stalingrad, and, second, because battles like El Alamein (in North Africa) and Kursk (in Russia) involved millions of men and were decisive victories. (The battle of Kursk is considered the “largest tank battle in history.”) [7]
But O’Brien measures success by how much in the way of armaments, weapons, and important equipment was lost that could not be used again. (He doesn’t measure casualties; he admires soldiers but sees their numbers as less important in the overall picture, especially if they lack access to war matériel.)
To illustrate the limited impact of the battles on the Germans’ ability to fight, O’Brien points out that during the most severe fighting at Kursk, the Germans lost about 350 AFV (armored fighting vehicles); and in total during July and August 1943, they lost 1,331 in fighting on the Eastern front.
“Yet, during 1943 as a whole, Germany produced just over 12,000 AFV. This means that the Germans lost less than 3 percent of the AFV they built in 1943 during the Battle of Kursk, and only 11 percent of annual AFV production during all of July and August.”[8]
“The idea that battle losses represented great blows to German power seems, at best, exaggerated,” he writes. “Far more important to German and Japanese defeat was the engagement of their air and sea weaponry.”[9] Air and sea power destroyed production facilities and prevented transport of necessary weapons.
Now, to the future: Bombing (an activity subsumed under the gentler term “air and sea power”) is now and will be among the military’s options.
In World War II millions of civilians died from these “strategic” bombings. They were meant to hit production facilities, but many of those facilities were located in cities or near populated areas. And in some cases, killing civilians may have been designed (as in Sherman’s march) to destroy the will of the people.
Such destruction is once again going on. However, new technologies are making truly targeted destruction increasingly possible. That is perhaps the best we can hope for, because we seem unable to prevent wars altogether.
The photo above shows a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, a World War II fighter. It was taken by Eric Friedebach. and licensed under Creative Commons BY-2.0.
Notes (Comments follow the notes.)
[1] Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1.
[2] O’Brien, 3.
[3] Rob Orrison, “The British Supply Chain in the South,” American Battlefield Trust, July 26, 2024 (update), https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/british-supply-chain-south.
[4] American Battlefield Trust, “10 Facts: The Southern Campaign,” June 14, 2024, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/10-facts-southern-campaign.
[5] Nick McGrath, “Battle of Guilford Courthouse,” George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, n.d., https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/battle-of-guilford-courthouse.
[6] John Marszalek, “Sherman’s March to the Sea: Scorched Earth,” Hallowed Ground Magazine, Fall 2014 (updated December 9, 2023), https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/shermans-march-sea.
[7] Amy Tikanen (ed.), “Battle of Kursk,” Encyclopedia Brittanica, Nov. 23, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Kursk.
[8] O’Brien, 3.
[9] O’Brien, 2.
One way to test such hypotheses as logistics wins wars is to imagine the war first without battles and nothing but logistics, then vice versa. I hope that the proponents of logistics and of battles are not absolutists but in fact are saying one or the other is a decisive factor.
In Russia’s war against Ukraine we have one side hoping the decisive factor will be logistics. That is Ukraine destroying Russian vehicles and boats, fuel supplies, bridges, and rail lines. Russia began and seems to still believe battles will be decisive as they pour troops into the “meat grinders”. The U.S. and Europe continue to feed supplies into Ukraine.
In our Civil War an important factor was that the naval blockade cut off the Confederacy’s ability to supply its British friends with cotton, making finance through cotton bonds impossible. In similar manner, the U.S. and Europe try to cut off exports from Russia, and the ruble is failing rapidly.