Allan Millett

Millett's book probes issues behind 'The Good War'

As a professor of military history at Ohio State, Allan Millett occasionally hears from people who believe that the Allied victory in World War II was inevitable, that the moral righteousness and technological superiority of the Allies led inexorably to victory.

But after a professional lifetime studying "The Good War,"Millett knows better. He and his colleague Williamson Murray, a former Ohio State professor who is now a senior fellow at Washington's Institute for Defense Analyses, have spent about 50 years between them studying the war from all its angles, looking at what happened in the battlefields and war rooms. The sum of their collective knowledge is contained in the new book A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Belknap/Harvard, 2000).

In the book, the authors consider, among many other issues, why the Allies won -- and how very difficult that victory was to achieve.

"We could have lost the war,"said Millett, who is the Raymond E. Mason, Jr. Professor of Military History. "One of the things we wanted to make clear in the book was that nothing that happened in World War II was preordained."

Many pivotal events in the war could conceivably have gone differently and threatened Allied victory, Millett said. For instance, Russia could have surrendered to Germany in 1941 or 1942 after suffering staggering losses, or the U.S. Navy could have lost the Battle of Midway in the Pacific Theater.

"You can't turn to any single event and say that's where the war was won, or could have been lost,"he said. "But you can easily imagine how events may have turned out differently and influenced the course of the war."

Especially early in the war, Germany and the other Axis powers had several key victories that threatened the Allied cause. But one of the keys to the eventual Allied victory was its technological superiority -- a superiority that was heavily attributable to the efforts of the United States, according to Millett.

The United States was determined to fight a capital-intensive war that was based on superior technology rather than on troops in the field.

"The United States doesn't like to lose people in a war,"Millett said. "There's this myth that this reluctance to lose troops was the result of the Vietnam War, but that's not true. We haven't been the same since the huge losses of the American Civil War."

Millett points out that among the major belligerents in World War II, the United States had the fewest combat deaths and spent the most money -- more than $300 billion. And of the approximately 300,000 combat deaths that the United States suffered, about one-third were airmen. "That suggests a capital-intensive war,"he said.

"Americans assumed right from the very beginning -- erroneously in some cases -- that we could build and design whatever kind of weapons we needed to become a superior military power."

Germany also had cutting-edge technology of its own, but the Allies caught up and eventually surpassed the Axis powers in military hardware, he said.

Of course, World War II was about more than just who had the best technology. And in A War to Be Won, Millett and Murray look beyond the technology to provide a comprehensive perspective on the war, with a special concentration on the conduct of operations by the military organizations involved. "We have not ignored the strategic and political decisions that drove the war, but what interests us most are issues of military effectiveness," he said.

The book was written to appeal to general readers and not just historians, Millett said. There are few footnotes -- instead, lists of suggested readings are provided in each chapter. There are also several appendices that give nonexperts information about weapons, tactics, strategies and other concepts with which they may not be familiar. One appendix, written by Millett, gives readers tips on how they can do their own research to learn more about World War II.

A War to Be Won benefited from its authors' years of discussion about the major issues of World War II with students at the University, Millett said. "Much of the material in the book is an extension of courses on World War II that Dr. Murray and I have taught at Ohio State for about 25 years."

The book itself took about four years to write, but that really doesn't capture the effort and time that went into producing the book, Millett said. The authors' interest started before they were scholars, when both began service in the military -- Millett in the Marines and Murray in the Air Force. They began collaborating on their World War II research in the 1970s.

"Dr. Murray and I have been writing, talking, teaching and studying World War II almost all of our professional lives,"Millett said.

The fact that books like A War to Be Won are still being written and read, more than 50 years after the conflict, shows that interest in the war has not receded, Millett said.

"I think World War II will be forever interesting to people around the world."

The Office of University Relations produces articles about faculty research to distribute to the national media. Among the most recent stories:

Hypnosis as smoking cure needs further scrutiny

Smokers who are hopeful that hypnosis will help them kick their habit need to temper their expectations, according to new research. A review of nearly five dozen studies showed that while hypnosis may have some effect as an anti-smoking treatment, it is by no means a cure for smoking. "Giving hypnosis the stamp of a well-established treatment for smoking cessation is premature,"said Joseph Green, associate professor of psychology at the Lima campus.

www.acs.ohio-state.edu/units/research/archive/hypsmoke.htm

Minimal counseling OK during genetic testing for cancer

People undergoing genetic testing for hereditary colon cancer may need less counseling than formerly thought, new research shows. The study showed that a pre-test counseling session is necessary, and that a counseling session must accompany the subsequent disclosure of the test result, but further sessions are unnecessary for most people, said Albert de la Chapelle, director of the Human Cancer Genetics Program.

www.acs.ohio-state.edu/units/research/archive/counsel.htm