At the moment of its birth the interwar-period naval arms limitation process was considered one of the most important events in global diplomatic history. To many, it seemed to hold out the possibility of major powers reshaping their behavior in a more liberal, more rational, and less confrontational manner. When the Washington Conference concluded in 1922 its host, the US President Warren Harding, described the agreement as representing a “new and better epoch in human affairs”. The head of the British delegation, Arthur Balfour, claimed that the Washington treaties were “absolute unmixed blessing to mankind”.

History has been much less kind to the process. Its demise in 1936, followed shortly by the outbreak of the Second World War, has colored the view of many. Often this has led to the naval arms limitation process being labeled as idealistic on the part of the British and the Americans, one which led them to neglect their naval defenses in the Asia-Pacific region and delay their naval build-ups until too late in the day – resulting in catastrophe during the early stages of the conflict.

The process itself centered on four major conferences. These were the Washington Conference of 1921–22, the Geneva(or Coolidge) Conference of 1927, the First London Conference of 1930, and finally the Second London Conference of 1935–36. Philosophically, the naval arms limitation process aimed to prevent future conflict, using a multi-layered process. In the short term it was directed at averting a potential naval building race between the United States, the British Empire, and Japan.

On the morning of August 17, 1943, a clear and sunny day with superb visibility, the 100th Bombardment Group of the USAAF's 8th Air Force, 4th Air Division took off from the United Kingdom to attack the Messerschmitt aircraft works in Regensburg, Germany. They were commanded by one of the more driven officers in the American air force, a fast-rising colonel named Curtis LeMay. This was a much more dangerous mission than any that the pilots in the unit had tried before. Raids by the 8th Air Force had previously been aimed mostly at German U-boat facilities on the coast, many in France – raids for which they could receive fighter escort for their entire time in the air.

In this raid, however, the twenty-one B-17s of the 100th Bombardment Group were placed “lowest and last,” flying at 17,000 feet at the absolute end of the 4th Air Division's bomber stream as it headed deep into Germany. Regensburg was located in southeast Germany, approximately halfway between Nuremberg and Munich. Until the 100th reached the skies over Holland, they met no opposition. Finally, at 10.17 in the morning, when the B-17s reached the Dutch town of Woensdrecht, they encountered German flak. Ten minutes later, whilst nearing the German border, the first Luftwaffe fighters appeared, two FW-190s, which attacked the unit from straight ahead.

There were no decisive battles in World War II. This might seem a strange thing to say as the war is usually viewed through the prism of its famous engagements. As this book was being completed, the seventieth anniversaries of El Alamein, Stalingrad, Kursk and Midway have been remembered. It has led to a great deal of reflection on this pivotal period of the war. Each battle is usually discussed with superlatives which invariably include how it changed the course of the war or was responsible for leading the Allies to victory.

El Alamein, the famous tank battle in the Egyptian desert in October and November 1942, between Bernard Montgomery's British 8th Army and Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps, is most remembered in the United Kingdom and parts of what was the British Empire. The destruction of most of Rommel's panzers, which started the German retreat from North Africa that would culminate in the surrender of a large German force in Tunisia in May 1943, is depicted as a crucial marker heralding German defeat. In the words of Winston Churchill, it may not have represented the beginning of the end, but it was “the end of the beginning.” Later he would say that before El Alamein the British never had a victory, and after they never had a defeat.

In 1944 Panzer Lehr was one of the most powerful divisions in the German army. It was completely mechanized and had twice the number of AFV of a normal panzer division. Having been created from the best instructors in the German panzer corps, Panzer Lehr was made up of 60 percent veterans of Russia and North Africa, with the rest eager recruits, so that the average age of a soldier in the division was only 21.5 years old. Not only that, it was one of the few units in the German army with a large complement of motorized flak vehicles. At full force, its fighting strength was reckoned to be equal to that of four standard panzer divisions.

Panzer Lehr was to be one of the key German units in the defense of France against the expected Allied invasion. General Heinz Guderian told the commander of Panzer Lehr, Fritz Bayerlein, that the division “alone must hurl the English back into the Channel. Your goal is not the coast; it is the sea.” However, until May 1, because of fear of air attack, the division was based near Budapest. When it was thereupon moved to France, it was stationed near the town of Nogent-le-Rotrou, about halfway between Le Mans and Chartres, only 80–90 miles from the town of Caen which lay just behind the Normandy beaches. On June 6, as soon as the first reports came in about Allied airborne troops landing in Normandy, Panzer Lehr was ordered to concentrate near Caen and drive the invasion into the sea. Such a journey would normally take a motorized division a few hours. However, Panzer Lehr had to fight its way along the roads of Normandy against constant air attack. Because it was desperately needed if the Germans were to have any chance of victory, Panzer Lehr couldn't take the precaution of moving only at night. The result was that it had to crawl along slowly by day, watching out for and receiving constant attacks from Anglo-American aircraft.

Chugi Kawamura was the luckiest unlucky man in World War II. He had the most dangerous job in any theater of the war, except for perhaps a kamikaze pilot. He was the captain of a Japanese oil tanker. On December 31, 1944 he set sail from Japan in the San Diego Maru bound for Singapore to bring back a load of desperately needed oil for the faltering Japanese war machine. It was a select convoy of ten merchant ships, most of them tankers, with a very large escort of eight anti-submarine vessels. The convoy, because it was made up of such prized vessels, was also able to travel at a high speed of 12 knots, a pace which had shown itself to be of great value in the Battle of the Atlantic.

For safety, the convoy hugged the Chinese coast. Upon reaching Shanghai, it was routed to Formosa. It was on this leg of the journey that the first tanker was sunk, torpedoed by a US submarine. The convoy then took refuge in the port of Takao, but it was spotted by American carrier aircraft and three more of the precious ships were destroyed on January 9. Three hundred carrier aircraft attacked in four waves, diving low so that they were only 200 yards above the huddling ships. At least ten bombs dropped close to the San Diego Maru, some only feet away, and another vessel nearby was sunk. Kawamura himself manned the anti-aircraft guns which were now standard equipment on all Japanese tankers, and he believed that he and the other gunners were responsible for shooting down a number of the American attackers. Miraculously, the San Diego Maru was not damaged.

SC 42 is one of the better-known convoys of World War II. Its story is told in many of the histories of the Battle of the Atlantic. SC were the code letters that the Admiralty assigned to convoys that were sent from Nova Scotia to the United Kingdom and 42 was the sequential number given to the convoy as it left port. SC 42 was therefore traveling on the most important trade route of the war during one of the most important times in the conflict, September 1941. It was a large convoy composed of sixty-four merchant ships with a combined total of 500,000 tons, many of which were old, slow bulk carriers carrying raw materials for Britain's factories, such as lumber, iron ore and phosphates. However, for such a large convoy it had a relatively small, if seasoned, escort force of one destroyer and three corvettes, all Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) vessels. There were also two other destroyers training in the North Atlantic at the same time which could conceivably be called upon if the convoy ran into trouble.

And run into trouble it did. As SC 42 had a top speed of only 7 knots, it was ideally suited for U-boat attacks. The importance of convoy speed had become well understood by the summer of 1941. U-boats of the Type VII class could only travel at 8 knots while submerged, so a convoy of this speed or lower could be hunted by German submarines which could remain hidden until the last possible moment. On September 9, 1941, as SC 42 was running very close to the east coast of Greenland, it crossed paths with a large U-boat wolfpack, codenamed Markgraf, at first composed of eight boats. On that evening, when the U-boats could operate on the ocean surface free from air attack and able to reach high speeds, Markgraf started to rip into SC 42’s flesh. Sometimes darting between the mostly helpless merchant ships, the U-boats sank seven vessels the first night.

The German state-sponsored histories of World War II, published in English translation as Germany and the Second World War, are remarkable achievements of scholarship. Fair-minded and detailed, they present a thorough picture of Germany at war. In one of the sections on war production the authors seemed surprised that Germany's economic effort was geared much more towards aircraft production than land armaments. They then pose a question:

It is a central question, but it is also misdirected in its assumptions. Instead of Germany spending a “conspicuously” small amount of effort on the land war, the Nazi state's efforts in this area were absolutely typical of all the major powers, with the exception of the Soviet Union. The economies of four of the five great industrial and technological powers that fought World War II were geared by large majorities towards the production of air and sea weapons. Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom (with the British Empire) and the United States all devoted between 65 percent and 80 percent of their economic output to the making and arming of aircraft, naval vessels and anti-aircraft equipment. In all cases aircraft were the single largest element of production, ranging from 30–35 percent of US munitions output to more than 50 percent in the case of the United Kingdom. When one adds the costs of developing and arming aircraft to the costs of constructing airframes and engines, these percentages jump to slightly below 50 percent for the United States and to more than half for Germany and the United Kingdom. In all, construction of air weapons also received first priority in the allocation of industrial workers and in being supplied with crucial raw materials such as aluminum. In many ways it is the allocation of aluminum that really shows the high priority given to the air war.