The usual epithet applied to the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) is one of defeat as in the first six months of 1944 the Luftwaffe fighter defences were shot out of the skies over the Reich by American long-range fighters. By the time of the Normandy invasion, the Luftwaffe was unable to mount anything other than a token response to Allied air forces which had achieved air supremacy. The underlying causes for this situation were the insufficient numbers of planes, low levels of pilot training and outdated aircraft. The factors behind these causes were long standing and went right back to the formation of the Luftwaffe in 1933 and will be the subject of this essay.

Phillips O'Brien in his book 'How the war was won' has produced an attractive new way of understanding the Second World War in which he claims the Western Allies were the main contributors to victory by their creation of a new type of warfare - an air-sea 'super battlefield' and their destruction of the lion's share of the production of the German and Japanese war economies. He makes the valid point that by comparison the war's main land battles, such as Kursk only involved relatively small amounts of territory and destroyed only small amounts of cheap equipment such as tanks while the air-sea supper battlefield covered large parts of the globe and consumed well over half the German and Japanese economic output in aircraft alone before we take account of shipping.