Phillips O'Brien

Phillips Payson O'Brien (born 1963) is an American historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

[3] He was subsequently lecturer in modern history at the University of Glasgow where he also ran the Scottish Centre for War Studies.

[8] After an analysis of the proportion of military output devoted to the different arenas of combat, O'Brien concluded that victory in World War Two was determined not through battles on land, but in the air and at sea on what he calls an "Air-Sea Super Battlefield" that crossed thousands of miles.

Examples included the decision to give equal or even higher priority to the fight against Japan rather than Germany, and Leahy's opposition to a 1943 Allied invasion of Europe.

[14] Steve Donoghue in The Christian Science Monitor, welcomed the book as an overdue first-rate telling of the life of a man who had more authority than celebrity and who was the "quiet commander in the background of every photo" of Roosevelt.

Cover of How the War Was Won, Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II , 2015.
William D. Leahy (back left) with front from left: Clement Attlee , Harry S. Truman , Joseph Stalin ; and back: Leahy, Ernest Bevin , James F. Byrnes and Vyacheslav Molotov .