Sarah Paine

However, when the United States gets into the war, the United States can help Britain retake some of these keys to the Mediterranean.

And this is what is going on in North Africa today.

So Admiral Dönitz had saved it initially, but after the United States is in with more assets, Dönitz's oil, the tanker supplying his oil, 60% of them are getting sunk because Malta holds and Malta is supplied and these tankers are getting bombed out of existence.

And so Rommel loses in North Africa, not because he's the inferior general, he's a better general, he's just not supplied.

And this is the key.

And once you take North Africa, that peripheral operation, it opens the opportunity to go into Sicily and then the rest of Italy.

And once you get that going, there's a possibility to do the Normandy landing.

So there's four different peripheral operations.

Some would argue that the air campaign over Germany was another peripheral campaign.

You're bringing the war home to Germans.

You're wrecking their productive base.

And also it's a major...

help to the Russians.

Why?

Because once the British start bombing Berlin, Hitler calls off air squadrons from the Eastern Front, and these anti-aircraft guns can be used against tanks or aircraft.

He pulls those back, and that means the Germans no longer own the skies of Russia, and you're no longer going to be taking hundreds of thousands of POWs.

Okay, so that's how the peripheral strategies worked out, but they're coordinated through allies, figuring out how to make all of them work.

And here are the stats on allies.

Alliances are additive.

right?