> Even WW2 was largely won by infantry and artillery, tanks and aircraft are way overrated.
You may wish to read Engineers of Victory: The Making of the War Machine That Defeated the Nazis by Paul Kennedy:
> Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
Certainly you need (to use the probably over-used phrase) "boots on the ground". But air supremacy helped a lot in European campaign, as did many other Allied innovations, and the technologists that put those developments into field:
You may wish to read Engineers of Victory: The Making of the War Machine That Defeated the Nazis by Paul Kennedy:
> Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
Certainly you need (to use the probably over-used phrase) "boots on the ground". But air supremacy helped a lot in European campaign, as did many other Allied innovations, and the technologists that put those developments into field:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabees_in_World_War_II