By 1918 the productive capacities of the Entente and the Americans, the cooperation they managed to sustain and their willingness to take considerable risks, all combined to give the Allies a crushing superiority.6 In every dimension it was the Allied armies that pushed the battlefield into a new technological era. When the climactic assault on the Hindenburg line began on 8 August 1918, 2,000 Allied aircraft provided smothering air superiority. The German squadrons, led amongst others by the youthful Hermann Goering, were outnumbered five to one. On the ground the imbalance was even more
...more
