For entirely understandable reasons, the popular history of the Second World War tends to concentrate on the sharp end of things. Books and documentaries are littered with the accounts and voices of infantrymen and tank crew, those who had to close with the enemy, take ground, and were most exposed to danger. The same is true of drama, on both television and film. Whether the viewer is following Easy Company fighting its way from Normandy to Germany in Band of Brothers or the exploits of the SAS in the North African desert in Rogue Heroes the focus tends to stick close the frontline. But the vast majority of the soldiers in the American, British and Canadian armies that landed in France in June 1944 and advanced into the Reich itself in 1945 were not infantrymen or tank crew.

In June 1944, the infantry represented 14 per cent of the British army’s strength and the armoured regiments just eight per cent. Even that overstates the real strength of the direct fighting arms. Of the 700 or so men in an armoured regiment, less than half of them acted as tank crew. The majority served in the repair workshops that kept the tanks running, drove the lorries that brought forward their fuel and ammunition, worked as the cooks who fed them or as the clerks who kept the whole, enormously complex, system running. The single largest arm, by raw numbers, was the Royal Artillery, which represented 18 per cent of all the Army’s manpower and actually outnumbered the Royal Navy in 1944. More than 40 per cent of the British army in Normandy’s strength worked in the broadly defined service corps. The ratios were similar in the American forces.

What is more, these armies were, by the standards of the time, comparatively small. In May 1944 the US army mustered just under 90 divisions in total, of which 60 were available for operations in Europe. That compares to more than 300 in the Red Army, around 240 in the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, and around 100 in the Imperial Japanese forces.

The casualties in these relatively small land forces were disproportionately felt by those whose accounts still grip the public more than eight decades later. The men carrying a rifle or a light machine gun in the infantry may have represented less than 15 per cent of the army’s strength, but they suffered 70 per cent of all casualties. A junior infantry officer in the British Army had just a one in ten chance of making it from June 1944 to May 1945 without being killed or wounded.

Fighting up close to the enemy, whether in a tank or from a foxhole, was a dangerous business. And the armies of the Western allies were designed, organised and employed in a manner that minimised how many people had to do it. As Brigadier Bill Williams, Field Marshall Montgomery’s intelligence chief, put it ‘let metal do it rather than flesh’. The war-fighting strategy of Britain and America was framed both around avoiding the kind of casualty levels suffered during the Great War and, just as importantly, playing to the natural strengths of the North Atlantic countries; their access to the raw materials of the world and their industrial prowess. This was a strategy which relied upon burying their opponents under a weight of artillery fire and airpower, which recognised that material could be replaced but men could not, and which let mechanisation rather than raw numbers play a decisive role. The Western allies, drawing upon their larger and more productive economies fought a ‘rich man’s war’, an option not open to the Soviet Union, the Third Reich or Japan.

There has been a tendency, which dates back at least to the 1940s, to emphasise the German skill at arms on display in the Second World War. Accounts of even the victorious years of 1944 and 1945 often play up the tactical prowess of the German defenders, lavish praise on the quality of their equipment, such as the rapid-firing MG-42 machine gun, the monstrous Tiger tanks and the deadly 88m dual-use anti-tank and anti-aircraft gun, and compare and contrast the determined motivation of the soldiers of the Reich with what seems a more cautious Anglo-American-Canadian approach.

That the, mostly conscripted, soldiers of the Western democracies fought a different kind of war to the products of totalitarian regimes is not surprising. Few things demonstrate this as well as the raw numbers of soldiers executed by the various combatants over the course of the war as whole. The US army judicially killed 146 of its own soldiers and the British just 44 – in almost all cases for committing what would be capital offences in civilian life. By contrast, the Wehrmacht executed a staggering 19,600 of its own men and the Red Army an almost unbelievable 150,000.

Postwar professional military men, looking back on the lessons of 1939-45 and especially of 1944-45 in north-western Europe, have often concluded that the Germans outfought the Western Allies in close-quarter battles at the platoon or company level. One quantitative study, from a US colonel, published in the 1970s argued that ‘on a man for man basis, the German ground soldier consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50 per cent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances’.

At the small unit level of platoons and companies, on which the postwar spotlight has often fallen, there is some truth to the idea of a German qualitative edge in terms of weaponry. That reflects both prewar procurement priorities and the path dependencies of how the opposing forces had experienced the conflict until 1944. Take light machine guns at the squad or section level as an example. Each German gruppe, or squad, of eight to ten men was equipped typically with one or sometimes two, belt-fed, MG-42 machine guns with a potential rate of fire of 1,400 rounds per minute. Especially when fighting from a prepared position on the defence, this was a superb tool. By contrast the American and British equivalents – the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and the Bren gun – were both loaded with a magazine (of 20 and 30 rounds respectively) and, while more accurate, had a much lower rate of fire. The Bren and the BAR were essentially the tools of armies designed to serve as a form of imperial gendarmerie rather than weapons for a total war against an organised great power. And while a different option could have been produced after 1939, small arms were not the Allied industrial priority.

When it comes to tanks the picture is much more nuanced. The 57-tonne Tiger tank still, decades later, draws the biggest crowds at events. Tank aficionados, and there are a lot of them, still regularly heap praise on the Tiger and its cousin, the Panther and often talk up their superiority to the humble Sherman tank, which was the mainstay of the Allied tank-arm in 1944 and 1945. Both were products of Germany’s experience on the Eastern Front in 1941 and 1942, when tank development had become a focus for the Wehrmacht and both, in many ways, did indeed outclass their Western opponents. But the numbers of both, and especially the Tigers, were limited and both suffered from mechanical flaws which meant breakdowns were relatively common. The most common tank encountered by the Allies between 1944 and 1945 was the Panzer Mark IV, which was broadly comparable to the Sherman.

At the small-unit level, in close combat action, the Germans may have had the edge in terms of weaponry, they often – although not always – had soldiers with more combat experience and the totalitarian nature of their state meant that determination to fight to the end would often be higher, too. But the war was not won through small unit close combats. Military effectiveness cannot be measured just by comparing infantry or tank units platoon for platoon. The allies enjoyed near total air superiority, they had vastly more artillery firepower and when it came to areas like medical support, logistics, intelligence and reserves of material they simply outclassed their opponents.

Panther tanks might have been both better armed and better armoured than a Sherman, but this was useless if they did not have the fuel to move. In mid-1944 no less a figure than General Heinz Guderian, often seen as Germany’s leading pioneer of armoured warfare, advised that the high fuel consumption of the Panther should always be considered before committing them to a particular action. The Allies usually faced no such constraint.

Just getting into the kind of close combat scenarios at which they excelled could be a deadly business for the Wehrmacht. The Panzer Lehr division, a superbly equipped division originally formed from cadres of Panzer school instructors and Eastern Front veterans, was ordered to advance to Normandy to combat the Allied beachheads from its base near Le Mans on the afternoon of D-Day. It’s commander, who had fought the British and the Americans in North Africa, warned that daylight movement would be too dangerous. He was overruled. His men later nicknamed the road they followed ‘fight-bomber alley’, as these were hit by repeated air attacks while on the move.

Once they got into position, the German forces would be subjected to ferocious artillery fire. The Allies not only had a greater number of longer-ranged guns but also, just as importantly, secure supplies of ammunition. The Germans were able, over the course of the fighting in 1944 and 1945, to fire around one artillery round for each ten they received in return from the Anglo-American-Canadian forces. What is more, Allied artillery using a combination of spotter planes and radio-equipped forward observers was employed with a much higher degree of accuracy.

Still, as was clear from the experience of the Western Front between late 1914 and 1918, artillery alone could not hope to defeat a dug-in enemy. The broad pattern of the fighting in Normandy usually followed a similar script. The Allies would soften up a German position with an impressive artillery barrage and air attack before sending forward their own infantry and tanks. This attack would eventually bog down when it encountered stiff resistance but, with an almost Pavlovian response, the Germans – true to a doctrine developed in the Great War – would almost instantly counter-attack in order to regain lost ground. Such a counterattack exposed them far more directly to allied artillery and airpower. The end result was often not much in the way of ground taken but with heavy casualties inflicted on a German force, which could not hope to replenish them. Many later historians, and a fair few professional soldiers, have condemned this approach as unimaginative and contrasted it with supposed German operational flair. And yet it worked.

Operation Goodwood, an attempted British breakout east of Caen carried out between 18-20 July 1944 is a case in point. At best it seems unimaginative, at worst feckless. It has even been dubbed ‘the death ride of the British armoured divisions’, a supposed replay of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War almost a century earlier. The plan was, true to form, to prepare the ground with a major artillery stonk and air attack before hurling three armoured divisions – the 7th, 11th and Guards Armoured – to force a breakthrough in the German lines. By the time the offensive was called off the British Army had lost more than 400 tanks and gained only seven miles of territory.

Goodwood, and its ilk, became something of an obsession for NATO militaries during the Cold War. As they wrestled with the problem of how to fight a much numerically larger foe with at least a local advantage in terms of artillery support, the example of the Wehrmacht – on both the Western and Eastern Fronts in 1943-45 – often came to the fore. Here was an army which had ultimately lost but which appeared to have defended ground stoically and often inflicted stinging losses on its opponents. Perhaps it had only lost the war because of wider strategic mismanagement and tactically there were many lessons to absorb?

Goodwood, by that frame of reference, was an ideal case study. An outnumbered German force, initially consisting of only the already very mauled 21st Panzer Division and a poorly trained, under-strength infantry division made up of Luftwaffe personnel, had managed to stop three large British armoured divisions despite their heavy artillery and air support.

Goodwood is a superb example of the Allies ‘metal not flesh’ doctrine at work. The supposed, and often repeated, figure of 400 tank losses is, at best, misleading. According to a Military Operational Research Unit report afterwards, 493 British tanks took some form of damage, but 218 of those were back in service within 24 hours and another 62 within a week. Only 156 were permanently lost and that was a number which could be made good with replacements.  Crew losses were even lower. The 2nd Northants Yeomanry reported 37 lost tanks during Goodwood, but of the 185 men manning them, only 25 were casualties.  German tank loses over the course of the engagement amounted to 83 tanks and assault guns – including 26 Panthers, seven Tigers and three of the ultra-rare, 72 tonne King Tigers. These were losses the German order could not replace. In addition, the German were forced to commit two more panzer divisions to steady their line, robbing them of their operational reserve. Once in the line they would be similarly chewed up over time.

It is too much of a stretch to claim that Operation Goodwood was a victory for the British, but it was by no means a death ride. The Germans suffered both losses of men and material which could not be replaced and were deprived of local reserves. The three British armoured divisions involved were all back to strength and in action again within two weeks.

On the other hand, a major German offensive which ultimately failed to take much ground at a high cost in material – such as played out over the course of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 – truly was a defeat.

Throughout the war the Western allies prioritised industrial production over ever-larger armies, they retained access to the resources of most of the globe and they were able to fight a high-tech, mechanised form of warfare, which utilised high levels of firepower and airpower to minimise the number of men who had to be put in harm’s way. The democracies of the West would not throw away the lives of conscripted civilians in uniform in the same manner as the autocracies would. The task of the Allied armies was to win victory without suffering excessive casualties. In this, they succeeded.