John Seiler Editorial writer The Orange County Register jseiler@ocregister.com

I grew up on stories of World War II, of Memorial Day parades and stories of family members who served in the war. My father served five years in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of captain. My family interest has helped lead to broad reading on the war.

What books would I recommend on the war? I'd start with a good general introduction, such as those by Martin Gilbert, John Keegan and Gerald L. Weinberg. Then the grunt's-eye-view, "Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War," by Paul Fussell, who was wounded as an infantry officer; it also covers conditions on the "home front."

Beyond these, the book that explains the most is "Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War," by John Ellis. More than any war before it, World War II was an industrial war. Massive armies rode to battle in tanks, jeeps and trucks or flew into it in planes, and killed one another and civilians by the millions.

It's likely impossible such a war could happen again. Nuclear weapons, which potentially could kill more people, make it foolish for major nations to mass millions of troops together. And the information revolution means a few men with high technology can defeat many men with tanks and guns.

The war's nature was evident from the beginning, when the German blitzkrieg rumbled into Poland and slaughtered brave Poles on horses. Then superior German tactics defeated an equivalent force of British and French forces in France in 1940. Ellis attributes the German victory to its generals' understanding that the tempo of war was much faster than in World War I.

Then the tables were turned on the Germans. Hitler's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and the U.S. entry into the war after Pearl Harbor gave the advantage in men and materiel to the Allies.

The book tells the story in part through tables and graphs. The monthly tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany by the British Bomber Command and the Eighth U.S. Air Force rose steadily from 4,087 in October 1942 to 133,329 in March 1945.

In the whole war, the Germans produced 20.6 percent of the tanks and self-propelled guns as the Allies, 19.6 percent of the artillery, 11.2 percent of the mortars, 14.2 percent of the machine guns, 19.4 percent of the trucks and 20.9 percent of the combat aircraft.

Ellis explodes the myth that the Germans were particularly well-armed. "In fact," he writes, "the figures show that the Allies were much better at converting raw materials into weapons."

Maybe the most telling number is that in 1944, the Germans produced just 9.6 percent of the trucks as the Allies. You just can't win a mobile war with one-tenth the trucks of the enemy. By 1945, the Germans were as disadvantaged militarily as the Poles had been in 1939.

In the Pacific War, the numbers were even more lopsided against Japan, which at that time was not as advanced industrially as Germany.

Ellis does criticize the Allied leadership for relying so much on their massive numbers - brute force. "[A]ny armed forces that embrace such a dictum are likely to waste more lives than they save, by failing to look at a whole range of tactical situations as anything but problems to be battered remorselessly into submission. ... [C]ommanders, together with the forces they build in their own image, become incapable of perceiving and seizing those fleeting opportunities that may considerably shorten a campaign or war, and thus save thousands of lives."

In the end, the Allies pulverized the Axis into defeat.

Ellis and others of the statistical school of history have been criticized for minimizing the personal heroism on the ground. I look at it differently. This book demonstrates how massively brutal the war was, ranging across most of the globe, from the Arctic to the tropics and deserts.

Americans who fought it, in your family and mine, will always be remembered.