There was no Desert War

One of the interesting things about history is that no matter how rubbish the opinions and analysis of many professional historians they are still worth reading for their access to loads of interesting facts. For example just two days ago I was browsing in a second hand book shop and I skimmed through one of Norman Stone's books. Usual Norma Stone far right revisionism: Stalin was a monster just like Hitler, we (we?) should have kicked the Soviets out in 1945, ... blah, blah, blah. But tucked away on one page was a chunk of real history. A table comparing the different fronts using some kind of notional man-year system (I was skimming) . On that scale (just from memory) the Eastern Front scored 400, the Western Front after D-Day scored 16, and North Africa scored 5. Now you can quibble with the methodology (and I will below) but basically the famous Desert War of British Military legend didn't exist, statistically speaking! How's that? Well 5 is 1.25% of 400. Most estimating systems would accept a 3 % margin of error and measuring the 'weight' of different military campaigns is just that: an estimation. The Desert War doesn't even reach half of a typical margin of error so practically speaking doesn't exist. Effectively that means that Tripoli, O'Connor, Malta, El Alamein etc, had no measurable effect on the war. Now that is only by one measure but a more subjective assessment of the War would come to the same conclusion (as I already had).
On the same thread, the West after DDay (16 remember) is equivalent to 4% of the Eastern Front; barely above the statistically significant!

Now you may think it's a bit of a cheek to take a quickly skimmed table off a page, add a dollop of measurement theory and dismiss a major campaign of the war. But at least it is a fact based analysis instead of the usual approach: starting from how we won and then selecting facts to suit.

p.s. One minor flaw in this method. The British and the Americans (especially the Americans) chucked wads more firepower per soldier than the Russians. So a man-month measure won't be a perfect comparator. But look if you double 1.2% you're still at 2.4%.