Niall Ferguson, author of The Pity of War, gives the first-ever e-lecture on boxmind.com.

Niall Ferguson's historic lecture is entitled "Why the World Wars were Won". In the First World War, Germany and her allies killed nearly five and a half million, and lost only four million. In the second, macabre statistics reveal that they "outkilled" the Allies at a rate of 2.4 to 1. Yet still the Allies won both wars. Why? In a revisionist tour de force, Ferguson argues that the key to victory in both wars lay not in killing the enemy, but in getting the other side to surrender. Using harrowing evidence of atrocities committed by both sides, he shows how a culture of 'take no prisoners' deterred men from coming out with their hands up. It was this that prolonged the Second World War long after the Germans and Japanese had lost any realistic chance of victory.