Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War

471 Pages·2013·5.24 MB·English

by  Paul Kennedy

ALSO BY PAUL KENNEDY
The Parliament of Man
Preparing for the 21st Century
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Copyright © 2013 by Paul Kennedy
Maps copyright © 2013 by David Lindroth, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kennedy, Paul M., 1945.
Engineers of victory: the problem solvers who turned the tide in the Second World War / Paul
Kennedy.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-58836898-0
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4000-6761-9
1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations. 3. Naval
convoys—Atlantic Ocean—History—20th century. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations.
5. Bombing, Aerial—History—20th century. 6. Germany—Armed Forces—Organization. 7.
Germany—Armed Forces—History—World War, 1939–1945. 8. World War, 1939–1945—
Amphibious operations. 9. Amphibious warfare—History—20th century. 10. World War, 1939–
1945—Campaigns—Pacific Area. I. Title.
D743.K425 2013
940.54—dc23 2012024284
Title-page image credit copyright © iStockphoto / © Todd Headington www.atrandom.com
Book design by Mary A. Wirth
v3.1
To Cynthia
The young Alexander conquered India.
On his own?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?
—Excerpt from Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 poem “Fragen eines lesenden
Arbeiters,” in which Brecht imagines a young German worker
beginning to read a lot of history books and being puzzled that
they are chiefly histories of great men
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps and Tables
Introduction
1. How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic
2. How to Win Command of the Air
3. How to Stop a Blitzkrieg
4. How to Seize an Enemy-Held Shore
5. How to Defeat the “Tyranny of Distance”
Conclusion: Problem Solving in History
Acknowledgments
Photo Insert
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
About the Author
Maps and Tables
Location of Merchant Ships of the British Empire, November 1937
The North Atlantic Air Gap and Convoys
U-boat vs. Merchant Ship Losses in the North Atlantic, 1943
The Fiercest Convoy Battle?
Fighter Command Control Network, Circa 1940
Increasing Escort Fighter Range
Losses of Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot Aces, March–May 1944
Anglo-American Armies Advance in Northern Africa and Southern
Italy
The Rapid German Expansion in the East, July–December 1941
Red Army Advances During Operation Bagration, June–August 1944
British Landings in Madagascar, May 1942
The Anglo-American Maritime Routes for Operation Torch, November
1942
The D-Day Invasions, June 6, 1944
The Japanese Empire’s Expansion at Its Peak, 1942
The Four Options for Allied Counterattack Against Tokyo After 1942–
43
The Geography of History: Allied Positional Assets in World War II
Introduction
T
his is a book about the Second World War that attempts a new way
of treating that epic conflict. It is not another general history of the war;
it does not focus upon a single campaign, nor upon a single war leader.
It focuses instead upon problem solving and problem solvers, and
chooses to concentrate upon the middle years of the conflict, from
roughly the end of 1942 to roughly the high summer of 1944.
In a book as complex as this one, it is best to state at the beginning
what it is not about and what it does not claim. It resists all efforts at
reductionism, such as that the winning of the war can be explained
solely by brute force, or by some wonder weapon, or by some magical
decrypting system. Claims that the war was won by Royal Air Force
(RAF) bombers, the Red Army’s T-34 tanks, or the U.S. Marine Corps’s
amphibious warfare doctrine are treated with respect and care in the
pages below, but none of these explanations dominates the book. Nor
should they. The Second World War was so infinitely more complex, and
fought out across so many theaters and by so many different means, that
the intelligent scholar simply has to go for a multicausal explanation as
to why the Allies won.
This complexity is reflected in the five large chapters below. Each
chapter tells a story of how small groups of individuals and institutions,
both civilian and military, succeeded in enabling their political masters
to achieve victory in the critical middle years of the Second World War.
It is about what the military-operational problems were, who the
problem solvers were, how they got things done, and thus why their
work constitutes an important field of study. The story begins at the
Casablanca Conference of January 1943, when the earlier Allied
strategic thinking was brought together into a much more cohesive and
wider-ranging blueprint for the defeat of the Axis powers, and it ends
around seventeen months later, in June/July 1944, when, remarkably,
all five of those operational challenges either had been overcome or
were headed for success. It is an analysis of how grand strategy is
achieved in practice, with the explicit claim that victories cannot be
understood without a recognition of how those successes were
engineered, and by whom. In this sense, the word engineers here means
not strictly people possessing a B.Sc. or Ph.D. in engineering (although
the founder of the Seabees, Admiral Ben Moreell, and the inventor of the
mine detector, Józef Kosacki, certainly did) but those falling under
Webster’s wider definition: “a person who carries through an enterprise
through skillful or artful contrivance.” The book’s potential
transferability to large nonmilitary organizations will seem obvious.
Of course, the five individual chapters themselves do not, and cannot,
begin in January 1943, for in each case there is an antecedent tale to
help the reader understand the background and contours of the analysis
that follows. Still, there is not a simple, mechanistic structure to every
chapter. Convoying merchant ships across the oceans (chapter 1) and
landing on an enemy-held shore (chapter 4) were such long-standing
military challenges, and drew upon so many lessons and principles from
past fighting, that those chapters deserve a lengthier historical
introduction. By contrast, grappling with the Wehrmacht’s armored-
warfare techniques (chapter 3) and being shot out of the sky by enemy
fighters (chapter 2) were so recent an experience that those two chapters
begin with anecdotes of clashes in 1943 itself. Chapter 5 sits somewhere
in between. Trying to figure out how to move large forces across the
Pacific after 1941 certainly demanded new weapons and organizations,
but the operational challenge had been pondered for a full two decades
beforehand and needs its own introduction.
By contrast, each chapter falls away quite rapidly after it reaches
June/July 1944. There is brief coverage of how fighting led all the way
to Berlin and Hiroshima, but the arguments in this book are complete by
around July 1944. The tide really did turn in those critical eighteen
months of the war, and no desperate actions by Berlin or Tokyo could
block the oncoming waves.
Authors come to write the books they do for many reasons. In my
case, a long detour in research and writing during the 1990s, to help
compose a study to improve the effectiveness of the United Nations,
probably was the reason I became more interested in the idea of problem
solvers in history.1 Later, a class in grand strategy that I taught each year
at Yale further spurred this intellectual interest. That class is a