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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Paul Kennedy, award-winning author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and one of today's most renowned historians, now provides a new and unique look at how World War II was won. Engineers of Victory is a fascinating nuts-and-bolts account of the strategic factors that led to Allied victory. Kennedy reveals how the leaders' grand strategy was carried out by the ordinary soldiers, scientists, engineers, and businessmen responsible for realizing their commanders' visions of success.
In January 1943, FDR and Churchill convened in Casablanca and established the Allied objectives for the war: to defeat the Nazi blitzkrieg; to control the Atlantic sea lanes and the air over western and central Europe; to take the fight to the European mainl∧ and to end Japan's imperialism. Astonishingly, a little over a year later, these ambitious goals had nearly all been accomplished. With riveting, tactical detail, Engineers of Victory reveals how.
Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar "as small as a soup plate," and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe's; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
The story of World War II is often told as a grand narrative, as if it were fought by supermen or decided by fate. Here Kennedy uncovers the real heroes of the war, highlighting for the first time the creative strategies, tactics, and organizational decisions that made the lofty Allied objectives into a successful reality. In an even more significant way, Engineers of Victory has another claim to our attention, for it restores "the middle level of war" to its rightful place in history.
Praise for Engineers of Victory
"Superbly written and carefully documented . . . indispensable reading for anyone who seeks to understand how and why the Allies won." --The Christian Science Monitor
"An important contribution to our understanding of World War II . . . Like an engineer who pries open a pocket watch to reveal its inner mechanics, [Paul] Kennedy tells how little-known men and women at lower levels helped win the war." --Michael Beschloss, The New York Times Book Review
"Histories of World War II tend to concentrate on the leaders and generals at the top who make the big strategic decisions and on the lowly grunts at the bottom. . . . [ Engineers of Victory ] seeks to fill this gap in the historiography of World War II and does so triumphantly. . . . This book is a fine tribute." -- The Wall Street Journal
"[Kennedy] colorfully and convincingly illustrates the ingenuity and persistence of a few men who made all the difference." -- The Washington Post
"This superb book is Kennedy's best." --Foreign Affairs
Author Notes
Born at the very end of World War II in Northeast England, Paul Kennedy was the first in his family to go to a university college. After receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy at Oxford University, Kennedy came to the United States to work in Washington in the National Archives. A J. Richardson Professor of History at Yale University since 1983, Kennedy is also the author of numerous important books. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers has enjoyed wide acclaim and great success as a best-seller, and Preparing for the Twenty-First Century covers the themes of lectures that Kennedy took part in at Yale University since the mid-1980s.
Kennedy's teaching and research are influenced by his knowledge of global trends. Recognizing Kennedy's activity in community service and his wisdom and expertise, the Secretary General of the United Nations invited him to co-direct a working group on the future of the United Nations for the 50th anniversary of the UN General Assembly.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kennedy takes a fresh and stimulating approach to the history of WWII in his latest, wherein he focuses on the war's middle years and its middle level: the implementation of strategies, doctrines, and policies as devised by Churchill and FDR in Casablanca in January 1943 and carried out into 1944. Before the North African conference, the Anglo-American alliance had not mounted decisive operations against the Axis powers. Five operational obstacles were in the way: "get[ting] convoys safely across the Atlantic," "win[ning] command of the air, "stop[ping] the Nazi blitzkrieg," securing and developing a European beachhead, and defeating Japan quickly and economically. In as many chapters, Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) demonstrates how, over the course of 18 months, the U.K. and the U.S. developed and implemented a system for addressing these problems pragmatically and focused on incremental progress. This process worked through a "culture of encouragement" based on "feedback loops" connecting all levels of planning and execution among the Allies, while allowing freedom to experiment, explore ideas, and cross institutional boundaries. Thus were intentions transformed to realities; thus was the tide of war turned. B&w photos, maps. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
There's a simple explanation for the result of WWII: the Allies marshaled more military power than the Axis. Although that is true, Professor Kennedy, the eminent author of many popular histories, would grade that explanation incomplete. He places a fuller interpretation on the chronological fulcrum of the global conflict: 1943. That's when Germany and Japan bestrode most of their conquered territories and seas, their armed forces battered but dangerous. For the Allies, someone had to devise applications of superior strength to numerous technical and strategic problems, and Kennedy elaborates five interlocking narratives of those individuals and what they did. Concerning amphibious landings, Kennedy elides prewar planners of such operations with wartime designers of landing craft; ditto with theoreticians and practitioners of air power, supremacy in which was critical for the success of any invasion from the sea. When Kennedy dwells on weapons like the Essex-class aircraft carrier, he treats them less as war-winning icons than as data for his ideas about running organizations, WWII being his case study. High authorial eminence ensures attention from the WWII readership.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE historian Daniel Boorstin once complained to me about the Smithsonian Institution's decision in 1980 to delete the final two words from the name of its Museum of History and Technology. Boorstin had a point. Scholars of other fields do often tend to underestimate the influence of technology. Although most of us know that World War II brought us radar, the literature of that titanic conflict is by no means exempt from this phenomenon. For instance, the biographer Joseph P. Lash subtitled his 1976 wartime account of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill "The Partnership That Saved the West," in response to which I once heard a British scholar carp, "If Lash is right, then why did all those scientists and intelligence officers and factory workers bother working so hard?" With this fresh and discursive new work, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, best known for his widely debated "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," published in 1987, calls attention to the way "small groups of individuals and institutions" surmounted seemingly insuperable operational obstacles to enable Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill and Stalin ultimately to grasp the laurels for an Allied triumph. "Engineers of Victory" achieves the difficult task of being a consistently original book about one of the most relentlessly examined episodes in human history. Unlike most studies of the war, this one is not primarily about politics, generalship or battlefield glories. References to the Big Three are few. Instead, like an engineer who pries open a pocket watch to reveal its inner mechanics, Kennedy tells how little-known men and women at lower levels helped win the war. Kennedy concentrates mainly on the European theater and on Allied progress during the period from early 1943, when Hitler's Admiral Doenitz sank 108 Allied vessels in a single month, provoking fears that England would be starved of essential bunker fuel, to the almost fantastic summer of 1944, when British and American troops scrambled onto Festung Europa. By Kennedy's telling, a number of concurrent accomplishments spelled the difference between victory and, if not defeat, then, at least, a struggle that might have dragged on past 1945, with countless additional casualties. The first was ensuring that Allied convoys could cross the Atlantic without being sunk by Germans. As Kennedy acknowledges, this was the first war in which sea power's success was decided by air power, so part of the solution was cranking out airplanes (especially long-range bombers). But vital too were innovations like the Hedgehog, a forward-firing shipmounted mortar (devised by an idiosyncratic British unit called "Wheezers and Dodgers"), and the Leigh Light, which exposed German U-boats that were surfacing at night to recharge batteries so that British bombers could do their deadly work. In contrast with the cadre of popular and scholarly authors who since the 1970s have written, often breathlessly, about glamorous code breakers, Kennedy is skeptical of Bletchley Park's importance, because the intelligence operation known as Ultra "could do only so much." Command of the air over Germany was seized only when American squadrons arrived to augment the Royal Air Force, upend the existing British doctrine of restricting attacks to nighttime and demand pinpoint bombing of specifically identified German military and industrial targets. The zenith of Allied accomplishment in the air, of course, was D-Day 1944, when a previously unimaginable 11,590 planes were sent aloft. "There had been nothing like it in world history," Kennedy writes, "nor has there been since. . . . There was no chance for the completely diminished Luftwaffe to do anything except lose more and more of its planes and pilots whenever they rose into the air." Kennedy goes on to describe how the Allies stopped the ferocious blitzkrieg assaults of 1939 to 1942 by deploying "stronger, tougher and better-equipped forces (with panzers, bazookas, mines, better tactical aircraft)" in concert with the western thrust of the Soviet Army, aided ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿y their T-34-85, which Kennedy calls the "most all-round battle tank" of the war. Victory in Europe before the summer of 1945 also required the Allies to make hasty progress in perfecting the art of amphibious warfare. After World War I, Kennedy notes, with "a badly defeated and muchreduced Germany, in a badly damaged and scarcely victorious France and Italy, and in an infant Soviet Union, there were many thoughts of war, but none of them involved the projection of force across the oceans." The disheartening debacle of the one-day Allied trial effort in August 1942 to breach the Atlantic Wall with a raid against the modest German garrison at Dieppe, France, provided crucial lessons that led directly to the world-important success on D-Day two years later. Kennedy shows how wise the Allies were to restrain themselves from invading France until their commanders and troops had gained more experience in amphibious landings and until control of the Atlantic had been secured. He insists that D-Day could have been a rout but for the fact that by mid-1944, British, American and Canadian warriors - from the top down - had transformed their organization into a smoothly functioning apparatus, refined their means of gathering intelligence and designed the now-famous "bodyguard of lies" that misled the Nazis about when and how the Allies would invade Europe. Succinctly covering the Pacific theater, Kennedy illuminates some of the main tools that enabled United States forces to make their slow progress across the ocean in order to bomb Japan - new fast carrier groups, new fighters like the F6F and bombers like the B-29, as well as the American submarine service and the 325,000 enlisted members of the Navy's construction battalions, the "Seabees," which by the end of the war had erected $10 billion worth of military infrastructure around the world. WHILE Kennedy rightly elevates the importance of technology and those much-too-unheralded bands of Allied innovators, on a grander scale he fully appreciates that "the winning of great wars always requires superior organization," which "will allow outsiders to feed fresh ideas into the pursuit of victory." An ingredient badly missing from the centralized systems of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany was the willingness, demonstrated again and again by top Anglo-American military and political leaders, to share power with those of more modest rank who had greater expertise in tackling a particular problem and who were closer to the action. Kennedy notes that even the dictatorial Stalin "began to relax his iron grasp once he understood that he had a team of first-class generals working for him." Although occasionally prolix and repetitive, Kennedy's volume is an important contribution to our understanding of World War II, and it sets a high standard for historians writing about other conflicts by reminding us to keep a close eye on technology. The curious reader may well finish this book and wish that scholars would pay more attention to how much American setbacks in lesser wars like Korea and Vietnam might have been influenced by gaps in our technological mastery. The Allies put 11,590 planes in the air on D-Day. 'There had been nothing like it in world history,' Kennedy says. Michael Beschloss, the author, most recently, of "Presidential Courage," is writing a history of American presidential leadership in wartime.
Guardian Review
In this impressive historical study of five campaigns in the second world war, including the Battle of the Atlantic and Operation Overlord, Paul Kennedy's aim is to direct attention away from the high-profile leaders and instead to highlight the vital contribution of the middle personnel - the problem solvers - and the systems they managed: "What happened to Caesar's cook is lost to history, but, assuredly, he played a role." He also agrees with Correlli Barnett who has said war is the "great auditor of institutions". As Kennedy's examples demonstrate, victory is achieved not just because one side has superior intelligence or more bombers than the other, but because one side is better organised: it has more capable, can-do personnel at all levels working in efficient and responsive systems that encourage a culture of innovation. For, as he shows, new weapons, processes and tactics are often decisive. Out of the fog of war, Kennedy distills the crucial elements in each campaign that brought final victory to the Allies. A masterly analysis of grand strategy. - PD Smith In this impressive historical study of five campaigns in the second world war, including the Battle of the Atlantic and Operation Overlord, Paul Kennedy's aim is to direct attention away from the high-profile leaders and instead to highlight the vital contribution of the middle personnel - the problem solvers - and the systems they managed: "What happened to Caesar's... - PD Smith.
Kirkus Review
Kennedy (The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations, 2006, etc.) presents what he calls "a new way of treating that epic conflict," World War II. The author begins with the agenda and priorities of the 1943 Casablanca Conference, and his inquiry traces the interrelationships among strategic decision-making, the accomplishment of the five major tasks identified by conference attendees, and the capacities and weapons systems that made the achievement of the goals possible. The aim was to overcome obstacles to the successful invasion of Western Europe, with five ranked top priorities: winning the battle against U-boats in the North Atlantic, securing control of the airspace over Europe, developing ways to counter the Nazi blitzkrieg, learning how to coordinate landings and establish secure beachheads on enemy-held coastlines, and mastering the technology and skills required to coordinate and fight combined arms warfare over thousands of miles. Kennedy's fine-grained analysis and suspicion of any one single cause--like cipher cracking, intelligence and deception operations, or specific weapons systems, like the Soviet T-34 tank--permit him to persuasively array his supporting facts. He discusses key elements in each of the five areas and the commonalities among the different global theaters of war. The succession of accomplishments highlights the special importance of control of the air. Kennedy rebuts those who argue that the second front could have been opened in 1943, by showing what was learned from the succession of amphibious landings and their impact on the D-Day preparations and ultimate success. The author introduces many individuals whose inventions and capacities contributed profoundly. An absorbing new approach to a well-worked field.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic Thus was the stage set for Germany to fling into the Atlantic struggle the greatest possible strength. . . . It was plain to both sides that the U-boats and the convoy escorts would shortly be locked in a deadly, ruthless series of fights, in which no mercy would be expected and little shown. Nor would one battle, or a week's or a month's fighting, decide the issue. It would be decided by which side could endure the longer; by whether the stamina and strength of purpose of the crews of the Allied escort vessels and aircraft, watching and listening all the time for the hidden enemy, outlasted the will-power of the U-boat crews, lurking in the darkness or the depths, fearing the relentless tap of the asdic, the unseen eye of the radar and the crash of the depth charges. It depended on whether the men of the Merchant Navy, themselves almost powerless to defend their precious cargoes of fuel, munitions and food, could stand the strain of waiting day after day and night after night throughout the long, slow passages for the rending detonation of the torpedoes, which could send their ships to the bottom in a matter of seconds, or explode their cargoes in a searing sheet of flame from which there could be no escape. It was a battle between men, aided certainly by all the instruments and devices which science could provide, but still one that would be decided by the skill and endurance of men, and by the intensity of the moral purpose which inspired them. In all the long history of sea warfare there has been no parallel to this battle, whose field was thousands of square miles of ocean, and to which no limits in time or space could be set. --S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939-1945 As Churchill and Roosevelt journeyed to and from Casablanca in January 1943, the weather in the North Atlantic had become as violent as any experienced sailor could remember. For much of December and January, huge storms at sea cramped naval and air activity. Merchant ships, pounded by giant waves, had heavy cargoes breaking loose and sliding around inside their hulls. Smaller warship escorts such as corvettes were tossed around like corks. Warships with heavier upperworks and gun turrets rolled from side to side. German U-boats, when they surfaced, could see nothing across the hundred-foot-high waves and were happy to submerge into quieter waters or to head south. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sailors were hurt, and not a few killed by accidents or washed overboard. In some extreme cases, the commander of a convoy was forced to order a return to base, or at least to send damaged ships back. General Sir Alan Brooke (later Viscount Alanbrooke) records in his diary that he, the other British Chiefs of Staff, and Churchill himself had their flight (or surface sailing) plans from London to Casablanca changed time and again. The result, quite naturally, was that convoy activity upon the storm-whipped North Atlantic routes was much less than normal in these midwinter months. Quite separate from this physical interruption, there was a second and cheerier reason the regular convoy traffic fell away at this time. Operation Torch itself demanded a vast number of escorts to assist the occupation of the Vichy states of Morocco and Algeria--the Royal Navy contributed 160 warships of various types to it--and in consequence the Gibraltar, Sierra Leone, and Arctic convoys had to be temporarily suspended.1 Since ships carrying Allied troops, landing equipment, and immediate supplies were bound to get the highest level of naval protection, and the Axis was ill-prepared for the Operation Torch invasion because of its obsessions with the Eastern Front and Egypt, it is scarcely surprising that the invading forces met with little or no U-boat opposition on North African shores. The other, understandable consequence was that Allied losses to enemy submarine attacks fell dramatically during midwinter. If there were fewer Atlantic convoys at sea in the first place, those that did sail, while battered by storms, were often protected by the same lousy weather conditions. Some were routed far to the north in a sort of great circle, trading physical damage by ice floes for distance from the wolf packs. The Admiralty's monthly toll of shipping losses captured this dramatic decline well. For example, in November 1942 the Allies lost 119 merchant ships totaling 729,000 tons, and while many of these vessels were sunk in more distant waters, off South America, those supply lines were also part of an integrated effort aimed at sustaining and enhancing Anglo-American power in the British Isles. The sinking of British oil tankers coming from Trinidad would, as a consequence, hurt the buildup of the U.S. bomber groups in East Anglia; everything hung on command of the seas. Because of the rough weather, U-boat sinkings in December and January fell to a mere 200,000 tons of Allied shipping, most of which also occurred on more southern routes (e.g., Trinidad to Gibraltar, to supply the Operation Torch armies). But the tallies for those months were exceptional, for the reasons explained above, and thus when the prime minister and president met at Casablanca they were under no illusion as to how serious the crisis over shipping losses had become. The Allied merchant fleets had lost a staggering 7.8 million tons in the course of 1942, almost 6.3 million of which had been sunk by that most formidable weapon, the U-boat. The amazing American mass production shipyards were still gearing up to full strength, but even their output in 1942 (around 7 million tons) meant that total available Allied shipping capacity had declined in absolute terms, and now had to compete with the even greater demands of the Pacific War. By early 1943, therefore, British imports were one-third less than those in 1939, and U.S. Army trucks and box-bound aircraft now competed with colonial foodstuffs, ores, and petroleum for space on the endangered merchant vessels. This grim fact imperiled everything in the European war strategy. It threatened the British war effort; if things got worse, it threatened mass malnutrition for the islanders. The heavy losses suffered by oil tankers meant that only two to three months of fuel remained in Britain's storage tanks, but how could the country fight, or live, without fuel? This crisis also threatened the Arctic convoys to aid Russia, and the Mediterranean convoys to aid Malta and Egypt. It threatened, by extension, the entire Egyptian campaign, for Britain could scarcely send military reinforcements via Sierra Leone and the Cape of Good Hope to Suez if its own lifelines were being crushed. It even threatened unrest in parts of East Africa and India that had come to rely upon seaborne food imports. And it absolutely threatened the assumptions behind Operation Bolero (later renamed Overlord), which called for a rapid and massive buildup of the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces in the British Isles in preparation for a second front in Europe; it would have been ironic to have sent 2,000 American heavy bombers and millions of GIs to England only to find that they had no fuel. Churchill later stated in his memoirs that, of all struggles of the war, it was the Battle of the Atlantic that he most worried about; if it was lost, so too might be Britain's gamble to fight on in 1940. In addition, although the Admiralty did not possess an exact tally of the enemy's U-boats, there did seem to be an awful lot more of them. In the course of 1942 Allied warships and aircraft had destroyed eighty-seven German and twenty-two Italian submarines. But the Third Reich was also gearing up its war production and had added seventeen new U-boats each month during that year. By the end of 1942, therefore, Doenitz commanded a total of 212 submarines that were operational (out of a grand total of 393, for many were working up, training new crews, or receiving new equipment), very significantly more than the 91 operational craft he had had (out of 249) at the beginning of that year.2 Although victory in the Second World War was critically affected by each side's inventiveness, technology, and organization, not just by sheer numbers, the blunt fact was that numbers did count. And by the time of the Casablanca conference it seemed that the Germans were having greater success at sinking Allied merchantmen than the Anglo-American forces were in sinking U-boats. Worse still, more and more U-boats were entering the fray. In the months that followed, therefore, the prime minister's nightmare appeared to be coming true. As March and April 1943 arrived and the convoy traffic to the British Isles resumed at a higher rate, so too did merchant ship losses. February's total doubled that of the previous month, and in March the Allies lost 108 ships totaling 627,000 tons, making it the third-worst month on record during the war. What was more, nearly two-thirds of those ships were sunk in convoy; one was no longer talking here of the happy U-boat pickings of individual merchant ships off the well-lit shores of America early in 1942, or of the almost equally easy raids upon Allied shipping routes in the South Atlantic. What was also truly alarming was that the losses had occurred chiefly along the single most important convoy route of all, that between New York and Halifax and the receiving ports of Glasgow and Liverpool. Between March 16 and 20 the greatest encounter in the entire Battle of the Atlantic saw Doenitz throw no fewer than forty U-boats against the two eastbound convoys HX 229 and SC 122. This epic fight will be analyzed in more detail below, but the result was awful for the Allies: twenty-one merchant ships totaling 141,000 tons were sunk, with the loss of only one U-boat. In the Admiralty's own later account, "The Germans never came so near to disrupting communications between the New World and the Old as in the first twenty days of March, 1943."3 These ever-rising losses suggested, among other things, that the whole principle of convoy as the best means of defending maritime commerce was now in doubt. The Strategic and Operational Context The British Admiralty's problems were nothing new in the annals of naval warfare. The protection of ships carrying goods at sea from hostile attack is one of the oldest problems in the history of war and peace. Even at the height of the Roman Empire merchants and consuls in Sicily and North Africa complained about the depredations of pirates against the grain, wine, and olive oil trades. Fifteen hundred years later Spanish commanders fumed at the plundering by Dutch and English raiders of their galleons bearing silver and precious spices; only a generation or two afterward the Dutch found their long-haul trade with the East Indies under French and English assault at sea. The age of European expansion and then of the Commercial Revolution (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) had moved ever greater shares of national wealth onto precarious maritime routes. In the age of Charlemagne, the dependence of rulers and peoples upon command of the sea was negligible. By the time of, say, the Seven Years' War (1756-63) it was critical in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, at least for all advanced economies. If a west European nation lost control of the trade routes, it was most likely also going to lose--or at least not win--the war itself. This was the message of that classic work, The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), composed by the American naval author Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan's ideas influenced the admiralties of Britain, Germany, Japan, the United States, and many lesser navies. The key belief was that the only way to gain command of the sea was to have the most powerful battle fleet afloat, one that would crush all rivals. Lesser forms of naval warfare, such as commerce raiding and cruiser and torpedo-boat operations--la guerre de course--didn't count for much, because they didn't win wars. It was true that during the Napoleonic Wars French predators had seized many independently sailing British merchantmen, but once the latter were organized in convoys and given an escort of warships, the sea routes were secure behind Nelson's assembled fleets. The same truth revealed itself, albeit at great cost, during the First World War. For three years, and even though the Grand Fleet had command of the sea, Allied merchant ships steaming on their own were picked off in increasing numbers by German U-boats. After the Admiralty was compelled by the British cabinet to return to the convoy system in 1917, losses to enemy submarines dropped dramatically. Within a short while, moreover, the Allied warships would possess asdic (sonar), so for the first time ever they could detect a solid object under water. Provided one had command of the sea on the surface, it was argued, one would also control the waters below. A submarine would thus be as recognizable as the sails of a French frigate 150 years earlier. Such was the prevailing assumption of naval staffs in the years following the Treaty of Versailles, 1919. Convoys, plus sonar, worked.4 Before we examine how and why that assumption was challenged by the renewed German U-boat threat during the first half of the Second World War, a couple of very important, though clashing, strategic-operational assumptions also need to be considered. The first of these, rarely articulated, is that one really didn't need to sink surface commerce raiders or submarines to win the maritime war. So long as the Royal Navy shepherded without loss a group of fifty merchantmen from, say, Halifax to Liverpool, it had won. The larger Allied strategy was to keep Britain in the fight and then to make it the springboard for an enormous invasion of western Europe. Thus, if every transatlantic (and South American, Sierra Leonean, and South African) convoy got to port safely without ever encountering U-boats, the war was being won, ship by ship, cargo by cargo. Even if the convoy escorts had to face a serious submarine attack but could beat off the predators, all would still be well. The task of the shepherd was to safeguard the sheep, not to kill the wolves. The opposite argument was that killing the wolves had to be the essence of Allied maritime strategy. It too had its own logic: if the threat to the sea-lanes was forcibly removed, all would be fine and one of the Casablanca war aims could at last be implemented. In today's language, the prevailing authorities cannot wait for terrorists to attack the international system but have to go and root out the terrorists. In maritime terms, therefore, a navy charged with protecting its merchant ships would either go on a submarine hunt or, an even bolder tactic, simply drive its convoys through U-boat-infested waters and force the submarines to fight--and be killed. The first of these two convoy strategies was clearly defensive; the second (whether submarine hunting or forcing the convoys through) was equally clearly offensive. Both visions, it is worth noting, involved a tricky, interdependent three-way relationship between the merchant ships, the U-boats, and the naval and aerial escorts, not unlike the children's rock-paper-scissors game. If the convoys could avoid an encounter or have the U-boats beaten off, fine for them; if the U-boats could get at the convoys without destruction from the escorts, fine for them; and if the escorts could destroy enough submarines, fine for them. In the harsh world of the North Atlantic between 1939 and 1943, however, neither an Allied defensive operational strategy nor an offensive one was possible on its own. The way forward had to be achieved by a combination of both options, depending on the ups and downs of what turned out to be the longest campaign of the entire Second World War. And this route was, geopolitically, the most important maritime journey in the world. Of course the other Allied trade routes mattered, and all faced the same operational and logistical difficulties, or sometimes (as with the Arctic convoys) even greater ones. But maritime security across the Atlantic was the foundation stone of all Anglo-American grand strategy in the European theater. With a look forward to the remaining chapters of this book, it is worth restating the many interconnections. Winning this Atlantic battle preserved Britain's own very large military-industrial base. Britain was also the unsinkable aircraft carrier for the Allied strategic bombing campaigns, and the springboard for the eventual invasion of western Europe. Britain was the port of departure for most of the convoys to northern Russia and to the Mediterranean; it was the source for the many troopship convoys that Churchill dispatched, via the Cape, to Montgomery in Egypt and the Middle East. Controlling the Atlantic was the sheet anchor of the West's plans to defeat Italy and Germany. The top-to-bottom logic chain of Allied grand strategy here is also unusually clear, a fine example of Millett and Murray's concept of the multilevel nature of "military effectiveness."5 The political aim was the unconditional defeat of the enemy, and the return to a world of peace and order. The strategy to achieve that purpose was to take the war to the enemy by all the means that were available: aerial, land-based, naval, economic, and diplomatic. This required decisive successes at the operational level, and in all the areas covered in the chapters of the present book. It would be foolish to argue about which of those operational regions was more important than others (even if the Combined Chiefs of Staff had to do so as they wrangled over allocating resources); they all were part of Allied grand strategy. What is incontestable, however, is that if the British, the Americans, and their smaller allies were to reconquer Europe from fascism, they first of all had to have command of the Atlantic waters. Yet control of that vital route was itself determined, in the last resort, by a number of key technical and tactical factors. In other words, there is also in this story a clear example of a bottom-to-top logic chain. Every individual merchant ship that was preserved and every individual U-boat that was sunk by Allied escorts directly contributed to the relative success rate of each convoy. The tactical success rates of each single convoy contributed to the all-important monthly tonnage totals, and those monthly tonnage totals were the barometer to the winning or losing of the Battle of the Atlantic. That operational battle, as we have argued, was key to victory in western Europe and the Mediterranean. And winning in the West was a part of the strategic tripos--victory in the West, victory in the East (Eastern Front), and victory in the Pacific/Far East. The Battle of the Atlantic was an operational and tactical contest that hung upon many factors. The first of these, from which all the others flowed, was the possession of efficient and authoritative organization. This was so basic a point that it is often taken for granted, yet on brief reflection it is clear how important were the structures of command, the lines of information, and the integration of war-fighting systems. Both sides benefited greatly, of course, from the experiences of the epic campaign in the Atlantic during the First World War, and by the post-1919 lessons drawn from them. In terms of simplicity of command, Doenitz had it easier, for the U-boat service was separate from the German surface navy, and it became easier still for him when the failure of a squadron of heavy ships to destroy an Arctic convoy in the last days of 1942 led to an explosion of rage on Hitler's part and to Grand Admiral Erich Raeder being replaced as commander in chief of the entire navy by Doenitz himself at the end of January 1943. Doenitz decided to remain commander of U-boats, so as to keep control of submarine operations, and it is evident that he found it much easier to obtain the Fuehrer's backing than his predecessor had. This did not mean that he had no organizational fights. There was a constant struggle to gain the necessary share of war materials (steel, ball bearings, electrical parts, antiaircraft weaponry) against the enormous demands of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. And, as we shall see, Doenitz had the greatest difficulty in getting aerial support for his boats. Nonetheless, it was an enormous advantage to have a single and very experienced authority directing the entire U-boat campaign. Excerpted from Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Maps and Tables | p. xiii |
Introduction | p. xv |
1 How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic | p. 5 |
2 How to Win Command of the Air | p. 75 |
3 How to Stop a Blitzkrieg | p. 145 |
4 How to Seize an Enemy-Held Shore | p. 215 |
5 How to Defeat the "Tyranny of Distance" | p. 283 |
Conclusion: Problem Solving in History | p. 353 |
Acknowledgments | p. 375 |
Notes | p. 379 |
Bibliography | p. 407 |
Credits | p. 417 |
Index | p. 419 |