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

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

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 mainland; 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


From the Hardcover edition.

网友对Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War的评论

In reading previous reviews, I find that I am not the only one to spot errors in this book. While I don't disagree with the author's broad conclusions, I wonder why so many little oversights crept into the narrative. In addition to those already mentioned, I found the following: (1)The leader of the initial air attack on Pearl Harbor was Mitsuo Fuchida, not Minoru Genda. Genda was arguably the brains behind the attack, but Fuchida was the flight leader.(2)Guam was not the first American territory to be retaken from the Japanese. Attu, in the Aleutians, was taken back a year earlier.(3) The author also mentions fighting for Kiska in the same breath, yet the Japanese abandoned Kiska without a battle. Granted the author is British and tends to lean heavily on the war in Europe, but even I, am amateur historian at best, noticed these defects. Possibly others found the same things. I haven't read every review.

I totally agree with the critics of the book and feel misled by the title.
This is one of the worst examples of poor writing and editing one can imagine. There is virtually no scientific engineering in the book, only what some call political engineering.

For example, the P-51 discussion is way off the mark. On page 121 the author states that the P-51 had low drag but neither Ronnie Harker nor anyone else knew why, an amazing and totally incorrect statement. The P-51 was designed with a "laminar flow" wing with a "drag bucket" at low angles of attack and thus had excellent range of operations (one of the real engineering feats of WWII). The original single stage supercharger Allison V-1710 was intended to provide a low cost engine which did suffer power loss at high altitudes. As originally designed for escort duties involving extended operating range, it was adequately powered with the low drag wing to keep up with the B-17s. However, lacking two stage supercharging severely limited it climb rate when engaging the enemy at high altitude. Since climb rate is related to power to weight ratio, high altitude performance depends on having an engine which retains good power at high altitude and the two-speed, two-stage Merlin had that. Note that the turbocharged Allison V-1710 was the power plant for the P-38 which also had excellent performance at high altitude.

All of these egregious errors could have been easily checked using Google search or Wikipedia which has excellent articles on the Allison V-1710 and the Merlin 61.

This author has a clear disdain for "Yanks." For all intents and purposes of this book, the US Army, Navy, Army Air Corps, Marines & Coast Guard were all minor bit player all under superior British command. Mr. Kennedy does not even mention a gentleman named Eisenhower, who, if memory serves, had some small part in the ETO until after page 250. Now this is a book about engineers and the Supreme Allied Commander, Eisenhower, was not an engineer. But the author does not hold back on how handily the British generals that he fawns over uses their engineers. It is as if the US had not one thing to contribute to the war effort. This is a very jaded view of how the raw power of GM, Dodge and Mr. Higgins-he of the Higgins Boats that landed the invasion forces on D-day had no real effect on the outcome. No mention of all the air craft from Mitchell, for one, that came off the lines by the thousands in this book. How do these not figure in any "Engineers of Victory" I will never know. This gent really doesn't like Americans.

The focus of this book is supposed to be how mid-level staff and engineers developed solutions to the sticky, real-world problems that made it possible for the grand strategies of World War II to be accomplished. As an engineer myself I thought this would be a fascinating read.

I am 3/4 of the way through the book, and I have to say I am disappointed. Although Kennedy states that the whole business of grand strategy has been exhaustively covered in other works, and will only be glossed over here, I nonetheless find that the bulk of his narrative concentrates on the grand and serves only dribbles of the small but consequential innovations that made victory possible.

If you already know how the P-51 Mustang turned the daylight bombing of Germany from a suicide mission to an invaluable tool against Nazi military power, you aren't going to learn much more here. If you know about 'Enigma' and the 'air gap' in anti-submarine warfare during the Battle of the Atlantic, you already have the central points in hand.

In all, the book is still a fascinating read, but I don't feel it delivers what was promised. Perhaps if it had been written BY an engineer it could have gotten much deeper into its subject.

Addendum:

I have finished the book. The end of the book deals with what actually won the war, and whether the Allied victory was inevitable. There are two factors, in my view, that Kennedy gives scant attention to.

The first, that the Allied forces had an insuperable advantage in having the vast resources and industrial power of the United States and Canada located beyond the reach of the Axis powers. All Axis attempts to attack North American industry were farcical. The only effective counter was the use of German submarines to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic. That worked well early on, but eventually American productive power provided the tools (primarily aircraft and escort carriers) to overwhelm the submarine threat. (Kennedy points out that the Japanese never made a coherent effort to attack American shipping with submarines. Apparently this is widely recognized as a incomprehensible blunder by the Japanese military.) Regardless, while North America remained safe from Axis attack the enemy was at an immense and increasing disadvantage.

The second, that the Axis powers had institutionalized arrogance. It was an article of faith both in Germany and Japan that they were fighting stupid, cowardly and degenerate peoples who were destined to be ruled and eventually replaced by their 'Master Race'. Rather than devise limited and cautious campaigns of expansion and aggression they took on all of the most powerful countries in the world, almost simultaneously. What might have been possible in 10 or 20 years of deliberate military actions became impossible in the face of near universal, maximal opposition. Time and again the Axis leaders, especially Hitler, took mad risks in the belief that they were unstoppable. Audacity can often carry the day, but in the long run it proved a suicidal strategy.

A final factor that Kennedy ignores is that all such advantages and disadvantages become minor in the face of nuclear weapons. Had the Nazi nuclear program succeeded in producing a weapon before the United States nothing the Allies could have done would have achieved victory. But here again the arrogance of fascists worked against them. Einstein and many other physicists felt threatened enough to abandon Germany for sanctuary in the United States. That transfer of talent and genius tilted the advantage in the nuclear race from Germany to the United States. Winning that race would have given the Allies victory no matter how brilliantly the Axis conducted their conventional campaigns.

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