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

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.

R ANDOM H OUSE 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: 978-1-58836-898-0
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4000-6761-9
1. World War, 19391945Campaigns. 2. World War, 19391945Naval operations. 3. Naval convoysAtlantic OceanHistory20th century. 4. World War, 19391945Aerial operations. 5. Bombing, AerialHistory20th century. 6. GermanyArmed ForcesOrganization. 7. GermanyArmed ForcesHistoryWorld War, 19391945. 8. World War, 19391945Amphibious operations. 9. Amphibious warfareHistory20th century. 10. World War, 19391945CampaignsPacific Area. I. Title.
D743.K425 2013
940.54dc23 2012024284

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To Cynthia

Contents

Maps and Tables

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 Armys T-34 tanks, or the U.S. Marine Corpss 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, Jzef Kosacki, certainly did) but those falling under Websters wider definition: a person who carries through an enterprise through skillful or artful contrivance. The books 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 ( 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. The pedagogical justification for such a course is a strong one: if we are teaching talented future leaders in the realms of politics, the military, business, and education, the period of their lives when they are advanced undergraduates and graduate students is probably the optimal time for them to grapple intellectually with enduring writings and historic case studies. Very few prime ministers or CEOs have much time to study Thucydides at the age of fifty or sixty!

But the teaching of grand strategy has, by its very nature, to address strategy and politics from the top. Therefore, what transpires at the middle level, or the level of the practical implementation of those policies, is often taken for granted. Great world leaders order something to be done, and lo, it is accomplished; or lo, it stumbles. We rarely inquire deeply into the mechanics and dynamics of strategic success and failure, yet it is a very important realm of inquiry, though still rather neglected. Grand strategists, leaders and professors alike, take a lot of things for granted.