Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (58 page)

This point about the understanding of the factors affecting this global conflict becomes more important when one returns to consider the critical role played by geography. Size, distance, and topography attend all of these five narratives, just as they constrained the weary fighters who had to grapple with those spaces.
Chapter 5
explicitly proclaims that it is about conquering the “tyranny of distance” across the broad Pacific reaches, but in their own ways each of the campaigns covered in the other four chapters can be viewed as the human struggle to gain control of great stretches of the air, sea, and land. Geography informed strategy. Clearly, in the American campaign against Japan, however lengthy the return route from Hawaii via the Gilberts, Marshalls, Carolines, Marianas, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa to Nihon’s outer shores, the fact was that it remained the swiftest route to reach Japanese home waters, and that MacArthur’s drive along the New Guinea coastline was, geographically, a far less obvious path to Tokyo Bay; for the same reason, it was impossible for the British exertions in the Burmese jungles, extraordinary as they were, to deliver a knockout blow.

Elsewhere also, geography shaped outcomes. Geography not only made the Torch landings feasible but very likely shaped their success:
because of the superior facility of movement across water, Anglo-American amphibious divisions could get to the shores of North Africa far more easily from the Clyde and Norfolk, Virginia, than could the Wehrmacht’s heavy central-reserve divisions from southern Germany or western France, let alone the Ukraine. All that was needed was naval protection for the fast Allied troop convoys, which was provided. There were no U-boat-free routes, of course, until the great tussle for command of the oceanic center had been resolved. The mid-Atlantic air gap was a spatial problem that for three years lacked a military-technological solution; by June 1943 it had been found. The struggle to find a long-range fighter that would escort the B-17s all the way to Prague and back took somewhat longer; but by February 1944 even that solution had been found, thanks not to brute force but to human ingenuity and sympathetic initiative. Geography shaped the Ostfeldzug in a different way: the German army went too far into inhospitable lands and paid the price in a campaign where primitive material strength did help to counter military sophistication. And at El Alamein the fabled Afrika Korps came up against a vastly entrenched British imperial garrison at a point when Rommel was a very long way from his supplies, fighting against a foe who had been working on maintaining extended lines of communications to Egypt for many decades. The conclusion is clear: distance was a killer—or a winner—in this massive war. The Allied war-fighting systems improved dramatically when they fully took that into account.

One is therefore struck by the Axis powers’ failure to see the Second World War as a gigantic geopolitical chessboard, and thus to appreciate the strategic significance of a small number of critical positions (bases) that gave the owner a disproportionate operational advantage.

The fact that Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo seems to have given up attempting to seize Hawaii after the Battle of Midway, when U.S. forces in the Pacific were still so relatively weak, is amazing. Compared with the Hawaiian Islands, acquisitions such as New Guinea and Burma were mere bagatelles; they would in any case have fallen into Japan’s lap as a consequence of Tokyo’s having first taken the most vital strategic place in the entire Pacific. Hitler’s failure to get his hands on Gibraltar—or, at the very least, to persuade Franco to neutralize
it—was another major deficiency, explained perhaps by his obsession with the drive to the east. So also was the Italian-German inability to crush the British air and naval bases on Malta. Had the Pillars of Hercules been blocked, with Algeria staying in sympathetic Vichy hands and Malta transformed into a giant Luftwaffe base, how long would it have been before Egypt itself fell?

In all, the Axis squandered its enormous early advantages by driving into secondary theaters—the Balkans, Burma, southern China—and paying far less attention to the really critical targets. Hitler’s strategy on the Eastern Front may be the most egregious example of all. Going at the same time for Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the middle, and Stalingrad, the Donbas, and the Caucasus in the south was militarily silly. Moscow, surely, was the supreme prize, even in a negative sense; that is, while a full occupation of that city might not have guaranteed the hoped-for swift victory—certainly the Politburo, even without Stalin, could have relocated eastward to continue the fight—the fact is that the German failure to seize the Soviet capital ensured that the war would go on. The student of all this gains a sense that both the Wehrmacht leadership and the Prussian-influenced Japanese generals had, ironically, forgotten Clausewitz’s stress upon the importance of focusing upon the enemy’s
Schwerpunkte
(centers of gravity, or key points) and paid the ultimate price for that forgetfulness. Many years ago Correlli Barnett suggested that the results of military battles, and of wars as a whole, could be regarded as the “great auditor of institutions.”
¹³
The present study affirms that notion.

The final point that emerges from this investigation of how the war was won concerns the tricky, perhaps intangible issue of what might be termed the “culture of encouragement,” or the culture of innovation. All of these massive and orchestrated war machines—in Britain, the United States, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—naturally strove both to defend their own positions and to advance in order to defeat their enemies. That is a truism. The more interesting question, for this book, has been the
how
question: how did some of these politico-military systems do it more effectively than others? A good portion of the answer has to be that the successful systems were so because they possessed smarter feedback loops between top, middle, and bottom; because they stimulated initiative, innovation, and ingenuity; and because they encouraged problem solvers to tackle large, apparently intractable problems.

T
HE
G
EOGRAPHY OF
H
ISTORY
: A
LLIED
P
OSITIONAL
A
SSETS IN
W
ORLD
W
AR
II
The 1937/1939–1945 global conflict was the World War of all History to date. Apart from the Russo-German land war, victory depended upon control of certain key maritime routes and of the ports that held the navies and aircraft that controlled the waters. While the British Empire and the United States had massive advantages here, both the Germans and Japanese were in a much weaker geopolitical situation. The map above highlights the most significant of the Allied naval bases during the war.

Of course the men at the top made a difference. The individual leaders, or individual leaderships, revealed very marked alterations in style. Here the Japanese were the worst. With a god-leader kept from serious strategic decision making and authority devolved to the army and the navy, both of those services (once Yamamoto had been shot down in April 1943) displayed a rigidity and old-boys-solidarity that could in no way handle the imaginative American counterattacks that were unfolding across the Pacific. Hitler and Stalin were, as many historians have pointed out, very similar in their obsessions about control, with the critical difference that Stalin began to relax his iron grasp once he understood that he had a team of first-class generals working for him, whereas Hitler became ever more megalomaniacal and paranoid, giving his experienced generals in the field little room for operational maneuver.
¹⁴
Generally, the further the distance a commander was from OKW—Guderian along the Seine, Rommel in the desert, Kesselring in southern Italy—the freer he was to exercise his own undoubted battlefront skills.

Roosevelt and Churchill were equally different. The president appears to have had such unshakeable faith in America’s power that he rarely interfered regarding either appointments or operational planning. Once the U.S. military leadership had been shaken out at the entry into war, he placed enormous faith in Arnold (air force), King (navy), and especially Marshall (army) to do the right thing, with his own trusted Admiral Leahy acting as titular head of the Joint Chiefs. The navy always had a special place in Roosevelt’s affections, and his appointment of Ben Moreell to lead the new Seabees was a brilliant
stroke. But otherwise FDR does not seem to have played an active or interfering role in service appointments. Why not let George Marshall do the tough job of clearing out unsuccessful generals at the beginning of the fighting, after the Kasserine Pass, and in the midst of the Anzio falterings?

It would have been temperamentally impossible for the prime minister to exercise that sort of hands-off approach—his personal notepaper was famously headed “Action This Day!” and it was with difficulty (including, finally, intervention by the king) that he was prevented from going off to the Normandy beaches on D-Day itself. At times—and there were many of those, including Norway, Dakar, and naval operations off Crete and Singapore—he drove Alanbrooke and the other British chiefs very close to desperation and resignation. And he certainly replaced a lot of generals in his search for effective battlefront leadership. Yet even the dyspeptic Alanbrooke frequently admitted that the prime minister’s imagination, drive, and rhetoric were indispensable to the war effort.

There was another level of this worldwide conflict in which Churchill’s enthusiasms and encouragements were invaluable: in recognizing talent, initiative, and, frankly, unorthodoxy in people and giving them a chance to prove themselves. His reproof about neglecting Major General Percy Hobart’s talents because he “excited controversy” was quoted in
chapter 4
, and indeed it is not easy to see how Hobart could have gotten his weird tank notions turned into an entire armored division in the conservative British Army without the prime minister. It was Churchill who pulled Admiral Ramsay out of retirement to lead the empire’s amphibious planning, who sent Orde Wingate to Burma to create the special-ops Chindits, and who arranged for the return of Sir Wilfrid Freeman to administer aircraft design and production at the Air Ministry. Who else but the prime minister, after witnessing in person the Dodgers and Wheezers’ successful experiments with their forward-firing Hedgehogs, would have sent the First Sea Lord by early the next morning an instruction that resources be made available for this new weapon? That list could go on, but the plain fact is that there probably was never another war leader with his talent-spotting skills and his capacity to inspire and encourage. The man was sui generis, but
the lesson he leaves with us is not: that without bold and worthy leadership, a large enterprise is likely to falter.

Yet there is more to this concept of a “culture of encouragement” than the personal tastes and whims of powerful leaders. The post-1919 U.S. Marine Corps, though much diminished in resources, was given enough freedom to develop its ideas on advanced naval bases in Micronesia. Stalin’s tank (Koshkin) and aircraft (Yakovlev) designers, although terrified of the “boss,” knew they would be supported if they were developing weapons that could kill lots of Germans—and thus got lots of resources. Someone in the RAF weapons development system was able to call Ronnie Harker down from Rolls-Royce in Derby to Duxford in April 1942 to test and report on the P-51 fighter; someone at Rolls-Royce knew how to reach Sir Wilfrid Freeman at the Air Ministry and get wheels turning. And a fighter commander such as Donald Blakeslee knew he could go to his air force superior, General Doolittle, and Doolittle in his turn knew he could go to Arnold and Lovett and get a faulty USAAF policy regarding the Mustang fighter’s fate changed, to massive effect. Two young postdocs at the University of Birmingham were encouraged to figure out the problem of building a miniaturized radar set that did not collapse under the sheer energy of its pulsing beam, and when they did it, they were not turned back. After that, first their professor and then Whitehall, Tizard, Vannevar Bush, Bell Labs, and MIT took it further. Finally, this new technology helped to sink large numbers of U-boats. This wasn’t a fluke; it was the result of a superior system.

But it had to start somewhere. And that somewhere was a space, a military-political culture, that allowed problem solving to go ahead. For reasons still unfathomable, Japan seems to have failed miserably on this scorecard: its impressive weapons systems such as the Zero fighter,
Akagi
-type carriers, and
Yamato
-class battleships were all essentially creations and designs of the late 1930s, and then the nation’s innovative capacities appear to have faded. There were no latter-day equivalents to the Lancasters, the Mustangs, Walker’s terrifying anti-U-boat squadrons, miniaturized radar, or decrypting machines, let alone the atomic bomb. The Third Reich went a different way, converting Germany’s pre-Nazi technological strengths into “superweapons” such as the V-1
and V-2 rockets, the jet fighter, and the schnorkel U-boat; but none of those stupendous instruments could be effective in the war because Germany had already conceded command of the sea and then command of the air. Nobody in Nazi Germany—no midlevel organization, not even Speer himself—had worked out the problem that the new superefficient submarines being assembled in Bremen would not go to sea if their diesel engines could not be transported in safety from the Ruhr because Allied bombers had blasted all the rail lines.