Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (62 page)

The armored struggles during this conflict were the largest and most confused of the entire war. Here German Tiger tanks are getting ready to strike at Kursk. The Wehrmacht still relied, however, on a vast number of horse-drawn wagons, which were painfully slow in dragging their way through the boggy paths and dirt roads of the country.

The early T-34 tank had extremely confined space for its three-man crew. The tank commander not only had to shout course changes to the driver, and aim and fire the gun, but also assist in loading the shells.

The advanced T-34/85 tank had a bigger turret and a more powerful gun, much transformed from the earlier prototype.

German two-engine bomber: Heinkel 111s

Japanese two-engine bomber: Mitsubishi G4M known as the Betty

RAF Lancaster bomber: This massive four-engine bomber, like its American equivalents, the B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s, carried a much larger bomb-load than eight to ten Axis medium bombers.

Once the pride of the German fleet, the battleship
Tirpitz
lies silhouetted against the snow-capped mountains of Norway after being destroyed in November 1944. In the foreground is a crater left by one of the six-ton Tallboy bombs dropped by a Lancaster during the same raid in the Sanne Strait.

B-17s flying toward Germany with long-range fighter cover overhead, at last.

The American B-29 Superfortress in squadron flight toward Japanese cities. Their main base in the Pacific theater was the island of Tinian in the Marianas, captured in June–July 1944.

Ronnie Harker

It was Harker, the British test pilot, who suggested that putting the new Rolls-Royce Packard Merlin engine into the American-built P-51 fighter would transform its range, speed, and overall performance. Here, a Merlin engine is lowered into the legendary Mustang chassis.

Captain Pete Ellis