Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (63 page)
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Authors: Paul Kennedy
Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #International Relations, #General, #Political Science, #Military, #Marine & Naval, #World War II, #History
American marines landing from barges on a beach at Guadalcanal, beginning an attack on the Japanese on September 7, 1942. It was Captain Pete Ellis who first conceived, as early as 1919, the strategy of amphibious landings on small islands across the Pacific.
Major General Sir Percy Hobart was responsible for many of the specialized armored vehicles, known as Hobart’s Funnies, that were deployed in North Africa, the invasion of Normandy, and later actions.
One of Hobart’s “flail tanks” in action. The turret is temporarily reversed; the flails are driving forward.
Admiral Ben Moreell (1892–1978) was a brilliant engineer and a distinguished naval officer who persuaded Franklin D. Roosevelt to allow him to create the new Construction Battalions (CBs or SeaBees) shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Mulberry harbor at Arromanches, with lorries rolling ashore loaded with supplies in June 1944. The Mulberry harbors were built by the SeaBees in Pembroke Harbor, towed to the Normandy beaches in sections, then reassembled to aid the invasion armies.
Germany also possessed brilliant wartime engineers. The above image shows the Messerschmitt Me-262, the first jet fighter of the war, which was far faster than the most advanced Spitfires or Mustangs.
The modified version, however, with bombs attached underneath, seriously impaired the plane’s speed and stability in flight. Hitler’s obsessiveness about bombing thus overcame Willy Messerschmitt’s engineering genius.
VICTORY HAS COME
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery leaves the Brandenburg Gate after a ceremony to decorate Soviet Generals in Berlin, July 12, 1945. With him are marshals of the Soviet Union: Georgy Zhukov (second from left), Vasily Sokolovsky (center right, background) and Konstantin Rokossovski (right foreground). Montgomery and Zhukov were perhaps the two most successful “positional generals” of the war.
INTRODUCTION
1.
After our UN report group initially suggested major constitutional changes at the very top of the world organization—that is, amending the United Nations Charter to admit new permanent veto members to the Security Council—and discovered the great political roadblocks to proposals of that magnitude, it became obvious that the best way the UN could help itself was by ensuring that it was effective in the middle, in on-the-ground peacekeeping, development, and human rights work. Compare the larger agenda suggested in P. Kennedy and B. Russett, “Reforming the United Nations,”
Foreign Affairs
74, no. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1995): 56–71, with the more cautious formulations in P. Kennedy,
The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations
(New York: Random House, 2006), ch. 8.
2.
The syllabus, for any reader interested, is available at
http://iss.yale.edu/grand-strategy-program
.
3.
For some exceptions to this generalization, see many of the essays in W. Murray, M. Knox, and A. Bernstein,
The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)—a very deliberate counterpoise to an older classic, E. M. Earle with G. A. Craig and F. Gilbert, eds.,
Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), with its emphasis upon strategic writings and thought.
4.
See, respectively, G. Parker,
The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries War
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); P. Padfield,
Guns at Sea
(London: Evelyn, 1973), ch. 10 and 11; J. C. Riley,
International Government Finance and the Amsterdam Capital Market 1740–1815
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); P. M. Kennedy, “Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy 1870–1914,”
English Historical Review
86, no. 341 (1972): 728–52.
5.
These operational directives are most sensibly summarized by State Department historian Herbert Feis in
Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War
They Waged and the Peace They Sought
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 105–8.
6.
The best way to test this remark is to examine four of the most useful histories of the Second World War that I quote repeatedly in my own text and check their descriptions (or lack of mention) of such jigsaw puzzle pieces as the Merlin-powered P-51 Mustang, the cavity magnetron, the Hedgehog, and Hobart’s Funnies. See B. Ellis,
Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War
(New York: Viking, 1990); R. Overy,
Why the Allies Won
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); W. Murray and A. R. Millett,
A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); B. H. Liddell Hart,
History of the Second World War
(London: Cassell’s, 1970). Another useful point of comparison would be with two recent and much acclaimed works on World War II. The first is Ian Kershaw’s
Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World 1940–41
(London: Penguin, 2007), a wonderful read, though deliberately constructed as a set of top-down stories—see ch. 2, “Hitler Decides to Attack the Soviet Union,” ch. 7, “Roosevelt Decides to Wage Undeclared War,” and so on. The second is Andrew Roberts’s gripping book
Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West
(London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2008), which to an amazing extent can be seen as the top-level complement to the middle-level thrust of my book.