Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (65 page)

65.
The later volumes of Craven and Cate, eds.,
Army Air Forces
, on the Pacific War, are best here, but there is also a great survey in Murray and Millet,
A War to Be Won,
ch. 17–18.

66.
The infamous 9/11 attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon claimed almost 3,000 lives.

67.
The best obituary of Harker is that of the
Times
(London) on June 14, 1999, describing him as “the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang.” The obituarist clearly has no idea of the later opposition to the Merlin-Mustang and talks of it as being greeted “like manna in heaven in Washington.” But he gets Harker right, at least.

1.
The quotation is from R. Atkinson,
An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943
(New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 350; the main battle is covered on 359–92. See also S. W. Mitcham,
Blitzkrieg No Longer: The German Wehrmacht in Battle, 1943
(Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Books, 2010), 66ff.

2.
Vividly described in Atkinson,
Army at Dawn,
212–13.

3.
Williamson Murray,
German Military Effectiveness
(Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing, 1992), esp. ch. 1. B. H. Liddell Hart,
History of the Second World War
(London: Cassell’s, 1970), is brief but good on the Polish campaign (ch. 3) and the defeat of France (ch. 7). On how surprising the latter result was, see E. R. May’s great revisionist book,
Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

4.
See Waugh’s classic Sword of Honour trilogy, especially the middle volume,
Officers and Gentlemen,
where he graphically describes his fictional “Royal Halbardiers” regiment being routed by the Germans in Greece and Crete. Only the New Zealanders seem to have stood up to the invaders, man for man, but at very severe cost.

5.
E. L. Jones,
The European Miracle
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for this thesis, and very much followed in P. Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
(New York: Random House, 1987), ch. 1.

6.
There are nice, clear details and good maps in Archer Jones,
The Art of War in the Western World
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

7.
T. Lupfer,
The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War
(Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1981), and, more generally, T. N. Dupuy,
A Genius for War: The German Army and the General Staff
(Fairfax, VA: Hero Books, 1984). See also the running commentary in R. M. Citino,
Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).

8.
See M. Boot’s fine distillation of this offense versus defense spiral in his
War Made New
(New York: Gotham Books, 2006).

9.
Some fine maps covering this campaign were lovingly put together for Liddell Hart’s
History,
on 110–11, 282, 292, and 300, but see also the maps in C. Messenger,
World War Two: Chronological Atlas
(London: Bloomsbury, 1989).

10.
A simple but most useful summary of all the moves in the North African Campaign is accessible in Messenger,
World War Two,
46–55, 88–93, 116–23, 134–35.

11.
There is a fine article by L. Ceva, “The North African Campaign 1940–43: A Reconsideration,”
Journal of Strategic Studies
13, no. 1 (March 1990): 84–104 (part of a special issue, edited by J. Gooch, called “Decisive Campaigns of the Second World War”), which among other things reminds the reader of the very significant role played by Italian forces in this campaign.

12.
Quoted in
The Rommel Papers,
ed. B. H. Liddell Hart (London: Collins, 1953), 249. See also Rommel’s amazingly candid letters home to his wife in the surrounding pages. The critical importance of fuel shortages is stressed again and again in B. Ellis,
Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War
(New York: Viking, 1990), ch. 5.

13.
A nice summation of this evolution is S. Bidwell,
Gunners at War: A Tactical Study of the Royal Artillery in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Arrow Books, 1972).

14.
Liddell Hart,
History
, 296.

15.
The best (and almost the only) authority here is M. Kroll,
The History of Landmines
(London: Leo Cooper, 1998). Clearly it is an unappealing topic, even for military historians themselves.

16.
For Hobart’s flail tanks (actually invented by a South African captain, Abraham du Toit), see
chapter 4
, and the “Mine Flail” article in Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_flail
. For the mine detector, see “Polish Mine Detector,” Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_mine_detector
(both accessed June 2010).

17.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that Coningham also commanded the tactical air forces in both later major campaigns. On Dawson’s quietly outstanding organizational skills, see Ellis’s approving remarks in
Brute Force,
266–67; for the larger story of the RAF in the North African campaign at this time, see D. Richards and H. St. G. Saunders,
Royal Air Force 1939–1945
(London: HMSO, 1954), 2:160ff. The earlier, sad tale is in D. I. Hall,
Strategy for Victory: The Development of British Tactical Air Power, 1919–1943
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).

18.
All the general World War II books referred to in this volume— H. P. Willmott,
The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War
(London: Michael Joseph, 1989); Messenger,
World War Two;
W. Murray and A. R. Millett,
A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); R. Overy,
Why the Allies Won
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Ellis,
Brute Force;
J. Keegan,
The Second World War
(New York: Penguin, 1990); Liddell Hart,
History;
and so—naturally cover El Alamein and point to the usual aspects: the constrained geographical limits, the importance of supplies, the British superiority in numbers, the importance of minefields and artillery, and the Wehrmacht’s fighting skills. Nothing has emerged in recent writings to change this overall outline.

19.
Mitcham,
Blitzkrieg No Longer,
ch. 4, is excellent on the Arnim-Rommel tensions.

20.
The second volume of Atkinson’s trilogy (
Day of Battle
), on the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, offers an excellent analysis, plus an introduction to an enormous body of further literature, such as C. D’Este’s
World War Two in the Mediterranean (1942–1945)
(Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1990). For the casualties claim, see Keegan,
Second World War,
368.

21.
T. N. Dupuy,
Numbers, Prediction and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles
(Fairfax, VA: Hero Books, 1985), has masses of statistics. One doesn’t need to follow the predictive part of this exercise to find the historical statistics interesting.

22.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)
, 2nd paragraph—accessed May 2010.

23.
Messenger,
World War Two,
63–64; David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House,
When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995) has many other good maps.

24.
Requoted in Liddell Hart,
History,
169.

25.
There are fuller details in the overlapping final chapters of J. Erickson’s
The Road to Stalingrad
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975) and the first chapters of the successor volume,
The Road to Berlin
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983). Really, with Erickson as the master, but so many other Anglo-American historians such as Earl F. Ziemke, the prodigious David M. Glantz, Ian Bellamy, Malcolm MacIntosh, Albert Seaton,
and the many excellent German experts on this topic, it is difficult to stop turning the endnote apparatus on the Russo-German War into something larger than the text. For Liddell Hart’s approval of the Stavka-orchestrated advances around the greater Stalingrad area, see
History,
481.

26.
R. Forczyk,
Erich Von Manstein
(Oxford: Osprey Press, 2010), 36–42 (it has good illustrations); Erickson,
Road to Berlin,
51ff.

27.
M. K. Barbier,
Kursk: The Greatest Tank Battle, 1943
(St. Paul, MN: MBI Publishing, 2002); M. Healy,
Kursk 1943
(Oxford: Osprey Press, 1992), for remarkable detail; and Lloyd Clarke,
The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011).

28.
A. Nagorski,
The Greatest Battle
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

29.
Erickson,
Road to Stalingrad;
Erickson,
Road to Berlin.
See also the reflections in Citino, “Death of the Wehrmacht,” esp. 14–19.

30.
B. Wegner, “The Road to Defeat: The German Campaigns in Russia, 1941–1943,”
Journal of Strategic Studies
13, no. 1 (March 1990): 122–23. A most intriguing article.

31.
See J. E. Forster, “The Dynamics of Volksgemeinschaft: The Effectiveness of the German Military Establishment in the Second World War,” in A. Millett and W. Murray, eds.,
Military Effectiveness
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1988), 3:201–2.

32.
P. Carell,
Hitler’s War on Russia,
trans. Ewald Osers (London: Corgi, 1966), 623. Carell (actually, Paul Karl Schmidt) was an early Nazi and a leading wartime propagandist who managed to escape the Nuremberg dragnet and transform himself into a highly successful writer of military histories—works that were always informative, but with dodgy judgments.

33.
Cited again from Wegner, “The Road to Defeat,” 122–23.

34.
Email communication to author by Mr. Igor Biryukov, June 7, 2010.

35.
The titles give this away: Ellis,
Brute Force;
Glantz and House,
When Titans Clashed;
and R. Overy’s fine
Russia’s War: Blood upon the Snow
(New York: TV Books, 1997).

36.
D. Orgill,
T-34: Russian Armor
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), is full of such quotes.

37.
Carell,
Hitler’s War,
75–76; see also the fine Wikipedia article “T-34,”
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34
(accessed May 2010), with a wonderful bibliography.

38.
The Mellethin, von Kleist, and Guderian quotations come from Orgill,
T-34
. The amazing postwar sales of the T-34 across the globe are detailed in the Wikipedia article “T-34.”

39.
Albeit in a backhanded way, by describing the post-1942 improvements; see Orgill,
T-34,
73ff.

40.
“T-34,” Wikipedia.

41.
Mary R. Habeck,
Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003),
has many interesting comments on the mutual “borrowings” of various of the interwar armored services. See also “J. Walker Christie,” Wikipedia,
http://wikipedia.org/Wiki/J._Walter_Christie
(accessed May 2011).

42.
Brief details in Orgill,
T-34
.

43.
M. Bariatinsky, “Srednii Tank T-34-85,”
Istoria Sozdania
(accessed May 26, 2011, from
http://www.cardarmy.ru/armor/articles/t3485.htm
). I am grateful to Professor Jonathan Haslam (Cambridge) for drawing my attention to this source.

44.
A very informative piece, despite its aggressive title, is A. Isaev, “Against the T-34 the German Tanks Were Crap,” in A. Drabkin and O. Sheremet, eds.,
T-34 in Action
(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008), ch. 2.

45.
“An Evaluation of the T-34 and KV Tanks by Workers of the Aberdeen Testing Grounds of the U.S., Submitted by Firms, Officers and Members of Military Commissions Responsible for Testing Tanks,” available at
http://www.battlefield.ru/en/documents/80-armor-andequipment/300-t34-kv1-aberdeen-evaluation.htr
. I am grateful to Professor Jonathan Haslam (Cambridge) for drawing my attention to this source.

46.
Ibid. Carell,
Hitler’s War,
also frequently notes the need for the T-34 commander to have a sledgehammer nearby, and their lack of a decent radio. It is amazing that they didn’t do much worse in the early years.

47.
Healey,
Kursk 1943,
31; Mitcham,
Blitzkrieg No Longer,
132.

48.
I found the best general source here to be G. L. Rottman,
World War II Anti-Tank-Tactics
(Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2005), 45ff.

49.
The Keegan quote is from his
Second World War,
407. And see the confirmation in David M. Glantz,
Colossus Reborn
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 29.

50.
Barbier,
Kursk,
55. There are similar figures in the valuable work by W. S. Dunn Jr.,
The Soviet Economy and the Red Army 1930–1945
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 179.

51.
Dunn,
Soviet Economy,
has impressive figures.

52.
Glantz,
Colossus Reborn,
355ff.

53.
Ibid. The creation of these massive pontoon-bridge parks, containing Lego-like bridges of various lengths and load-carrying capacities, sounds very similar to the story of the Seabees (see
chapter 5
), but I have not yet found a Soviet equivalent to Admiral Ben Moreell.

54.
Glantz,
Colussus Reborn,
361–62; Barbier,
Kursk,
58.

55.
Barbier,
Kursk
, 58; see Mitcham,
Blitzkrieg No Longer,
138, on the partisans’ efforts at Kursk. Stone’s observation is from
A Military History of Russia
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 212–13.

56.
http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Forum4/​HTML/000052.html
.

57.
Both W. Murray,
Luftwaffe
(Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1985), and R. Muller,
The German Air War in Russia
(Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing, 1992), show the tremendous
effects that the RAF and USAAF strategic bombing campaigns had in pulling away the German air from the Eastern Front, leaving behind chiefly planes for supporting the ground forces. See Richard J. Evans,
The Third Reich at War
(New York: Penguin, 2008), 461, for the particular statistic.