Just got this from a friend and from the review I think I will get this book. Thought I would share it here. MO: the conclusions are applicable to our current state of affairs i.e., lack of innovation and increased risk aversion in middle management within government and the private sector. Leads to group thinking and missing the forest for the trees IMO. Food for thought
Tinkerers Triumphant
By Paul Kennedy
(Random House, 436 pages, $30)
Reviewed by Andrew Roberts January 27, 2013
Histories of World War II tend to concentrate on the leaders and generals at the top who make the big strategic decisions and on the lowly grunts at the bottom who do the fighting from foxhole to foxhole. There are usually very few pages devoted to the people in the middle, the implementers who turn great decisions into a workable reality. "Engineers of Victory," by Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian and author of the seminal "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (1987), seeks to fill this gap in the historiography of World War II and does so triumphantly.
At the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, the giants of Western military policy-making—including Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Gen. George C. Marshall (America's chief strategist), Gen. Sir Alan Brooke (his British counterpart), Dwight Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery, George Patton and others—devised the general strategy of how to defeat Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the Western European theater and Japan in the Far East. But then they went back home, leaving others to work out the logistics on the ground, in the air and at sea. Mr. Kennedy calls these middle-ranking people "the problem solvers," and they are deservedly the heroes of this book.
Mr. Kennedy correctly identifies the five greatest problems that needed to be solved after Casablanca: how to get convoys safely across the Atlantic; how to win command of the air; how to stop the Nazi blitzkrieg; how to advance on an enemy-held shore; and, lastly, how to defeat the Pacific Ocean's "tyranny of distance."
With German arms production in 1943 twice that of 1941, the problem solvers had only a limited amount of time, and they knew it. Mr. Kennedy describes the 18 months between the Casablanca Conference and July 1944—by which time the Allies were safely ashore in Normandy—as the period during which the tide of war changed. Other historians might narrow it down further—perhaps to the five months between the surrender of Stalingrad in February 1943 and the Germans' defeat at Kursk that July, a period that would also include the surrender of a quarter of a million Axis troops in North Africa in May. But none will disagree that by the time of the Red Army's destruction of German Army Group Center in July 1944, the writing was finally on the wall of the Reich Chancellery.
Mr. Kennedy's heroes are men like the Royal Air Force liaison test pilot Ronnie Harker, "the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang." Placing the Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 engine into the P-51 Mustang allowed it to fly at 432 miles per hour, enabling it to destroy Germany's Focke-Wulf 190 fighters then dominating the skies of occupied Europe. Similarly, the idiosyncratic Great War pilot Humphrey de Verd Leigh invented the Leigh plane-carried searchlights, which in Mr. Kennedy's characteristically vivid language "would catch in their stunning glare and paralyze U-boats recharging their batteries at night." The inventors of the cavity magnetron, a miniaturized radar device that could be placed in aircraft like the Vickers Wellington, as well as in smaller ships, are also given their due. But it isn't all inventors. Mr. Kennedy also salutes the middle managers and farsighted administrators who were keen to reduce red tape and drive through the bureaucratic thickets to ultimate victory.
By 1943, only the British and American navies were launching heavy warships, and by August of that year the battle of the Atlantic was won and the first of the five Casablanca problems solved. Politically incorrect though it might be to say nowadays, many other Allied problems were solved, at least in part, by the Allied capacity to smash German cities and industrial centers night after night, if at horrific cost to the brave British and American bomber crews. Mr. Kennedy reminds us that the massive four-engine Lancaster bomber—like the B-17, B-24 and B-29—was capable of carrying the same bomb load as nine Axis medium bombers. The German two-engined Heinkel 111 bombers that had terrorized London earlier in the war simply couldn't cause the necessary damage, which is why nine times more German civilians died from aerial bombing than Britons.
"Engineers of Victory" rightly pays particular attention to the newly created Construction Battalions (CBs or "SeaBees") that, under Adm. Ben Moreell—one of the great American problem solvers—built the vast Mulberry Harbors that were towed across the English Channel to the beachheads established in Normandy on D-Day. Altogether some 1.5 million Allied soldiers stepped ashore on them, which obviated the need to capture the heavily defended Norman port of Cherbourg. The determination and vision of men like Moreell saved thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives in attacks that would otherwise have been incredibly costly.
Mr. Kennedy writes knowledgeably and movingly of the scientists who built the war-ending nuclear weapon at Los Alamos, N.M. Their average age, he notes, was only 26. When one considers the 3,000 Americans killed and wounded clearing a similar number of Japanese off the tiny island of Tarawa in November 1943, Mr. Kennedy is right to ask what the cost would have been in American lives considering that "the enemy garrisons in the Philippines were twenty or fifty times as large as those on Tarawa." Moreover, if the Japanese home islands would have had to have been invaded against similarly fanatical resistance, the U.S. might have had to countenance losses of a quarter-million to a half-million men, many multiples of the numbers lost even in the Civil War. For most people, the question of the nuclear bomb therefore answers itself and makes the scientists working at breakneck speed every possible hour in New Mexico truly heroic in their efforts. They were the best of the "problem solvers," and this book is a fine tribute to them and their counterparts.
(Mr. Roberts latest book is "Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War.")
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