Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War

I devoured this book in two days. It is quite simply, one of the best works on the second world war that I have ever enjoyed, and for a number of reasons.Paul Kennedy takes a novel approach and gives the reader five excellent chapters that explain with a clarity you very rarely encounter of how this war was won by the Allies.The first chapter deals with getting convoys safely across the Atlantic. He shows through excellent graphs and maps the many problems encountered by the Allies and the devastating losses incurred as a result of the effective Uboat menace, orchestrated by Doenitz, who directed four groups and preyed upon shipping where his boats were free of Allied air attack. During the course of this struggle and the convoy battles that are so wonderfully explained in the book, the Allies eventually turned the tide against the Germans and began to win the struggle. A chart on page 43 shows in detail the merchant ship losses and uboat losses each month of 1943 and you can see the vast improvement for the Grand Alliance.There is abundant information of the Allies gaining control of the air, and the developments of technology and superior weaponry. Of special interest is the chain of events that led to the development of the P51 Mustang which became so important to the Allies and confounded the Germans. There is a world of information about the Battle of Britain, showing how radar sites along the English coast allowed the RAF to respond in a timely fashion to incoming flights of German bombers, and the many advantages the British had flying and fighting over their home turf. You can also find excellent information on this in  The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 There are excellent chapters covering the thwarting of the Blitzkrieg and the war on the Eastern Front, so replete with the bodies of Germans and Russians alike. The story of the development of the T34 Russian tank is, like many of the stories here, a type of evolution, and the author combines that will a concise and brilliant overview of that part of the war that will grip your interest.There are other informative chapters of the live, die and learn process of how to assualt an enemy held coast, going all the way back to Gallipoli, and how that translated into the success of DDay, which we today seem to think is a given, but was no such thing as assured at the time.The author goes into the war in the Pacific in good detail and shows how strategies change when you have such a large space of water and islands to contend with.His summary of all of this is excellent. The entire war is looked at in a different perspective. I would also recommend reading Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II  as a supplement to this important work.This book is outstanding.There is simply too much information to try to summarize what is in the book, but I feel that the reader needs to know that this author's work is brilliant, and the writing style will have you turning page after page.

I thought this was a very good book on how the Allies (principally Britain and the US) attained their victories over Germany and Japan in WW II. By that, I mean the decisions that were made, who made them, and the organizational structures that allowed those decisions to be implemented in an effective manner. This generally is not a book on battles and military campaigns although it does mention them, but only in the sense of grand strategy – the means by which victory was achieved.The book focuses in detail on how the Allies succeeded in five major areas or themes:• The convoy battles in the north Atlantic between the German U-boats and the British and American shipping, escorts, aircraft, and intelligence decrypts. The chapter describes in detail the evolution of anti-submarine weaponry, the development of tactics, and the deployment of long-range aircraft. Somewhat surprisingly, I felt, there is only a little discussion on the American mass production of the 42 million tons of shipping. It’s almost as if this was just a given.• The British / American strategic bombing campaign against Germany in 1942 – 1945 and the development of the long-range P-51 “Mustang” fighter plane.• The development of the tri-service (land, naval, air) concept of amphibious warfare and its application in the Mediterranean, the Normandy invasion, and in the Pacific.• The development of tactics by the British, American, and Soviet armies to resist the German army “blitzkrieg” mechanized air-land warfare method.• The overall development of US naval power to overcome the vast distances in the Pacific. By 1944 the US was conducting naval war against the Japanese in the Central Pacific and the Southwest Pacific, as well as simultaneously supporting a secondary war in Burma and supplying China.The book frequently names the people who were responsible for making the decisions and then (if necessary) fighting the various bureaucracies to implement them. Sometimes no individuals can really be named – it was the overall organizational structures that allowed critical decisions to be made and implemented.Based on the book’s title, I had thought that it would describe the military – industrial efforts of the US and Britain and perhaps the USSR during the war. In fact, very little is said on this subject.Occasionally, there is some mention of German and Japanese war-fighting efforts at the strategic level. Most of it is negative. The overall thrust of the book is that the German and Japanese leaderships just didn’t make good decisions throughout the war. I have been reading about WW II for decades now and I have become fascinated by this latter issue: why did the German and Japanese leaderships consistently make so many poor decisions? What was it about their political and military systems that allowed this? Some writers have asserted that democracy is just essentially superior to totalitarian dictatorships but if that were true then the Soviet Union would have lost the war. Yet the Soviet leadership learned from its mistakes and by late 1942 / early 1943 was making reasonably good decisions. Kennedy suggests a few reasons: a “culture of encouragement” that existed in the US and Britain and which was lacking in Germany and Japan; a centuries - old British tradition of managing a world - wide empire that resulted in a British government system that was inherently better at making grand decisions; and “a support system, efficient feedback loops, a capacity to learn from setbacks, an ability to get things done.” The implication is that Germany and Japan lacked these efficient feedback loops and capacity to learn from setbacks. Maybe their governing systems and military leaderships were just too rigid to enable them to fight a long war in which situations changed, requiring new decisions and methods. Yet another explanation (perhaps simplistic) is that the German and Japanese leaderships were just plain incompetent (see below).If you are interested in reading other books that discuss why Germany lost the war and offer non-trivial explanations, then I recommend the following:“War and Economy in the Third Reich” by Overy (1994). This is a truly fascinating book on the German military – industrial economy before and during World War II. It explores just about every aspect of the German economy that you might imagine and how these issues affected the ability of Germany to wage war. I thought the best chapters were:• Chapter 6 “Hitler’s War Plans and the German Economy, 1933 – 1939;”• Chapter 8 “Hitler’s War and the German Economy: A Reinterpretation.” This chapter investigates a central question of the poor overall performance of the German economy during the war: why was there such a gap between what Hitler wanted and what was actually produced? It’s a complex issue with many reasons. Overy first explores the frequently alleged argument over the post-war decades that Hitler and the German leadership had envisioned a series of short wars so that the German economy did not need to be fully mobilized at the expense of the German civilian consumers. This is wrong. Hitler had envisioned a massive expansion of the Wehrmacht and an associated equally massive economic military – industrial expansion. For a variety of reasons that came together and were never resolved and which are discussed here, the German economy was under – mobilized throughout the war.• Chapter 11 “Rationalization and the ‘Production Miracle’ in Germany during the Second World War.”The German war industrial economy administration at the national level was in chaos throughout the war. This issue is discussed in detail in the book “Design for Total War” by Carroll (1968). Fritz Todt and Albert Speer attempted to bring some coherence and organization to the industrial war effort, but were only partially successful. In 1942 there were five "Supreme Reich Authorities" having various control or administration powers over the war effort, along with assorted armed forces ordnance offices, Plenipotentiaries, other government ministries, Commissioners, Committees, and Industrial Associations. On top of that were the Nazi Party Gauleiters in their capacities as Reich Defense Kommissars for their regions, the SS under Heinrich Himmler, and interventions from the Party Chancellery under Martin Bormann. Chapter X "How Warlike a War Economy" and Chapter XIII " Total War: The Prophecy Fulfilled" were the most interesting. Chapter XI "Mobilization, 1939: A War of Each Against All" describing the dysfunctional military and civilian organizations for war industry and economy and their collective inability to establish priorities is also fascinating if not astounding.A must-read book on the German war economy is “The Wages of Destruction” by Adam Tooze. This is the ultimate book on the German economy and military industry of WW II in my opinion. It discusses financial, industrial, technological (especially regarding the Luftwaffe), mass bombing, and Nazi ideological issues. The analysis is superb. Numerous Figures and Tables describe economic and military industrial production. Several Appendices provide data on subjects such as German steel production and armaments production.The book “The Soviet Defense Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev” by Barber and Harrison (2000), Chapter 5 “Wartime Mobilization: A German Comparison,” provides a fascinating comparison of the slow mobilization of the German wartime economy compared to the mobilization of the economies of the US, Britain, and the USSR.Another book “Defeating Hitler” by Winter (2012) is also useful. It was written in 1945 and is based on British intelligence assessments during the war and interviews with key German military and industrial leaders after the war. Section II “German Weaknesses” offers some interesting insights or analyses as to why Germany eventually lost the war. An entire chapter is devoted to “Hitler’s Personality.” His characteristics of obstinacy, refusal to listen to facts or advice which ran contrary to his preconceived notions, and inability to formulate and execute long-term plans are all addressed in relation to his record of consistently poor decisions especially in the period 1942 – 1945. Section II Chapter II and Appendix IV “Machinery of Joint Command” describe the weaknesses of the German military command system comprising the OKW and OKH. Section II Chapter IV “Organization of German War Production” offers a fascinating assessment of the German armaments industry during the war. In conjunction with Appendix III “Nazi Machinery of Government” and Appendix VI “German War Production” discusses the reasons for the overall inefficiency and disorganization of war production. Albert Speer may have greatly improved output but there were institutional and internal political factors inhibiting production that even he could not overcome. Page 191 contains an interesting statement: In postwar discussions with various industrial leaders regarding alternatives that they failed to adopt, they frequently gave the response “That, in our country, was politically impossible.”Finally, “The Secret Horsepower Race” by Douglas (2020, page 429) contains a British assessment of the competency of the leadership of the Luftwaffe air ministry (RLM) and general, staff OKL) based on post-war interrogations: “…[N]one of the men occupying high military posts in Germany understood the true nature of science and technical development or appreciated their primary importance in the conduct of a modern war. It is curious that the Luftwaffe, the most technical of the services … was commanded by men who only imperfectly grasped the essentially technical and scientific character of their force. The responsible heads in the OKW and the OKL never had more than a layman’s conception of the strategic and tactical potentialities, and operational possibilities, of an air force. …[T]he root cause for their failure was incompetence, an innate incapacity to fill the requirements of their office.” Pretty strong stuff!

This is an excellent account of the basic problems faced by the Allies during WWII, and how they were overcome. The issues presented are still very relevant today. Highly recommended.

O livro traz um entendimento muito mais profundo sobre a necessidade S.A. organização e do estímulo ao talento nos grandes empreendimentos. Muito interessante e reflexivo!

Paul Kennedy's magisterial study of the Second World War identifies five challenges that were key to the Allies winning the war - finding a way to get convoys safely across the Atlantic, winning command of the air, stopping blitzkrieg tactics, working out how to seize an enemy-held shore and overcoming the 'tyranny of distance' (operating far away from the military's home bases). He charts the many failures along the way in overcoming those five challenges, and focuses in on how they were beaten, making this a history of the evolution of technologies and tactics rather than an account of one battle after another.This approaches makes the eventual Allied victory look less certain than in classic accounts, especially as Kennedy takes the reader through the formidable difficulties in turning economic dominance into actual military superiority, and also makes the outcome of the war look much more uncertain from the perspective of early 1943 than is usually given credit for with the traditional identification of turning points at Stalingrad, El Alamein and Midway.Kennedy's account also makes those who opposed invading France until 1944 seem very wise; the long trail of mistakes made at Dieppe, Kasserine Pass, Salerno, Anzio and elsewhere were vital learning stages. It's hard to read the book and not conclude that American enthusiasm for an invasion of France in 1943 would have led to disaster.The use of "engineers" in the title is perhaps a little problematic, as judging by other online reviews it led some readers to expect detailed engineering stories. That's not what Kennedy provides: he explains the strategic context which made certain problems so important for engineers to fix, and hence also why the work of some engineers was so much more important than that of others.Hence Paul Kennedy gives very little detail about, for example, the Mulberry artificial harbours that were so important to making the days after D-Day a success. But his broader account of the logistical problems armies faced as they moved further and further from their original bases explains why they were so important.In other words, it's in explaining why some problems were so vital to fix that Kennedy's book stands out. His descriptions of exactly how they were fixed are more variable in level of detail (and, judging by other apparently well-informed reviews, in accuracy of details too).This approach means too that some famous problem solvers get very little credit in the book as they were not working on problems Kennedy has identified as the big ones of the war.Most notably and controversially, the codebreakers therefore get little credit. He addresses this briefly, arguing that whilst the intelligence they produced was useful, when you get down to looking at the individual struggles, it is hard to assign improved intelligence as the key to their course. For example, in the battle with U-boats in the North Atlantic, intelligence was useful - but it was developments in a wide range of technologies and tactics that can be more closely traced with the changing fortunes on that battlefield.The book comes with a good number of photographs, though disappointingly small in size. One however, despite its size, did have a powerful impact on me. It's of the Gilbert Islands, apparently showing a scene of devastation from after the American invasion. But check the date, and the photo was actually taken four years afterward - a powerful testament to how massive and long-lasting the destruction caused by a world war is.

A fascinating recounting of the making of war. Accent on what was done and how was it done, technically. What were the main problems and how did one solve them (and who solved them). How was control of the sea and the air won, how were the huge distances mastered (one of the main problems!), how was the land war in western and eastern Europe won, how was the war in the Pacific won - where conquering small islands covered with jungle was a the main challenge, why did the Germans and the Japanese lose, what were their mistakes that made winning possible...At first I had trouble with the almost complete disregard for the people, soldiers, airmen, sailors, who had to make it happen, for the deaths and suffering, also of the civil population on both sides. But as Kennedy explains fairly at the beginning of his book, ethics is not his subject. He recounts the translation of strategic goals into tools for making them happen, weapons, planes, ships, tanks, operations...It is a very detailed book and at the same time full of suspense, exciting. I don't know how Kennedy did it!At first I was bewildered by all the plane and ship names - but Google is there to help with that (or you just read on...). Also all the names of Generals etc. (but again: Wikipedia),Kennedy has included some photographs, but I would have likes a lot more! (again: Wikipedia).I had never looked at the war from this perspective and I am very greatful to Kennedy for his research and his book.When you recieve this thick heavy bound book, it is somewhat daunting, so I started right in knowing I'd otherwise build up a resistance to it, and was pratically immediately taken in by it. No problem reading on, and on, and on... As I said, I don't know how he did it!

A very honest book which convincingly demonstrates that no single technical advance won the war, but that both a thorough system approach plus bottom up serendipity was in effect vital.