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

production in 1943 was well over twice that of 1941; its output of aircraft in that earlier year had been about half of Britain’s, but by 1943 it was surging ahead again. The various German armed services were receiving better aircraft, better tanks, better submarines. Hitler’s worried reaction to the Anglo-American landings in North Africa (November 8, 1942) was to seize control of all of southern (Vichy) France and pour crack divisions into Tunisia. As the Allied leaders were flying home from Casablanca, Rommel’s newly arrived forces were punishing the inexperienced U.S.units in the Kasserine Pass. After Stalingrad the Red Army’s frontline forces had run out of steam, and as early as February and March 1943, Erich von Manstein’s reinforced panzer armies had blunted the Russians’ offensive, had retaken Kharkov, and were assembling a vast armored force for their own summer assault toward Kursk. If, in addition, Berlin really could continue to interrupt the Atlantic convoys, destroy the Western aerial offensive, and deny the Anglo-American armies entry into France, then presumably it could concentrate more of its massive forces on the Eastern Front, until perhaps even Joseph Stalin would admit a compromise settlement.
    Another major operational challenge was the task of ensuring the defeat of Japan. This was clearly going to be an American enterprise, if not exclusively then overwhelmingly so. To be sure, British and British-Indian troops would attempt the recovery of Burma, Thailand, and Malaya, and Australian divisions would join Douglas MacArthur in taking New Guinea and pushing on to the Philippines. Yet the most sensible operational route was actually to avoid the jungles of New Guinea, Burma, and Indochina and instead to hop across the Central Pacific directly westward from Hawaii to the Philippines, then China, then Japan. Innovative U.S. officers had toyed with this “War Plan Orange” throughout the interwar years, and on paper it seemed most promising; it was, after all, the only campaign plan that didn’t have to be tossed away or severely amended in consequence of the Axis’s great successes of 1939–42.
    The problem once again, as in the case of invading France, was always the practical one. How exactly did one land on a coral atoll, its inshore waters strewn with mines and obstacles, the beaches infested with dynamited booby traps, the enemy holed up in deep bunkers? As late as November 1943, Central Pacific Command began its long-awaited offensive with an assault in overwhelming force against the Japanese garrison holding Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. The result was not in doubt, because Imperial General Headquarters had decided that the Gilberts lay outside its “absolute national defense sphere” in the Pacific, and the garrison numbered a mere 3,000 men, but the losses among the American marines stranded under heavy fire on the outlying coral reefs shocked the public back home. Whichever way one cameacross the Pacific, the indicators were grim. It was all very well for General MacArthur, with his flair for publicity, to promise “I shall return” to the Philippines when he left early in 1942, but the Japanese garrison in those islands now totaled 270,000 men, none of whom would surrender. How long, then, would it take to get to Japan’s own shores? Five years? And at what cost, if the enemy garrisons in the Philippines were twenty or fifty times as large as those on Tarawa?
    There was, then, a truly daunting list of difficulties to be overcome by the Grand Alliance, a list made all the more formidable because almost all of these challenges were not fully separate but depended upon gains being made elsewhere. Hopping across the Pacific islands, for example, first required gaining command of the sea, and that in turn depended upon command of the air, and then upon building giant bases on top of meager coral islands—and a great disaster in the Atlantic or Europe would have produced urgent