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

calls for a relocation of U.S. resources from the Pacific to those theaters instead (and a furious row among the Chiefs of Staff). Invading France was impossible until the German U-boat menace to the Atlantic convoys had been defeated. Only when Allied shipyards could produce enough of the new, odd-looking assault vessels to surmount obstacles and fight their way onshore could a maritime invasion take place in any theater. Although Stalin would never admit it, the Red Army’s successes in the field were helped significantly by the fact that the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign compelled Germany to allocate enormous amounts of manpower to the antiaircraft, civil control, and emergency rebuilding programs required to keep the Third Reich in action. The vital Dodge and Studebaker trucks, the workhorses for the Soviet divisions in their westward advance, could not be transported from America to Russia unless maritime lines of communication were preserved by the Royal Navy. Conversely, it is difficult to see how the Anglo-American armies in the west could have made much progress at all had not scores of battle-hardened Wehrmacht divisions been pinned down (and decimated) in the east. In short, whereas one advantage gained by the Allies could help campaign(s) elsewhere, a serious defeat could damage the chances of the other aims being achieved.
    Remarkably, all five separate though interconnected challengeswere overcome between early 1943 and the summer of 1944—roughly, between Casablanca and the quadruple successes of Normandy, the fall of Rome, the Marianas landings in the Central Pacific, and Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front. Some strategic problems (aerial control over Germany, island-hopping across the Pacific) took longer than others (controlling the Atlantic sea-lanes, blunting the blitzkrieg), but in the space of something like seventeen months, the tide turned in the greatest conflict known to history.
    Why was that so, and how did it happen? One reply lies close to hand, in the sense that the Fascist aggressor nations were rash enough to attack the rest of the world. Because of their earlier arms buildups in the 1930s, the Axis powers gained wide and stunning successes, but they could not succeed in defeating any one of their three major enemies. When the rest of the world recovered from those batterings, it steadily applied its far greater resources, fought its way back, and achieved final victory. a
    Yet there is another equally important point to be pursued, namely, exactly
how
did the Allies recover and fight their way back? The relative productive capacities held by each side by 1943–44 do indeed point to the likely winners. But what if the U-boats had not been defeated in summer 1943, or if the Luftwaffe had not been destroyed early in 1944, or if the Red Army had not found ways to blunt German panzers? What if the legendary “turnaround” weapons such as the long-range fighter and miniaturized radar—whose arrival on the battlefields in 1943–44 most historians seem to take as a given—had not come into play at the time they did, or had not been developed at all?
    At the very least, all this suggests that the “inevitable” Allied victories could have occurred much later than in May and August 1945, and that they would have been accompanied by far higher losses in the field. The story of the second half of the Second World War presumably would have looked very different than it does to us today. What we explore here, then, is a common conundrum: how does one achieve one’s strategic aims when one possesses considerable resources but does not, or at least not yet, have the instruments and organizations at hand?

    This is the story, then, of that strategic, operational, and tactical turnaround from early 1943 to mid-1944. From the beginning, it was obvious that the investigation proposed here had to move downward from the Combined Chiefs of Staff’s declarations to a detailed analysis of