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

the process of carrying out the proclaimed missions. It was one thing to assert that defeating the German U-boat threat was paramount. How, actually, did one go about defeating it? Again, it was no doubt fine (and politic) for Washington and London to assure an irritated Stalin throughout 1942 and 1943 that a second front would soon be launched in France. But how? Certain individuals and certain organizations had to answer those questions; it was they who must solve these problems and thus make feasible the efforts of the millions of Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen.
    This is where the present work may set itself apart, because it seeks to tell the story of such individuals and organizations, not just in some anecdotal or romantic or military-history-buff sort of way, but as a key part of understanding the larger epic of how the tide was turned. Many readers will have some knowledge of the story of the Ultra decryption team at Bletchley Park and their equivalents in the Pacific. Some will know the story—as portrayed in the film
The Dam Busters
—of how Barnes Wallis invented the bouncing bombs that blew up the Ruhr Valley dams. Only a few are familiar with the eccentric Percy Hobart’s creation of the weird tanks that could push right through D-Day coastal minefields and barbed wire, or with the individuals who devised the Mulberry harbors. Very few Western readers will have an inkling of the renowned T-34 tank’s truly pathetic capacities, or know instead of the extremely important role of the Red Army’s antitank weaponry. And only some will understand the significance of the cavity magnetron, or why putting a Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 engine into a rather limp P-51 Mustang fighter was such a critical step, or the significance of the extraordinary career of the founder of the American Navy’s Seabees. Much of that World War II folklore is fascinating in itself to those who do know those stories. But the point being made here is that we have rarely if ever stepped back and understood how their work surfaced, was cultivated, and then was connected to the problems at hand,or appreciated how these various, eccentric pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fitted into the whole. 6
    This book seeks, through the chapters that follow, to make a contribution to such understanding. In many ways, it is a return to the research and writing done some forty years ago for Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s own
History of the Second World War,
although this time I hope I am seeing through the glass more clearly than in that earlier time. b Yet the present study is intended not as a form of personal pilgrimage but rather as an effort to widen the debate about decision making and problem solving in history. It seems a story worth telling. And if that is true, it is a mode of inquiry that may be worth applying elsewhere.
    a This is, after all, the argument in my 1988 book
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
, 347–57.
    b See the acknowledgments for further details.

    
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
        
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune:
        
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
        
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
        
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
        
And we must take the current when it serves,
        
Or lose our ventures.
        —W ILLIAM S HAKESPEARE ,
Julius Caesar
, Act IV, Scene 2

CHAPTER ONE

HOW TO GET CONVOYS SAFELY ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
    Thus was the stage set for Germany to fling into the Atlantic struggle the greatest possible strength.… It was plain to both sides that the U-boats and the convoy escorts would shortly be locked in a deadly, ruthless series of fights, in which no mercy would be expected and little shown. Nor would one battle, or a week’s or a month’s fighting, decide the issue. It would be decided by which side could endure the longer; by whether the stamina and strength of purpose of the crews of the Allied escort vessels and aircraft, watching