This book, by the noted Yale professor Paul Kennedy, is subtitled 'The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide In The Second World War'. He studies five strategic challenges identified by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Casablanca Conference in 1942 and makes his case for the technological adjustments and discoveries that led to the dominating Allied victories in 1944 at Normandy, in Operation Bagration in the Ukraine and the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. I do not believe his thesis is compelling.
His best argument is about the air war over Europe. By the end of 1943 into early 1944, the RAF and USAAF had virtually abandoned their failed attempts at strategic bombing, which Kennedy, an Englishman who remembers being bombed in London as a boy, calls indiscriminate terror bombing. There were days when the Allies lost 20% of their planes and the raids on Berlin were costing the British 5.2% of every sortie. The solution for victory was a plane with an American frame and a Rolls Royce engine; the Mustang. By providing the bombers full escort coverage with the Mustang, the Allies quickly controlled the air over Europe. The Mustang was faster than anything the Luftwaffe had, could fly higher and longer, and, virtually overnight, grounded the Germans in the spring of 1944. On June 6th, we had 12,000 planes in the air and the Germans had 170. I find it ultimately incredibly ironic that today the Rolls Royce automotive brand is owned by BMW, of Munich.
The case for change in the Battle of the Atlantic is a bit less compelling, but certainly credible. In March of 1943, the U-Boats were on the verge of shutting down the UK. Yet, the introduction of radar on fighter planes, a new type of depth-charge, a night vision device that could find U-Boats surfacing to re-charge their batteries, better escort techniques, and escort airplane carriers, eliminated the German challenge in the North Atlantic. For the rest of the war, the U-boats went far afield to the Americas and Africa to carry on their fight.
The third strategic challenge was how to land on a foreign shore. After barely coming ashore in Africa and almost losing at Anzio, there was no certainty that Overlord would succeed. The author reminds us that Ike wrote a letter of resignation apologizing for the failure of the invasion. Control of the air carried the day, and the German belief (helped by subterfuge) that the main thrust would come in the Pas-de-Calais assured that Rommel received inadequate reinforcements.
The case he makes for stopping Blitzkrieg is, in my opinion, the weakest. He points to the T-34 tank as a weapon that made a difference on the Eastern front. Yet, it is Russia's overwhelming superiority in numbers that led to Germany's defeat in the East. Indeed, he points out that man for man, unit for unit, army for army, the Allies had no match the Wehrmacht.
His last case study, the tyranny of distance in the Pacific, states that it was the Marines, the aircraft carrier dominance and the B-29 that turned the tide. As I have always assumed that mid-war weaponry and systems adjustments were part of all wars, this just doesn't add up for me.
Although, I struggled with the basic premise, I thoroughly enjoyed this esteemed historian's insights into so many aspects of the war. He points out that Ike stopped the strategic bombing and had both Air Forces bomb the French railroad infrastructure. There were 20,000 French casualties, but it prevented the Germans from retreating or being reinforced in Normandy. Also, as the Germans were trying to restart their Eastern war at Kursk in 1943, Hitler moved troops from that front to Italy, because the Allies landed and the Italians withdrew from combat. He even muses about the consequence of forty-million Ukrainians who welcomed the Germans, despised Stalin, but were brutalized and not welcomed as potential allies. This was not an easy book, but it is an insightful one.
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