Engineers of victory
An account of how the tide was turned against the Nazis by the Allies in the Second World War. It focuses on the problem-solvers - Major-General Perry Hobart, who invented the 'funny tanks' which flattened the curve on the D-Day beaches; Flight Lieutenant Ronnie Harker 'the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang.
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- > Even WW2 was largely won by infantry and artillery, tanks and aircraft are way overrated.
You may wish to read Engineers of Victory: The Making of the War Machine That Defeated the Nazis by Paul Kennedy:
> Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
Certainly you need (to use the probably over-used phrase) "boots on the ground". But air supremacy helped a lot in European campaign, as did many other Allied innovations, and the technologists that put those developments into field:
- For a good overview on the key role that enginners, scientists, and 'technologists' had in helping to win WW2 for the Allies, see Engineers of victory: the problem solvers who turned the tide in the Second World War by Kennedy:
> Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
> The story of World War II is often told as a grand narrative, as if it were fought by supermen or decided by fate. Here Kennedy uncovers the real heroes of the war, highlighting for the first time the creative strategies, tactics, and organizational decisions that made the lofty Allied objectives into a successful reality. In an even more significant way, The Turn of the Tide has another claim to our attention, for it restores “the middle level of war” to its rightful place in history.
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/91616/engineers-of-...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13132847-engineers-of-vi...
Lots of references in case you want to dig into more detail on the particular inventions he goes over.
I was a bit surprised to learn that the Americans were quite reluctant to build Merlin-powered P-51s: they were originally designed with Allison engines, but after a test flight the British decide to shoehorn a Rolls Royce engine into one and the performance went from pretty good to astounding.
- If you're interested in topics like this, check out Paul Kennedy's "Engineers of Victory". It basically talks about how the road to victory in WWII were a number of operational and technological challenges that needed to be solved.
http://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Victory-Problem-Solvers-Turn...
- Yes.
"When whole squadrons of very long-range aircraft were operating out of bases in the Shetlands, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland (and, after mid-1943, the Azores), and when the Bay of Biscay could be patrolled all through the night by aircraft equipped with centimetric radar, Leigh Lights, depth charges, acoustic torpedoes, even rockets, Doenitz’s submarines knew no rest." [0]
[0] Kennedy, Paul. Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War, from the chapter 'How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic'
- > I was watching a WW2 documentary yesterday and learned Nazi Germany’s encryption had already been (mostly) cracked by the time they entered the war, which (don’t quote me) significantly influenced the outcome of the war.
The Poles had broken Enigma before the outbreak of war (1945-09-01) with the help of intelligence from France. Bletchley Park used computers to speed up the process of going through the messages.[0]
It has been remarked that 'cracking Enigma shortened the war by X years',[1] so for some people this could be considered "significantly influenced".
However, after reading Engineers of Victory by Paul Kennedy:
> Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/91616/engineers-of-...
I think there were more important developments than cracking Enigma, as influential as that could have been.
If we're talking about codes, then I think the Americans breaking the Japanese ones was more important: the US would have won regardless just because of industrial output, but the intercepts allowed things like being able to predict Midway and being able to take out Yamamoto had more meaningful operational results than what was gained out of Ultra, IMHO.
In the European theatre, I think the Merlin engine was much more critical to the outcome of the war (especially in the Battle of Britain), and the cavity magnetron was more important in the Battle of the Atlantic (along with re-learning to use convoys, like was done in WW1).
[0] Bletchley Park broke other codes, like Lorenz; see William "Bill" Tutte.
