I read a lot of books about WWII and yet I am not an uncle. Why do I keep coming back to the most painful period of the 20th century? For starters, it’s the fulcrum of modern history. Almost every major recent political, economic, and cultural development can trace its roots back to the war. The war touches every facet of the human experience and can be interpreted through every conceivable discipline. Further, understanding its broad strokes unlocks enormous and tangled debates that loom large around the world.
Historians still grapple over the central question of why the Allies won the war. After all, in 1942 Hitler was at the gates of Moscow while Japan had conquered Singapore and was threatening Australia and India. By 1944, however, the Red Army was marching to Berlin and the Japanese empire had lost its fleet.
To explain this most dramatic of reversals, most scholars look to great battles (Kursk and Stalingrad, Midway) and specific technological innovations (Enigma, the T-34). Or they abstract away the military history and focus instead on the Allies’ collective advantage in productive capacity.
Historian Paul Kennedy in Engineers of Victory tries to integrate all three approaches by focusing on what may be the war’s least sexy angle — its middle managers. The Allied “problem solvers,” he contends, outclassed their Axis counterparts.
the creation of war-making systems that contained impressive feedback loops, flexibility, a capacity to learn from mistakes, and a ‘culture of encouragement’…that permitted the middlemen in this grinding conflict the freedom to experiment, to offer ideas and opinions, and to cross traditional institutional boundaries…. [T]he successful systems were so because they possessed smarter feedback loops between top, middle, and bottom; because they stimulated initiative, innovation, and ingenuity; and because they encouraged problem solvers to tackle large, apparently intractable problems.
Kennedy makes a compelling case for why these logistical and technological innovations were critical. He is much less strong on how they happened in the first place. The only dependent variables he provides credible explanations for are the roles of the heads of state. Churchill, having spotted the importance of air power and “land ships” even before WWI, ran the most impressive technological incubator relative to the resources at his disposal. Stalin, after purging nearly all of his Red Army officers, deferred to the generals he left alive once the Germans invaded. And FDR’s similar hands off approach created the Mustang and the atom bomb. On the other side, Hitler micromanaged his way into technological waste like the wonderweapons. Kennedy convincingly demonstrates that the Japanese didn’t innovate but doesn’t have a particularly good read on why.
Unfortunately, Kennedy doesn’t really get into the guts of these loops. Even without Hitler’s interference, the Nazis clearly had plenty of engineering brilliance at their disposal and Japan industrialized far faster than any country had. What allowed the Allied middle-managers to work better together? What permitted their flexibility and ‘culture of encouragement’ to flourish? Kennedy puts Soviet innovation on the same level as British and American (I’ll grant him that for operational tactics — shoutout to Deep Battle — but less so for technological innovation) so he can’t fall back on the “free societies give you a marketplace of ideas” thesis.
I think Kennedy doesn’t have a detailed enough understanding of the engineering to follow the minutes of the 1940s version of a daily scrum and compare working styles across the major powers. Even on the most accessible archives of the UK and American ones his narratives tries not to but gives the impression that individual genius and happenstance, not feedback loops, drove improvement. A collaboration with a historically-minded management consultant or technologist would have served him well. Allied problems solvers pulled off the most impressive logistic feats (D-Day) and technological innovations (atom bomb) the world has ever seen. This book doesn’t quite tell us why and make good on its promise to give readers timeless lessons.
Another interesting extension would have been to look at what the Axis was doing right before 1942. Surely there must have been some impressive feedback loops running through the 20s and 30s and into the war that created such a powerful Wehrmacht from a broken German Imperial army and a Japanese modern military that before the 1860s was rocking samurai swords. In terms of operational successes some of the most dramatic came in the invasion of France, in the early days of Operation Barbarossa, and feats like Pearl Harbor and the capture of Singapore.
His five chapters walk through different theaters. His first, on the Battle of the Atlantic, is the most impressive. American and British inventors cross-pollinated each other to create sonar, better depth charges, “hedgehog guns,” long-range aircraft, homing torpedoes…etc. Mid-level officers teamed up to devise optimal convoy arrangements. These innovations for Kennedy far outstrip the impact that Turing and Co. had on the campaign — as they allowed the Allies not just to dodge but to defeat the submarines. The problem solvers knew they were doing something right when their combined inventions prompted Nazi Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz to message to his fleet in 1943, “if there is anyone who thinks that combating convoys no longer possible, he is a weakling and no true u-boat captain.”
His Battle of Britain chapter also excels. Less impressive are Kennedy’s takes on Soviet innovations on the eastern front and Japanese stagnation. Perhaps due to a lack of archival access, he wasn’t able to convey the dynamics of Soviet production and innovation. As some historians have now started to do really impressive work digging into Japanese wartime archives, it’s less easy to excuse Kennedy’s hand waving especially as he surely has the resources and cache to attract capable translators and graduate students around the world.
Kennedy knows better than to just look to technology to explain the war’s outcome. He adds to his thesis the “role of geography” and leaders’ relative levels of appreciation of its power. On these classic questions of geopolitics Engineers of Victory is less original but really excels. Its focus on the operational level of war really plays out how the different theaters interacted and why Nazi and Japanese hyperactivity on multiple fronts from 1940–42 stretched resources thin. If you accept Tim Snyder’s recent thesis from Black Earth that a geography-based ideology drove Hitler more than anything else, ironically the man most focused on geography was also the one who most misunderstood it.
I really liked Kennedy’s walk-through of the trade-offs facing the Allies when considering the four different approaches to shrinking the Japanese empire (through Burma, the Philippines, over the Himalayas and into China, and through the Marshall Islands).
My hot take: the three massive blunders that led the war down the path it took (ignoring everything before, say, 1934) of initial Axis success followed by total defeat were 1. One part American isolationism, two parts French blowing their chances to invade after the Ruhr, and four parts British willful ignorance of Hitler’s rising threat and Chamberlain’s criminal diplomatic maneuvering, 2. Hitler’s decision to invade Russia and operational errors in its execution (a close run thing that the engineers may have influenced), and 3. The Japanese talking themselves into awaking a giant their smartest leaders knew they could never defeat.
I also like Andrew Roberts’ thesis that many of Hitler’s errors were rooted in ideology. For instance, maybe he would’ve gotten the atomic bomb before the West…but only if he didn’t alienate or kill all his brilliant German Jewish scientists who ended up joining the Manhattan project. He kept overreaching because of ideology. Then again, you can also argue that he only rises to power in the domestic sphere and grows the Third Reich to the size it gets in 1940–1 through seemingly insane decisions (like nearly invading Czechslovakia — a move his generals thought was so crazy the had resolved to coup if it happened) that only a megalomaniac would have had the nerve to pull off. Certainly it takes megalomaniac to throw away the position he was sitting in in 1941 and roll the dice yet again with an invasion of the USSR — the biggest blunder that led to his downfall. [Tim Snyder is very good on Roberts’ counterfactuals here.]
So who should read this? Folks who want a novel take on WWII operational history and folks who want a really good overview of geopolitical questions and how the different theaters interacted with each-other. But be wary if you think you want takeaways to apply the Allies’ ‘secrets of success’ to your professional pursuit.
