Engineers of Victory by Kennedy
Ref: Paul Kennedy (2013). Engineers of Victory. Penguin Publishing.
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Summary
The technological innovations that won World War II.
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—Technological Innovations—
Air Warfare
Rolls Royce: Specialized in converting fuel into thrust as efficiently as possible.
Pursuit Fighter 51 (P-51): used to defeat Japanese Zero’s.
Sunderland Bomber: Combined innovations including the Leigh Light, the increasingly improved variants of HF-DF, the cavity magnetron, and the airborne homing torpedo.
Superfortress: A new bomber with unprecedented range and destructive power.
Fido: An air-launched acoustic homing torpedo used to search for and destroy submerged enemy submarines.
Gee, Oboe, H2S: Top Secret Directional Aids to navigation and target identification that were increasingly capable of getting the bombers closer to the target.
Targeting: The RAF Staff was assuming a theoretical average error of drop of 1,000 yds, only 1/10 of the RAF’s bombers found their way even to within 5 miles of their assigned targets. Increased accuracy alone would quadruple their capacity to damage Germany.
Amphibious Warfare
Supporting aircraft were overhead, and battleships were firing from close-in positions. The beaches were clearly marked out by color codes. Eventually there was a separate channel for return traffic: empty landing craft, damaged vessels, and hospital ships with their dead and wounded.
Sea Warfare
Essex-Class Carriers: The first boat of a near-revolutionary design with radar-controlled gunnery and detection systems, armored hangars, side elevators to save space, enormous turbines to power a speed of over 30 kts, and 90-100 aircraft.
Admiral William Sims is generally regarded as the father of the U.S. carrier service.
Submarine Warfare
During the war as a whole, the casualty rate among the U-boat crews was a staggering 63%, or 76% if captured sailors are included. No other major service in the struggle came close to these terrible rates of loss.
Type VIIC: The key U-boat deployed at the time, was a narrow, cramped, and very basic piece of equipment, a mere 800 tons in weight and 220’ long, carrying 44 crew members stuck in unbelievable conditions.
Land Warfare
Land Mines: cheap and easy to produce in vast numbers, easily transportable to the battlefield, capable of being readily hidden in the ground and covered up, and able to be arrayed in all sorts of checkerboard formations.
The Handheld acoustic mine detector, devised by the Pole Jozef Kosacki and given freely to the British Army.
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—Theaters of War—
The Eastern Front
85% of all Wehrmacht losses occurred on the Eastern Front.
Rasputitsa: a notorious Russian weather condition in which surface water puddles from snowmelt because it is unable to drain due to the still frozen soil underneath.
Operation Bagration was the most calamitous defeat of all the German armed forces in World War II.-Zaloga.
The Battle of Kursk was the greatest minefield battle of the war; the Red Army laid tens of thousands of mines across the entire salient, all of them soon to be hidden by the growing summer wheat. The density of the minefields, particularly between the strong points, was remarkably high, with antitank mines averaging 2,400 per mile and antipersonnel mines 2,700 per mile.
The Atlantic
By Mar, 1943, the disadvantages under which the Allied convoys were laboring were, then, pretty overwhelming: inadequate naval protection, poor intelligence, nonexistent or minimal air cover (and no cover at night), together with a lot of poor, faulty, and outdated equipment.
The Western Front
The Normandy landings made more sense for several reasons: it was almost equidistant from all the large southern English and Welsh invasion ports, whereas a major landing near Calais would really pile up the successive waves of landing craft. Normandy gave space for Montgomery’s insistence on landing at five beaches, not the original three; it gave the Allied navies more room for maneuver than in the Narrows; and it offered a promising chance to send an army westward from Normandy into the Cotentin Peninsula, take Cherbourg, and create a major link from France back to the millions of men and masses of munitions that could sail directly from America. All that was needed was to seize a part of western Europe and then move east into Germany.
The Pacific Theater
In the end, only one campaign counted: Nimitz’s thrust of the USN across the Pacific to bomb Japan.
The compelling commercial need to gain the oil and rubber and tin of Sumatra and Malaya led to the operational decisions to strike at Hong Kong, the Philippines, Borneo, Java, and Singapore, eliminating American, British, and Dutch armed forces and seizing their bases.
The spectacular attack on Pearl Harbor opened everyone’s eyes to the amazingly destructive reach of carrier-borne air power.
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—Allied & Axis Forces—
German Forces
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, a person who held to the tactical principle that when one was being pushed backward by superior enemy forces, the only sensible response was to retreat a little, regroup, then ruthlessly counterattack, relying on his men’s sheer professionalism and superiority of fighting experience to intimidate and overcome more numerous but (he could assume at this point) half-green troops.
German General Eberhard von Mackensen had been chief of staff of one of the German armies invading Poland in 1939 and of another army invading France in 1940. By the next year he was with Army Group South on the Eastern Front. By 1943 he was in charge of the First Panzer Army at the critical Battle of Kharkov. He was then moved to command the German Fourteenth Army in Italy. In other words, he probably had more battlefield experience than all of the Allied divisional commanders at Anzio put together.
Doenitz wrote in his memoirs that the chief problem had been that “Germany was waging war at sea without an air arm.” That was like boxing with only one fist.
Russian Forces
In total during the war, the Soviets conscripted thirty million men, of which they lost ten million, with still larger numbers of wounded.
Japanese Forces
Admiral Nagumo: headed the Pearl Harbor Operation.
British Forces
I am not at all impressed by the prejudice against him in certain quarters. Such prejudices attach frequently to persons of strong personality and original view… We are now at war, fighting for our lives, and we cannot afford to confine Army appointments to officers who have excited no hostile comment in their career.-British PM’s Oct, 1940 Reproof to the War Office for not using Hobart’s talents.
Instead of the spring of the panther, there were the flopping's of a beached whale.-Churchill on Gallipoli.
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Strategy & Tactics
Strategic, because it independently struck at the enemy’s capacity to fight, and could bring war to the home front.
Eisenhower’s decision to cut off the Wehrmacht’s reinforcement routes was one of the single most important policy calls in the entire war.
Smart logistics are the foundations of victory.
Maritime security across the Atlantic was the foundation stone of all Anglo-American grand strategy in the European theater.
WWII was the first in the entire history of human conflict in which sea power was decisively affected by airpower. Without the latter, one could not reign supreme in the former.
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Misc Quotes
All military organizations benefit from having real or perceived enemies.
“Terror bombing” first took place when Japanese, Italian, and especially German bomb bays opened upon civilian populations below. Whether saturation bombing took place in China, over Japan, or against Warsaw, London, or Dresden, it stood in contradiction to the generally accepted codes of proportionality and discrimination; it offended the doctrine of “just war.”
The demolition teams, the bravest of the brave.
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Chronology
Mar, 1945: Firebombing of Tokyo; US low-flying firebombers kill 130,000 people.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
Mar- Jul, 1945: Strategic Bombing of Tokyo incinerates 45 mi2 of crucial industrial areas, razes 2 million buildings to the ground, and 13 million Japanese civilians lose their homes.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
9 Mar, 1945: Firebombing of Tokyo; US General Curtis LeMay orders low-flying bombers to drop almost 2000 tons of Napalm bombs on Tokyo which kill 130,000 people.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
23 June- 19 Aug, 1944: Operation Bagration; A Soviet-Belorussian Strategic Offensive results in a Soviet Victory. Overall German losses in Operation Bagration were a numbing 670,000 killed, wounded, or captured, though the Russian losses were even higher (178,000 killed and 587,000 wounded).-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
15 June- 9 Jul, 1944: The Battle of Saipan in the Mariana Islands; 8,000 US marines were onshore in the first 20 min, and 20,000 men by the end of the first day.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
Jun- Aug, 1944: The Wehrmacht in France loses 450,000 men.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
6 Jun, 1944: Operation Overlord (aka D-Day); An Amphibious Assault of the Beaches of Normandy gain the Allies a foothold in continental Europe. The Beach was setup into multiple Beachheads with the US at Utah and Omaha (losing 2400 US casualties at Omaha). Within 6 days, some 326,000 men and 54,000 vehicles had been brought across the Channel as the Allies began the advance towards Berlin.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
5 Jul- 23 Aug, 1943: The Battle of Kursk; Soviet forces regain a 2000km wide front; the practical problem facing the Wehrmacht at Kursk included (1) running out of ammunition and fuel, (2) insidious minefields, and (3) the effective Red Army antitank platoons.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
1943: A team of Canadian air engineers pulled one bomb bay from a B-24 Liberator, replaced it with extra fuel tanks, and created an aircraft that could reach the transatlantic gap.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
4 June, 1942: The Battle of Midway; a Carriers-only battle.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
5 Mar, 1942: Formation of the US Construction Battalions (CBs aka Seabees).-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
7-8 Dec, 1941: Japan conducts simultaneous attacks on allied positions at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Singapore.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
25 July, 1941: Executive Order 8832 is passed by US President FDR, supported by the British & Dutch, and freezes all Japanese commercial assets, essentially cutting off Japan’s consumption of oil (88% of which was imported).-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
22 June- 5 Dec, 1941: Operation Barbarossa; the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Once Barbarossa unfolded, the German air force was fighting on three fronts (eastern, western, and southern).-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
10 Jul- 31 Oct, 1940: The Battle of Britain.
Mar, 1915- Jan, 1916: The Battle of Gallipoli is fought with the intent of restoring sea-lanes to the West, keeping a tottering Russia in the war, pushing Turkey towards collapse, and tempting the Balkan states of Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania out of neutrality on the side of the allies. By the end the allies had lost 44,000 men and had another 97,000 wounded. Turkey’s casualties were even higher, but they had won.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
Dec, 1915- Jan, 1916: Retreat of allies from Gallipoli; in swift nighttime moves that surprised the Turks, the Allies pulled away from the beaches, admitting defeat, and sailed for home.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
Mar, 1915: The Battle of Gallipoli begins with a purely naval attempt to rush the Straits.-Engineers of Victory by Kennedy.
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