Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (59 page)
Read Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War Online
Authors: Paul Kennedy
Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #International Relations, #General, #Political Science, #Military, #Marine & Naval, #World War II, #History
In this particular measure, of the sheer efficiency of getting fighting equipment and fighting men from A to B, the British probably again take the palm, certainly not because of some innate cleverness, but because of their long organizational experiences and their acute sense after 1940 of fighting against the odds, together with the prospect of losing. Necessity was indeed here the mother of invention. They had to defend their cities, transport troops around Africa to Egypt, support the Greeks, hold the frontiers of India, get the United States into the war, and then bring that massive continental American potential to the European theater.
15
Here was another problem solver’s task. How exactly did one get two million Americans soldiers, once arrived in the Clyde, to bases in southern England in preparation for the assault upon Normandy, when most of British Rail was concentrated on hauling coal wagons to the iron and steel mills that could not cease production? As it was, an organization staffed by people who had grown up memorizing Bradshaw’s railway timetables as a hobby did it, while the high commanders took that all for granted because they were confident in their middle-level managers’ capabilities. As Churchill famously said about the artificial harbors, don’t worry too much about the problems, for the problems will sort themselves out—that is, a way will be found, step by step.
There is another way of thinking about this story of incremental problem solving, and it comes from a very contemporary example. In November 2011, as all the posthumous tributes were pouring in to the “genius” leader of Apple, Inc., Steve Jobs, an intriguing article appeared in the
New Yorker
. In it the author, Malcolm Gladwell, argued that Jobs was not an inventor of a machine or an insight that changed the world; few beings ever are (excepting perhaps Leonardo and Edison). Instead, he was a brilliant adopter of other people’s early, clumsy inventions and
partial insights, which he built upon, modified, and constantly improved. He was, to use today’s parlance, a “tweaker,” and his true genius was to push for ever-greater increases in the effectiveness of his company’s products.
The story of Steve Jobs’s success, however, was not new. The coming of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Britain—arguably, the greatest revolution that explains the rise of the West—came about precisely because that country possessed a plethora of tweakers in a national culture that encouraged progress:
In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stokes, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation.
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The reader who has followed this analogy in the five preceding chapters will be struck by the similarity. For was not the story of the evolution of the Soviets’ T-34 tank from a badly designed, underpowered hunk of metal to an assured, fast-moving, deadly weapon of war a story of continuous tweaking (
chapter 3
)? Was that not also the case for the great American bomber, the B-29, at one stage so mired in difficulties that its cancellation was proposed until the Boeing teams fixed those problems (
chapter 5
)? And what about the miraculous tales of the P-51 Mustang (
chapter 2
), Percy Hobart’s Funnies (
chapter 4
), and a powerful radar system so small that it could be inserted into the nose of a long-range patrol aircraft and turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic (
chapter 1
)? It all fits, once one brings the scattered pieces together. But all these projects needed time and support.
If these remarks about the culture of innovation are valid, the five
peculiar and parallel tales narrated above carry a significant transferable message into other fields, other disciplines, other great contestations. This does not just mean transferability to such large-scale military conflicts as the Napoleonic War or the American Civil War, although they surely would serve as well, and indeed, each of those conflicts has its own splendid historians of how the war was won.
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The argument in any of the five preceding chapters of this book can feed into the enormous literature and debates upon what has come to be called “military innovation studies.”
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The case histories also, I hope, contribute to the many writings on the operational level of war, and to the popularized “genius of design” television programs. And they relate (with full acknowledgment in the endnotes) to the transformative studies of military effectiveness.
By extension, then, any smart middle manager or management consultant in today’s business world—or a CEO who reads widely—can see the lessons that emerge from these tales. Indeed, the managers of even the world’s greatest companies can only presumably marvel at, say, Admiral Ramsay’s planning and orchestration of the five simultaneous D-Day landings and wish they could achieve one-tenth of what he did. In a certain way, the ghost of the late, great Peter Drucker hangs around this present book, since all of his many works were about how to manage and organize. And no one, it is fair to argue, ever did it better than Ramsay and his team on the morning of June 6, 1944.
In sum, the winning of great wars always requires superior organization, and that in turn requires people who can run those organizations, not in a blinkered way but most competently and in a fashion that will allow outsiders to feed fresh ideas into the pursuit of victory. None of this can be done by the chiefs alone, however great their genius, however massive their energy. There has to be a support system, a culture of encouragement, efficient feedback loops, a capacity to learn from setbacks, an ability to get things done. And all this must be done in a fashion that is better than the enemy’s. That is how wars are won.
Thus, the young, inquiring German worker of Brecht’s poem cited at the very beginning of this book was right in his puzzled questions. Who indeed did make things work for Alexander and Caesar? Was it not the middle managers and the problem solvers? With all due respect to the great contributions made by the masters and commanders, on
the one hand, and those made by the soldiers and sailors who had to cross the beaches and patrol the dangerous seas during the 1939–45 war, on the other, this book argues so. Without the middle personnel and the systems they managed, victory would remain out of grasp. It remains a puzzle that we have given the problem solvers of the Second World War such relatively small recognition.
By contrast, Frederick the Great, ever the canny manager of things, rewarded his generals, colonels, and middle managers with titles, honors, and lands (some of their heirs, bearing the same aristocratic titles, fought in the Ostfeldzug 180 years later, under a former Austrian corporal they despised). Alexander’s team of fighters bore him back as far as they could, buried him, then returned to due honor in Macedonia. Philip II of Spain was not mean in handing out rewards to those who had served him faithfully and were willing to keep on fighting for his divine cause despite the Armada’s failure. What happened to Caesar’s cook is lost to history, but, assuredly, he played a role.
The same recognitions are deserved, surely, for the middle people who turned the Second World War from being the blunting of Axis aggressions in 1942 into the irreversible Allied advances of 1943–44, and thus the crushing of Germany and Japan. True, some of these individuals, weaponry, and organizations are recognized—such as the achievements of those who created the P-51 long-range fighter, the specialized tanks, miniaturized radar, the Fighting Seabees—but usually in a spotty and popularized manner, by fans of a certain aspect of the war. Rarely if at all have these individual threads been woven together to show how those advances then affected the many campaigns that swung in the Allies’ favor during the middle parts of this global conflict. Even more rare has been an understanding of how the work of these various problem solvers also has to be joined by a fuller appreciation of the importance of having a “culture of encouragement,” to ensure that the mere declarations and strategic intentions of great leaders get turned into reality and do not wither in the storms of war. If so, as has been argued throughout in the pages above, then we have lived with a large gap in our understanding of how World War II was won in its critical years. Perhaps the present work will help to close that gap a bit.
a
One might think of this as the litmus test for the P-51 Mustang versus the Me 262. Both were aviation breakthroughs, but one had a terrific impact on the war’s outcome and the other didn’t. Thus, arguments about the significance of this or that spy ring in the Second World War have to go through the same sort of litmus test: did they really help the war to be won, and where, specifically?
b
Consider, among others, the Romans, holding their many fronts for many centuries; the Elder Pitt in the Seven Years’ War, juggling Europe, Canada, and India; and Clemenceau and Lloyd George in the First World War. Consider, by contrast, Philip II of Spain’s inability to focus, and Napoleon’s double distraction in both Spain and Russia. To govern is indeed to choose. The implications for the American government in our troubled early twenty-first-century world are obvious.
c
Consider King’s refusal to accept Royal Navy advice to convoy merchantmen steaming up the East Coast of the United States during 1942 (those were British oil tankers from Trinidad, supposedly under USN protection), Echolls’s obstinacy to accept the Merlin-powered P-51, and Bradley’s lack of interest in any British ideas regarding landing techniques, and compare these with accounts of American scientists’ ready acceptance of the cavity magnetron, the shared intelligence work in the Bletchley huts, and the sharing of shipbuilding and ship-repair plans.
I
first conceived of this book in 2007, a year after the publication of my study of the United Nations,
The Parliament of Man
. With the backing of Random House in New York and Penguin UK in London, I moved into the serious writing of chapters 1, 2, and 4 during six months of research leave in Cambridge in 2008. My return to full-time teaching, advising, and fund-raising at Yale left me little opportunity for further drafting, but I was able to take another stint of research leave at Cambridge in 2010, where I drafted the remaining chapters, 3 and 5. The introduction and conclusion were drafted in the fall of 2010, after my return to Yale. In the period following I sought to incorporate, or at least mull over, the comments and criticisms of many academic colleagues and my chief editors.
There is no way that senior, overcommitted academics these days can engage in major scholarly research and writing without the assistance of enlightened universities and foundations who are willing to support such endeavours. My thanks must therefore go in the first place to my home university, Yale, which not only provided an intellectual base, scholarly resources, and remarkable, sustaining collegiality but also freed me from time to time for serious research and writing abroad. In that latter regard, the welcome and hospitality I received from academic colleagues and colleges at Cambridge were both moving and essential. Above all, I am indebted to the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, who provided me with assistance and accommodation for
three lengthy stays; without the college’s generosity, I doubt that this book could have been written. I am also obliged to the IDEAS department of the London School of Economics and Political Science, which made me their first Philippe Roman Visiting Professor in 2008, thus allowing me the chance both to teach and to continue my research and writing. The generosity of Roger Hertog permitted me to put all those pieces together.
My colleagues at Yale, above all John Gaddis and Charles Hill, have tolerated my discourses on the nuts and bolts of war for many years now, and permitted me to inflict some of the ideas present in this book upon our co-taught class in grand strategy. The same tolerance and encouragement was shown by the genial Arne Westad and Michael Cox at the London School of Economics. As to the encouragement given by Cambridge scholars and officers, well, I don’t know where to start, and I feel sure I will have missed a name or two: Zara Steiner, Christopher Andrew, David Reynolds, Jonathan Haslam, Richard Drayton (now at London), Adam Tooze (now at Yale), and Brendan Sims all made me think and think again. Allan Packwood at the Churchill College Archive was an immense help. At St. John’s College, two successive masters, Richard Perham and Christopher Dobson, along with presidents Jane Heal and Mark Nicholls and, perhaps especially, that naval connoisseur cum domestic bursar John Harris, were always supportive.