by Paul Kennedy
The final point that emerges from this investigation of how the war was won concerns the tricky, perhaps intangible issue of what might be termed the “culture of encouragement,” or the culture of innovation. All of these massive and orchestrated war machines—in Britain, the United States, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—naturally strove both to defend their own positions and to advance in order to defeat their enemies. That is a truism. The more interesting question, for this book, has been the how question: how did some of these politico-military systems do it more effectively than others? A good portion of the answer has to be that the 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.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF HISTORY: ALLIED POSITIONAL ASSETS IN WORLD WAR II
The 1937/1939–1945 global conflict was the World War of all History to date. Apart from the Russo-German land war, victory depended upon control of certain key maritime routes and of the ports that held the navies and aircraft that controlled the waters. While the British Empire and the United States had massive advantages here, both the Germans and Japanese were in a much weaker geopolitical situation. The map above highlights the most significant of the Allied naval bases during the war.
Of course the men at the top made a difference. The individual leaders, or individual leaderships, revealed very marked alterations in style. Here the Japanese were the worst. With a god-leader kept from serious strategic decision making and authority devolved to the army and the navy, both of those services (once Yamamoto had been shot down in April 1943) displayed a rigidity and old-boys-solidarity that could in no way handle the imaginative American counterattacks that were unfolding across the Pacific. Hitler and Stalin were, as many historians have pointed out, very similar in their obsessions about control, with the critical difference that Stalin began to relax his iron grasp once he understood that he had a team of first-class generals working for him, whereas Hitler became ever more megalomaniacal and paranoid, giving his experienced generals in the field little room for operational maneuver.14 Generally, the further the distance a commander was from OKW—Guderian along the Seine, Rommel in the desert, Kesselring in southern Italy—the freer he was to exercise his own undoubted battlefront skills.
Roosevelt and Churchill were equally different. The president appears to have had such unshakeable faith in America’s power that he rarely interfered regarding either appointments or operational planning. Once the U.S. military leadership had been shaken out at the entry into war, he placed enormous faith in Arnold (air force), King (navy), and especially Marshall (army) to do the right thing, with his own trusted Admiral Leahy acting as titular head of the Joint Chiefs. The navy always had a special place in Roosevelt’s affections, and his appointment of Ben Moreell to lead the new Seabees was a brilliant stroke. But otherwise FDR does not seem to have played an active or interfering role in service appointments. Why not let George Marshall do the tough job of clearing out unsuccessful generals at the beginning of the fighting, after the Kasserine Pass, and in the midst of the Anzio falterings?
It would have been temperamentally impossible for the prime minister to exercise that sort of hands-off approach—his personal notepaper was famously headed “Action This Day!” and it was with difficulty (including, finally, intervention by the king) that he was prevented from going off to the Normandy beaches on D-Day itself. At times—and there were many of those, including Norway, Dakar, and naval operations off Crete and Singapore—he drove Alanbrooke and the other British chiefs very close to desperation and resignation. And he certainly replaced a lot of generals in his search for effective battlefront leadership. Yet even the dyspeptic Alanbrooke frequently admitted that the prime minister’s imagination, drive, and rhetoric were indispensable to the war effort.
There was another level of this worldwide conflict in which Churchill’s enthusiasms and encouragements were invaluable: in recognizing talent, initiative, and, frankly, unorthodoxy in people and giving them a chance to prove themselves. His reproof about neglecting Major General Percy Hobart’s talents because he “excited controversy” was quoted in chapter 4, and indeed it is not easy to see how Hobart could have gotten his weird tank notions turned into an entire armored division in the conservative British Army without the prime minister. It was Churchill who pulled Admiral Ramsay out of retirement to lead the empire’s amphibious planning, who sent Orde Wingate to Burma to create the special-ops Chindits, and who arranged for the return of Sir Wilfrid Freeman to administer aircraft design and production at the Air Ministry. Who else but the prime minister, after witnessing in person the Dodgers and Wheezers’ successful experiments with their forward-firing Hedgehogs, would have sent the First Sea Lord by early the next morning an instruction that resources be made available for this new weapon? That list could go on, but the plain fact is that there probably was never another war leader with his talent-spotting skills and his capacity to inspire and encourage. The man was sui generis, but the lesson he leaves with us is not: that without bold and worthy leadership, a large enterprise is likely to falter.
Yet there is more to this concept of a “culture of encouragement” than the personal tastes and whims of powerful leaders. The post-1919 U.S. Marine Corps, though much diminished in resources, was given enough freedom to develop its ideas on advanced naval bases in Micronesia. Stalin’s tank (Koshkin) and aircraft (Yakovlev) designers, although terrified of the “boss,” knew they would be supported if they were developing weapons that could kill lots of Germans—and thus got lots of resources. Someone in the RAF weapons development system was able to call Ronnie Harker down from Rolls-Royce in Derby to Duxford in April 1942 to test and report on the P-51 fighter; someone at Rolls-Royce knew how to reach Sir Wilfrid Freeman at the Air Ministry and get wheels turning. And a fighter commander such as Donald Blakeslee knew he could go to his air force superior, General Doolittle, and Doolittle in his turn knew he could go to Arnold and Lovett and get a faulty USAAF policy regarding the Mustang fighter’s fate changed, to massive effect. Two young postdocs at the University of Birmingham were encouraged to figure out the problem of building a miniaturized radar set that did not collapse under the sheer energy of its pulsing beam, and when they did it, they were not turned back. After that, first their professor and then Whitehall, Tizard, Vannevar Bush, Bell Labs, and MIT took it further. Finally, this new technology helped to sink large numbers of U-boats. This wasn’t a fluke; it was the result of a superior system.
But it had to start somewhere. And that somewhere was a space, a military-political culture, that allowed problem solving to go ahead. For reasons still unfathomable, Japan seems to have failed miserably on this scorecard: its impressive weapons systems such as the Zero fighter, Akagi-type carriers, and Yamato-class battleships were all essentially creations and designs of the late 1930s, and then the nation’s innovative capacities appear to have faded. There were no latter-day equivalents to the Lancasters, the Mustangs, Walker’s terrifying anti-U-boat squadrons, miniaturized radar, or decrypting machines, let alone the atomic bomb. The Third Reich went a different way, converting Germany’s pre-Nazi technological strengths into “superweapons” such as the V-1 and V-2 rockets, the jet fighter, and the schnorkel U-boat; but none of those stupendous instruments could be effective in the war because Germany had already conceded command of the sea and then command of the air. Nobody in Nazi Germany—no midlevel organization, not even Speer himself—had worked out the problem that the new superefficient submarines being assembled in Bremen would not go to sea if their diesel engines could not be transported in safety from the Ruhr because Allied bombers had blasted all the rail lines.
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 clev
erness, 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.16
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.17 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.”18 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.