Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  22. Murray, Luftwaffe, 60, Table XI. The comparative aircraft production rates are in Overy, Air War, 33.

  23. Murray, Luftwaffe, 60, 10.

  24. Figures from Overy, Air War, 150.

  25. Quotes from Liddell Hart, History, 595–96; see also Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, 1:178.

  26. Webster and Frankland, ibid, 233

  27. A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin, 2006), 596–602, a brilliant, revisionist analysis.

  28. See Hastings, Bomber Command, 246, for the damage statistics; see W. Murray, Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe 1939–1945 (Maxwell, AL: Air University Press, 1983), 169, for Speer and Hitler. Note that this is a different, slightly earlier book than Murray’s Luftwaffe, though it uses a lot of the same data.

  29. See Longmate, The Bombers, ch. 21, “The Biggest Chop Night Ever”; Hastings, Bomber Command, 319, gives the Harris quotes, and on 320 quotes the official history.

  30. R. Weigley, The American Way of Warfare: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973); ch. 14 has his own comments on the USAAF aerial offensives.

  31. W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948–1958), 7 vols., is revealing here: see vol. 2, ch. 9, Arthur B. Ferguson’s “The Casablanca Directive.”

  32. Bendiger, Fall of Fortresses, 232–34. Bendiger’s language here is withering.

  33. These figures come from A. Furse, Wilfrid Freeman: The Genius Behind Allied Survival and Air Supremacy 1939 to 1945 (Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount Press, 1999), 234; they are slightly different in Liddell Hart, History, 603.

  34. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, 2:702–3; the actual description is in chapter 20, “Pointblank,” by Arthur B. Ferguson.

  35. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, 2:706, 705.

  36. Karl Mendelssohn, Science and Western Domination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). The story has been developed in Daniel Headrick’s Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  37. A. Harvey-Bailey, The Merlin in Perspective (Derby, UK: Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust, 1983), is very technical but also important in stressing the key role of Rolls-Royce’s managing director E. W. Hives after Royce’s death. See also H. Glancy, Spitfire: The Biography (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), ch. 1.

  38. Harvey-Bailey, Merlin.

  39. Glancy’s Spitfire is only the most obvious. See also Alfred Price’s The Spitfire Story (London: Arms and Armour, 1995) and Len Deighton’s remarkable Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain (London: Pimlico, 1996).

  40. The Story of the Spitfire, DVD (Pegasus, 2001).

  41. Harvey-Bailey, Merlin, is excellent on the steady enhancement of the engine’s power. The equally impressive efforts by Packard engineers to mass-produce Merlin 61 engines in the U.S.A. is nicely covered in Herman Arthur, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012), 103-105.

  42. See Furse, Wilfrid Freeman.

  43. D. Birch, Rolls-Royce and the Mustang (Derby, UK: Rolls-Royce Historical Trust, 1987), 10; the photo of the original plane is on the same page.

  44. Furse, Wilfrid Freeman, 226–29, presents remarkable detective work.

  45. Paul A. Ludwig, P-51 Mustang: Development of the Long-Range Escort Fighter (Surrey, UK: Ian Allen, 2003), esp. ch. 5, on the resistance of Echols.

  46. Birch, Rolls-Royce and the Mustang reproduces Hitchcock’s letter in full on 37–39; see also 147–48. The quote by the official historians is in Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Services, 4:217–18.

  47. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Services, 3:8.

  48. Lovett’s report, and Arnold’s response, are best covered in Ludwig, P-51 Mustang, 143–45, 148.

  49. For two of them, see Murray, Luftwaffe, and N. Frankland, The Bombing Offensive Against Germany (London: Faber, 1965).

  50. Furse, Wilfrid Freeman, 234–35.

  51. See www.cebudanderson.com/droptanks.html—an unusual source (accessed May 2008), the memoir of Donald W. Marner, a U.S. mechanic serving a Mustang squadron based in Suffolk in 1944–45, whose chief task was to get his hands on enough of them from his RAF buddies. Bendiger also mentions the American fliers’ gratitude for these quaint papier-mâché drop tanks. For confirmation of the immense significance of the drop tanks (especially the paper version) in the air war, see Ludwig, P-51 Mustang, 168–70.

  52. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, vol. 3, ch. 3, on “Big Week”; and Murray, Luftwaffe, 223ff. Ludwig, P-51 Mustang, 204, has comparative figures of P-38, P-47, and P-51 kill ratios. To some degree, then, as G. E. Cross points out, the P-47 Thunderbolts became overshadowed by the Mustangs, rather the way the Hurricanes were overshadowed by the Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, while in reality all four aircraft types played a vital role. See Cross’s Jonah’s Feet Are Dry: The Experience of the 353rd Fighter Group During World War Two (Ipswich, UK: Thunderbolt, 2001).

  53. Furse, Wilfrid Freeman, 239–41.

  54. See Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, 3:63, on air battles doing “more to defeat the Luftwaffe than did the destruction of the aircraft factories.” There is a vast German-language literature, perhaps best summarized in English in the seventh volume of the German official history: Horst Boog et al., The Strategic Air War in Europe, 1943–1944/45, vol. 7 of Germany and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  55. Overy, Why the Allies Won, 152. The figures in the preceding paragraph come from Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won, 324–25. The Kocke anecdote is from E. R. Hooton, Eagle in Flames: The Fall of the Luftwaffe (London: Arms and Armour, 1997), 270–71, also with names of fellow aces killed at that time. (This is a fine, almost intimidating statistical analysis of the air war in Europe.)

  56. Frankland, The Bombing Offensive, 86, offers a really crisp account of how the coming of the American long-range fighters redounded to the secondary advantage of Bomber Command.

  57. Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won, 413. Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, vol. 3, is excellent throughout. See also W. Hays Parks, “ ‘Precision’ and ‘Area’ Bombing: Who Did Which and When?” Journal of Strategic Studies 18, no. 1 (March 1995): 145–74. Also, personal communication of June 30, 2008, to author from Professor Tami Biddle, whose own writings (including Rhetoric and Reality) are compelling scholars into a serious reconsideration of the challenges Harris faced from mid-1942 onward.

  58. Hastings, Bomber Command, 342–43.

  59. J. Scutts, Mustang Aces of the Eighth Air Force (Oxford: Osprey Military Series, 1994), 56–60, on the coming of the Me 262s.

  60. On the diminishing aviation fuel figures, see M. Cooper, The German Air Force, 1933–1945: An Anatomy of Failure (London: Jane’s, 1981), 348–49, 360.

  61. Hastings, Bomber Command, 422–23.

  62. Saward, Victory Denied; Harris, Bomber Offensive.

  63. All these works have been cited above. It will be obvious how much I am indebted to the works of Hastings, Murray, Biddle, and Overy, and how much their conclusions make sense to me. See Hastings, Bomber Command, ch. 14–15; Murray, Luftwaffe, ch. 7–8; Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality, ch. 5 and conclusion; Overy, Why the Allies Won, 149–63. But perhaps the prize goes to Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol. 3, and Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, vol. 3, passim, as models of scholarship, objectivity, and insight.

  64. The calculation about V-rocket costs versus aircraft figures is in Overy, Why the Allies Won, 294. Hitler’s bizarre demands about the Messerschmitt Me 262 are neatly covered in D. Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Luftwaffe Marshall Erhard Milch (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), ch. 21.

  65. The later volumes of Craven and Cate, eds., Army Air Forces, on the Pacific War, are bes
t here, but there is also a great survey in Murray and Millet, A War to Be Won, ch. 17–18.

  66. The infamous 9/11 attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon claimed almost 3,000 lives.

  67. The best obituary of Harker is that of the Times (London) on June 14, 1999, describing him as “the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang.” The obituarist clearly has no idea of the later opposition to the Merlin-Mustang and talks of it as being greeted “like manna in heaven in Washington.” But he gets Harker right, at least.

  CHAPTER THREE: HOW TO STOP A BLITZKRIEG

  1. The quotation is from R. Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 350; the main battle is covered on 359–92. See also S. W. Mitcham, Blitzkrieg No Longer: The German Wehrmacht in Battle, 1943 (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Books, 2010), 66ff.

  2. Vividly described in Atkinson, Army at Dawn, 212–13.

  3. Williamson Murray, German Military Effectiveness (Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing, 1992), esp. ch. 1. B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (London: Cassell’s, 1970), is brief but good on the Polish campaign (ch. 3) and the defeat of France (ch. 7). On how surprising the latter result was, see E. R. May’s great revisionist book, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

  4. See Waugh’s classic Sword of Honour trilogy, especially the middle volume, Officers and Gentlemen, where he graphically describes his fictional “Royal Halbardiers” regiment being routed by the Germans in Greece and Crete. Only the New Zealanders seem to have stood up to the invaders, man for man, but at very severe cost.

  5. E. L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for this thesis, and very much followed in P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), ch. 1.

  6. There are nice, clear details and good maps in Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

  7. T. Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War (Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1981), and, more generally, T. N. Dupuy, A Genius for War: The German Army and the General Staff (Fairfax, VA: Hero Books, 1984). See also the running commentary in R. M. Citino, Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).

  8. See M. Boot’s fine distillation of this offense versus defense spiral in his War Made New (New York: Gotham Books, 2006).

  9. Some fine maps covering this campaign were lovingly put together for Liddell Hart’s History, on 110–11, 282, 292, and 300, but see also the maps in C. Messenger, World War Two: Chronological Atlas (London: Bloomsbury, 1989).

  10. A simple but most useful summary of all the moves in the North African Campaign is accessible in Messenger, World War Two, 46–55, 88–93, 116–23, 134–35.

  11. There is a fine article by L. Ceva, “The North African Campaign 1940–43: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Strategic Studies 13, no. 1 (March 1990): 84–104 (part of a special issue, edited by J. Gooch, called “Decisive Campaigns of the Second World War”), which among other things reminds the reader of the very significant role played by Italian forces in this campaign.

  12. Quoted in The Rommel Papers, ed. B. H. Liddell Hart (London: Collins, 1953), 249. See also Rommel’s amazingly candid letters home to his wife in the surrounding pages. The critical importance of fuel shortages is stressed again and again in B. Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990), ch. 5.

  13. A nice summation of this evolution is S. Bidwell, Gunners at War: A Tactical Study of the Royal Artillery in the Twentieth Century (New York: Arrow Books, 1972).

  14. Liddell Hart, History, 296.

  15. The best (and almost the only) authority here is M. Kroll, The History of Landmines (London: Leo Cooper, 1998). Clearly it is an unappealing topic, even for military historians themselves.

  16. For Hobart’s flail tanks (actually invented by a South African captain, Abraham du Toit), see chapter 4, and the “Mine Flail” article in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_flail. For the mine detector, see “Polish Mine Detector,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_mine_detector (both accessed June 2010).

  17. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Coningham also commanded the tactical air forces in both later major campaigns. On Dawson’s quietly outstanding organizational skills, see Ellis’s approving remarks in Brute Force, 266–67; for the larger story of the RAF in the North African campaign at this time, see D. Richards and H. St. G. Saunders, Royal Air Force 1939–1945 (London: HMSO, 1954), 2:160ff. The earlier, sad tale is in D. I. Hall, Strategy for Victory: The Development of British Tactical Air Power, 1919–1943 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).

  18. All the general World War II books referred to in this volume— H. P. Willmott, The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1989); Messenger, World War Two; W. Murray and A. R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Ellis, Brute Force; J. Keegan, The Second World War (New York: Penguin, 1990); Liddell Hart, History; and so—naturally cover El Alamein and point to the usual aspects: the constrained geographical limits, the importance of supplies, the British superiority in numbers, the importance of minefields and artillery, and the Wehrmacht’s fighting skills. Nothing has emerged in recent writings to change this overall outline.

  19. Mitcham, Blitzkrieg No Longer, ch. 4, is excellent on the Arnim-Rommel tensions.

  20. The second volume of Atkinson’s trilogy (Day of Battle), on the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, offers an excellent analysis, plus an introduction to an enormous body of further literature, such as C. D’Este’s World War Two in the Mediterranean (1942–1945) (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1990). For the casualties claim, see Keegan, Second World War, 368.

  21. T. N. Dupuy, Numbers, Prediction and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles (Fairfax, VA: Hero Books, 1985), has masses of statistics. One doesn’t need to follow the predictive part of this exercise to find the historical statistics interesting.

  22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II), 2nd paragraph—accessed May 2010.

  23. Messenger, World War Two, 63–64; David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995) has many other good maps.

  24. Requoted in Liddell Hart, History, 169.

  25. There are fuller details in the overlapping final chapters of J. Erickson’s The Road to Stalingrad (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975) and the first chapters of the successor volume, The Road to Berlin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983). Really, with Erickson as the master, but so many other Anglo-American historians such as Earl F. Ziemke, the prodigious David M. Glantz, Ian Bellamy, Malcolm MacIntosh, Albert Seaton, and the many excellent German experts on this topic, it is difficult to stop turning the endnote apparatus on the Russo-German War into something larger than the text. For Liddell Hart’s approval of the Stavka-orchestrated advances around the greater Stalingrad area, see History, 481.

  26. R. Forczyk, Erich Von Manstein (Oxford: Osprey Press, 2010), 36–42 (it has good illustrations); Erickson, Road to Berlin, 51ff.

  27. M. K. Barbier, Kursk: The Greatest Tank Battle, 1943 (St. Paul, MN: MBI Publishing, 2002); M. Healy, Kursk 1943 (Oxford: Osprey Press, 1992), for remarkable detail; and Lloyd Clarke, The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011).

  28. A. Nagorski, The Greatest Battle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

  29. Erickson, Road to Stalingrad; Erickson, Road to Berlin. See also the reflections in Citino, “Death of the Wehrmacht,” esp. 14–19.

  30. B. Wegner, “The Road to Defeat: The German Campaigns in Russia, 1941�
�1943,” Journal of Strategic Studies 13, no. 1 (March 1990): 122–23. A most intriguing article.

  31. See J. E. Forster, “The Dynamics of Volksgemeinschaft: The Effectiveness of the German Military Establishment in the Second World War,” in A. Millett and W. Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988), 3:201–2.

  32. P. Carell, Hitler’s War on Russia, trans. Ewald Osers (London: Corgi, 1966), 623. Carell (actually, Paul Karl Schmidt) was an early Nazi and a leading wartime propagandist who managed to escape the Nuremberg dragnet and transform himself into a highly successful writer of military histories—works that were always informative, but with dodgy judgments.

  33. Cited again from Wegner, “The Road to Defeat,” 122–23.

  34. Email communication to author by Mr. Igor Biryukov, June 7, 2010.

  35. The titles give this away: Ellis, Brute Force; Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed; and R. Overy’s fine Russia’s War: Blood upon the Snow (New York: TV Books, 1997).

  36. D. Orgill, T-34: Russian Armor (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), is full of such quotes.

  37. Carell, Hitler’s War, 75–76; see also the fine Wikipedia article “T-34,” http://wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34 (accessed May 2010), with a wonderful bibliography.

  38. The Mellethin, von Kleist, and Guderian quotations come from Orgill, T-34. The amazing postwar sales of the T-34 across the globe are detailed in the Wikipedia article “T-34.”

  39. Albeit in a backhanded way, by describing the post-1942 improvements; see Orgill, T-34, 73ff.

  40. “T-34,” Wikipedia.

  41. Mary R. Habeck, Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), has many interesting comments on the mutual “borrowings” of various of the interwar armored services. See also “J. Walker Christie,” Wikipedia, http://wikipedia.org/Wiki/J._Walter_Christie (accessed May 2011).

  42. Brief details in Orgill, T-34.

  43. M. Bariatinsky, “Srednii Tank T-34-85,” Istoria Sozdania (accessed May 26, 2011, from http://www.cardarmy.ru/armor/articles/t3485.htm). I am grateful to Professor Jonathan Haslam (Cambridge) for drawing my attention to this source.