Pun Salad

Not quite what I expected. I was expecting from the title that there would be more stuff about … y'know, engineers. But instead…

The author, Paul M. Kennedy, looks at the specific "problems" that the Allies faced in World War II in order to achieve their eventual victory. Conveniently organized into chapters: "How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic"; "How to Win Command of the Air"; "How to Stop a Blitzkrieg"; "How to Seize an Enemy-Held Shore"; and "How to Defeat the 'Tyranny of Distance'". Each had its unique challenges, and each (indeed) was "problematic" in the early days of the war. For example, victory against Germany absolutely required that hundreds of thousands of men and massive supplies of food and weaponry be reliably supplied to Britain across the pond. But German U-Boats had dismaying amounts of success at sinking merchant ships, sometimes just off American shores. New anti-submarine warfare tactics had to be developed. And (yes) some technology was involved; for example, the cavity magnetron, invented just in time to make small radar sets practical enough to be installed in sub-hunting airplanes. Within a few years, it was pretty miserable to be a U-Boat crewman.

Kennedy's approach to "engineering" is broad, including more than gadgetry. It's a holistic approach: innovation and flexibility was required in developing new strategies, tactics, and logistics in addition to having workable and effective weaponry in place to defeat the baddies. There are a lot of good stories along the way. For example, Stewart Blacker, inventor of the Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar; he got his start as a "schoolboy in Bedford", designing a mortar that sent a projectile (a croquet ball) 300 yards into a tempting target (his school's headmaster's greenhouse).

Other technical innovations spelled doom for the Germans and Japanese. Putting a Rolls-Royce "Merlin" engine into a P-51 fuselage, replacing the original Allison engine, turned the plane from a dud to a stud. Redesign of the Soviet T-34 tank made it incredibly effective against Germany. The Seabees, whose motto was (and is) "We Build, We Fight." The B-29. And more.

So, a pretty good read, although Kennedy's discussion gets bogged down in plain old history at times.