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mburnamfink 's review for:
Engineers of Victory is an immensely frustrating book. Brilliantly conceived and written by an author who is obviously a talent, it nonetheless fails to address to its thesis or contribute to scholarship.
Kennedy's thesis is that WW2 was won in those critical months between the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 and early 1944. More specifically, it was won by "Organizers", men at the middle levels of the military, government, and vital industries who invented new weapons systems, sent them into the field, and used them to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan. He takes as his case studies the Battle of the Atlantic, strategic bombing in Europe, the rollback of Blitzkrieg on the Eastern Front, the amphibious assaults in the Mediterranean and at Normandy, and the logistical and naval victory in the Pacific. There's nothing to argue with there: Clearly something did happen between the dark days of the early war and the triumphant conquests of 1945, and looking at the causal factors as a matter of organization, rather than the psychology of great men (FDR, Eisenhower, and Churchill. Always Churchill) or the superiority of a certain weapon over a comparable model (M4 Sherman vs Panther vs T-34, Go!) is an neat take. After all, it's like Napoleon (supposedly) said: "Amateurs study strategy. Professionals study logistics" (and procurement, and maintenance, and training...).
All the pieces of a really interesting story are there, but Kennedy fails to connect them, or even bring in his anonymous organizers. For a book that alleges to valorize the unsung heroes in the middle, it mentions shockingly few of them. For example, the Battle of the Atlantic would be a great place to talk about Alfred Loomis of the MIT Radiation Laboratory and centimeter radar, or Patrick Blackett's work on operational research in anti-air and anti-sub warfare, along with strategic bombing. Blackett gets one mention in the context of the Casablanca Conference (Roosevelt and Churchill again), and the MIT Radiation Lab isn't mentioned at all.
Omission of vital details are constant. It seems like wherever there's a chance to dive deeply into a topic, and the men and women who organized the Allied victory, the book bounces off and away into a digression of something that we've heard 100 times before on a History Channel documentary. This is a popular book and I don't expect heavy theory, but a passing mention of the literature on organization or innovation would be nice, or perhaps positing this book as a vindication of Robert Merton's sociology of science, and its position that only liberal democracies could take full advantage of science and technology. I'm not even an expert on WW2, and I feel like I could put together a more insightful book on the subject talking about radar-assisted naval gunfire, logistics in distant theaters, and special operations missions as starting points, and then blending in some STS and strategic theory. I expect a history of this caliber to offer a deep dive into new material, or a broad synthesis of exist evidence in favor of some novel insight, or at least to satisfactorily meet its thesis, and Engineers of Victory does none of that. It's downright embarrassing.
Kennedy's thesis is that WW2 was won in those critical months between the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 and early 1944. More specifically, it was won by "Organizers", men at the middle levels of the military, government, and vital industries who invented new weapons systems, sent them into the field, and used them to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan. He takes as his case studies the Battle of the Atlantic, strategic bombing in Europe, the rollback of Blitzkrieg on the Eastern Front, the amphibious assaults in the Mediterranean and at Normandy, and the logistical and naval victory in the Pacific. There's nothing to argue with there: Clearly something did happen between the dark days of the early war and the triumphant conquests of 1945, and looking at the causal factors as a matter of organization, rather than the psychology of great men (FDR, Eisenhower, and Churchill. Always Churchill) or the superiority of a certain weapon over a comparable model (M4 Sherman vs Panther vs T-34, Go!) is an neat take. After all, it's like Napoleon (supposedly) said: "Amateurs study strategy. Professionals study logistics" (and procurement, and maintenance, and training...).
All the pieces of a really interesting story are there, but Kennedy fails to connect them, or even bring in his anonymous organizers. For a book that alleges to valorize the unsung heroes in the middle, it mentions shockingly few of them. For example, the Battle of the Atlantic would be a great place to talk about Alfred Loomis of the MIT Radiation Laboratory and centimeter radar, or Patrick Blackett's work on operational research in anti-air and anti-sub warfare, along with strategic bombing. Blackett gets one mention in the context of the Casablanca Conference (Roosevelt and Churchill again), and the MIT Radiation Lab isn't mentioned at all.
Omission of vital details are constant. It seems like wherever there's a chance to dive deeply into a topic, and the men and women who organized the Allied victory, the book bounces off and away into a digression of something that we've heard 100 times before on a History Channel documentary. This is a popular book and I don't expect heavy theory, but a passing mention of the literature on organization or innovation would be nice, or perhaps positing this book as a vindication of Robert Merton's sociology of science, and its position that only liberal democracies could take full advantage of science and technology. I'm not even an expert on WW2, and I feel like I could put together a more insightful book on the subject talking about radar-assisted naval gunfire, logistics in distant theaters, and special operations missions as starting points, and then blending in some STS and strategic theory. I expect a history of this caliber to offer a deep dive into new material, or a broad synthesis of exist evidence in favor of some novel insight, or at least to satisfactorily meet its thesis, and Engineers of Victory does none of that. It's downright embarrassing.