Posted on 11/09/2013 1:06:18 PM PST by frankenMonkey
Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy (Jan 29, 2013)
From a review
This is a very good book, but not the book the title suggests. The title suggests that the book focusses on the engineering achievements that contributed to winning WWII, whereas in fact, the book is actually a history of the strategies that won the war. Whoever created the title deserves a dope-slap. “Engineering” has two meanings, (a) the most common meaning: the development of a device, like engineering a new machine gun; and (b) the less common meaning: a means to achieve an objective, like engineering a way to get Johnnie accepted into the college of his choice. Both meanings of the word contributed mightily to success in WWII, but the book only deals with the “scheme” meaning of the word (it mentions the tremendous contributions of new equipment developed during the war, but does not go into the engineering details thereof; rather, equipment developments are discussed as how they contributed to strategies). Therefore, use of the “engineering” in the title is extremely misleading.
Great book Bush should have taken there advice..
Stay out with ground troops..let them do the fighting,…use special forces and cia small groups of people to help them..they have been fighting for hundreds of years..
In the author’s defense, the title is often changed by the editor at the publishing house.
Looks like an interesting book though. I see he used a lot of secondary histories in his work and not much in the way of primary material.
My life on the Plains by Geo A Custer.
The Indian War of 1864 by Lt Ware
Massacres of the Mountains by J R Dunn Jr.
The Ultra Secret by Winterbotham
We read their codes, they didn’t read ours. Amazing advantage in WWII.
NAM by Mark Baker
http://www.amazon.com/Nam-Vietnam-words-women-fought/dp/068800086X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384043429&sr=1-2&keywords=nam
The Codebreakers by David Kahn
The Spymasters of Israel by Stewart Steven
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
German Secret Weapons of WWII by Hans Luger
(contains a section on the circular planform VTOL aircraft project). Along those lines, “Intercettali Senza Sparare” by Renato Vesco, later titled “Intercept UFO”
and then the rights were picked up by David Childress and it was something like “Nazi UFOs, 50 years of suppression”.
Finally, I can’t find the name of the book I read on the P51 Mustang design effort by North American Aviation.
“A Time For Trumpets’’ was an excellent book.
Volume 3 came out earlier this year.
You should read “Company Commander” by MacDonald too. It is more of his own first hand account and relates directly back to “A Time for Trumpets”.
Toland does a fair job of trying to construct a Japanese perspective of World War II, but I also recommend “Pacific War, 1931-1945” by Saburo Ienaga. Ineaga was a Japanese historian that spent his career fighting his governments attempts to suppress the extent of the atrocities committed by the Japanese Empire.
Don’t forget Grenada.
Apols if posted elsewhere in this thread, but THE finest biography of Patton is: “Patton: Ordeal and Triumph”, by Ladislas Farago. The film drew generously from this book.
Enough here to keep anyone busy for awhile...PING!
The Whiting book “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest” is the one you are thinking of.
I absolutely agree with you on what a disaster the Huertgen Forest battles were. General Courtney Hodges should have, in my opinion, been relieved of his command for continuously sending in individual divisions to be ground up in that forest. When the Germans counter-attacked during the Ardennes Offensive, Hodges was so taken aback by forces cutting through his thin line on that part of the front that he took to his bed. It was his chief of staff, a General William Kean who gave out the initial orders to try and stop the flow of German troops.
Another good book which has a section that covers Huertgen and General Hodges failings there is “Patton’s Peers” by John English.
- The New Dealers' War:
- FDR and the War Within World War II
by Thomas Fleming
- Fire and Fury
- The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945
Randall Hansen
- Freedom's Forge:
- How American Business Produced Victory in World War II
Arthur Herman
Dispatches, by Micheal Herr. This is the real life from where all the memorable scenes came for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, he co wrote the scripts I believe.
The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara's Pulitzer winning Civil War Novel (Gettysburg)
The Good War, Studs Terkle, the underside of WWII.
Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, by Anthony Sutton, the history of what some have suspected.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll get a copy. In the book on the Hurtgen Whiting makes a very prescient point that just as the Army sent infantry into a dense forest at a time of year that was rainy, foggy and cold, and darkness comes at about four in the afternoon, US troops were unable to use their main heavy assets,air cover, artillery and tanks. Something he said the US Army would repeat some twenty years later sending young American infantrymen into the jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam.
I’m working with a lot of the “Facebook” generation, both in-person and online. I want to be able to provide them a resource for an appreciation of our recent military history, without the spin from academia, if possible. Working with them I have found both an ignorance of the subject (not surprising), but more importantly a willingness to learn. My focus is really on the latest conflicts, from 9-11, but covering Vietnam is also wanted.
And thanks to all who have contributed to this thread.
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