by Aaron Danis, 15 August 2024
Engineers of Victory (2013) is a misleading title. The author, Paul Kennedy of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988) fame, is not looking strictly at technical engineers and their impact on winning World War II (although some are present in the book), but instead is highlighting the problem solvers who led the Allies to victory. These problem solvers were often unknown mid-level leaders and managers who solved technical, tactical, and operational problems to defeat the Axis.
I bought the book used as part of a multi-book purchase and thought the former when I glanced the cover: that the book focused on how Allied engineers ended up “out engineering” their Axis counterparts. I was wrong, and somewhat disappointed, but the book has an interesting thesis nonetheless. (I am not an engineer but had them as classmates in college.)
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This is not a full review of the book; you can read the New York Times or other review publications from 2013 for that. I am going to discuss its relevancy to wargamers. In that regard, Kennedy’s thesis focuses on the 5 problems he claims the Allies needed to solve to defeat the Axis:
- How to get convoys safely across the Atlantic
- How to win command of the air
- How to stop a (German) blitzkrieg
- How to seize an enemy-held shore
- How to defeat the tyranny of distance (in the Pacific)
In wargame design, designers (and perceptive players) often look for the key forces, factors, and events on which conflicts hinge, and a lot of ink has been spilled on World War II in this regard. Allied material superiority from the Arsenal of Democracy, German tactical and alleged technical prowess (which proved to be a chimera; the Germans were lucky they were defeated before they got nuked), the seemingly endless Russian hordes, and Japanese fighting spirit have all been examined endlessly. With his 5 discrete Allied operational/tactical problems listed above, Kennedy gets to what he believes is the crux of what was needed for victory.
To solve these 5 problems, the Allies required both technological innovation and tactical evolution.
To solve these 5 problems, the Allies required both technological innovation (the hedgehog anti-submarine weapon, centimetric radar, drop tanks for fighter escorts and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine for the P-51 Mustang) and tactical evolution (the massive use of mines to blunt German spearheads in the North Africa desert and Russian front, covered by better anti-tank guns and massive artillery barrages, and the trial and error of the Dieppe raid and Torch and Sicily/Italy landings to prep for D-Day). The tyranny of distance in the Pacific was solved by U.S. logistical innovation, extensive base building (by the critical Seabee construction battalions), the destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet by an unleashed U.S. submarine force armed with better torpedoes, and complete domination of the air after 1943 using a concentrated carrier force armed with the flying beast known as the F6F Hellcat, which made the Japanese Zero obsolete overnight. There is more, but you get the point.
Kennedy’s thesis is a strong one, although he devalues other factors like intelligence. He claims, with some justification, that there were more intelligence failures than successes during the war. He concedes that Allied intelligence ultimately proved to be better than that of the Axis, but it is hard to prove that this advantage helped shorten the war, or by how much. Good intelligence was often ignored, replaced by the bad assumptions of senior leaders who were confident in their own flawed judgement. That ended up being more of a problem for autocratic leaders like Hitler and Stalin than the democracies, but the Western Allies also had their head-slapping moments.
A major failure of Kennedy’s book is the complete absence of any discussion of the impact of the British Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), which fused intelligence and detection programs with tactical wargaming to defeat the U-Boat threat to merchant convoys in the Atlantic and elsewhere. His book was published in 2013, and the role of the WATU, while known, was not given more popularized credit until after 20161 . Ultimately, he should have found what had been published during research, and he missed it. It was a crucial and successful fusion of wargaming, operational intelligence, and new counter – U-Boat weapons and tactics.
Designers of strategic World War II wargames would do well to look at Kennedy’s five factors and do their best to integrate them into Allied game play and strategy. This can be done most easily through the use of cards that provide these capabilities over time. Some Card Driven Games (CDGs) that simulate wars covering years will switch out decks or add new cards that have new capabilities, events, and leaders as the game progresses. GMT’s Twilight Struggle and Compass Games’ The Lamps are Going Out come to mind. The same can be done with the Axis, as Kennedy’s book points out where the Axis failed to effectively evolve in response to the Allies’ progress, either by their own omission or lack of resources.
While this is not a “must have” book, it is worth a read if you can get it used or through the library.
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Footnotes
- See Paul Edward Strong, Wargaming the Atlantic War: Captain Gilbert Roberts and the Wrens of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, Paper for MORS Wargaming Special Meeting October 2017 – Working Group 2 (Utility of Wargaming), December 10th, 2017, and Simon Parkin, A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II, Little, Brown and Company, January 28, 2020.
