Book description
From Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers, one of the most acclaimed history books of recent decades,
Engineers of Victory is a new account of how the tide was
turned against the Nazis by the Allies in the Second World War.
In January 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt and the Combined Chiefs of
Staff met in Casablanca to review the western Allies' war aims
and strategy. They realised that to attain their ultimate aim of
'unconditional surrender' they would have to achieve some formidable
objectives - win control of the Atlantic sea-lanes and command of the
air over the whole of West-Central Europe, work out how to land on an
enemy-held shore so that Continental Europe could be retaken, how to
blunt the Nazi blitzkrieg that a successful invasion would
undoubtedly provoke, and finally how to 'hop' across the islands of
the Pacific to assault the Japanese mainland. Eighteen months later
on, as Paul Kennedy writes, 'these operational aims were either
accomplished or close to being so.'
The history of the Second World War is often told as a grand
narrative. The focus of this book, by contrast, is on the
problem-solvers - Major-General Perry Hobart, who invented the 'funny
tanks' which flattened the curve on the D-Day beaches; Flight
Lieutenant Ronnie Harker 'the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang';
Captain 'Johnny' Walker, the convoy captain who worked out how to sink
U-boats with a 'creeping barrage'. The result is a fresh perspective
on the greatest, conflict in human history.
Paul Kennedy is one of the world's best-selling and most influential
historians. He is the author or editor of nineteen books,
including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which has been
translated into over twenty languages, Preparing for the
Twenty-First Century, The Parliament of Man and the now
classic Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery.
Paul Kennedy is one of the world's best-selling and most influential
historians. Born and bought up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he took his
doctorate in Oxford and began work shortly afterwards for the first
great historian of the Second World War, Sir Basil Liddell Hart. He now
teaches at Yale, and is the author or
editor of nineteen books, including
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
, which has been translated into over twenty languages,
Preparing for
the Twenty-First Century
,
The Parliament of Man
and the now classic
Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery
.
