Engineers of victory

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.