Dimensions
162 x 240 x 41mm
n 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 achieve 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. What was ordained at Casablanca had really come about. This book attempts to explain how and why.'
The history of the Second World War is often told as a grand narrative, as if fought by supermen or decided by fate. The focus of this book, by contrast, is not upon the commanders who directed the Allies military forces, nor for the most part on the soldiers on the ground, but on the problem-solvers, the men in the middle who actually worked out how to achieve these objectives in practice - 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'. Kennedy examines how the work of these remarkable individuals surfaced, was cultivated, and then connected to the problems at hand. The result is a fresh perspective on the most studied, as well as the greatest, conflict in human history, which encourages us to think again about why it took the course that it did.
