I am finding myself regretting the recent demise of Michigan War Studies Review (MiWSR). I gather that perhaps the editor has decided to fully retire. Before said presumed decision, I had volunteered to review for MiWSR a recent and compelling book, by a former colleague at George Mason University, by the title “Churchill’s American Arsenal”. Lest I lose that to the ether, I provide it here.
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Book review: Churchill’s American Arsenal: the Partnership Behind the Innovations that Won World War Two
Larrie D. Ferreiro, Oxford University Press, October 2022
As a young naval gunnery officer in the 1990s, I wondered why my proximity-fuzed anti-aircraft shells were called “variably timed,” or VT. It was technically accurate, but in meaning unclear. Indeed, I learned, it was intentionally unclear. When the technology was developed in Britain during the Second World War, the obfuscating name was chosen to discourage German understanding of the underlying technology. “VT” became the cover name in both the United Kingdom and the United States.
So explains Larrie D. Ferreiro (page 265) in Churchill’s American Arsenal: the Partnership Behind the Innovations that Won World War Two (Oxford University Press, October 2022). As the publisher highlights on the book jacket, many iconic “American” inventions of the time, including the proximity fuze, P-51 fighter, Liberty ship, Landing Ship Tank (LST), and Sherman tank “all began as British projects, brought to fruition by American scientific expertise and industrial capacity.” Penicillin did too, which made Anglo-American cooperation “not only the arsenal but also the pharmacy of democracy” (page 280). From industrial events well before Pearl Harbor, through Churchill’s legendarily personal involvement, to the emergence of postwar enthusiasm for government-funded scientific research, Ferreiro traces intriguing stories of contemporary relevance.
As author, he is well-qualified to comment. An American, he undertook his doctorate in the history of science and technology from Imperial College London, and later became a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He currently serves as director of research at the Defense Acquisition University and as an adjunct professor of history at George Mason University, both in Virginia. He previously served a long prior career as a naval architect—though the book is not overly naval.
Rather, the book describes the development of a wide range of solutions to battlefield problems during World War Two, with particular emphasis on the transatlantic cooperation that brought them to fruition, and the British and American teams that effected that success. The work serves to recount and analyze the bilateral relationship at multiple levels of political and technical leadership and execution. Ferreiro’s occasional details about the exigencies of air and sea travel in the 1940s help reveal some of the merely logistical challenges.
There were differences of opinion, and political challenges too. The British and the Americans had, at times, different views of the potentials for certain technologies. They certainly had different interests in the war, at least in the long run. The challenges of managing intellectual property may have been yet more daunting, but the book describes how decisive action and common sense resolved or just bulldozed certain problems. In 1940, needing to power those soon-to-be-developed P-51s, newly-installed Minister of Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook used his “near-dictatorial powers” to establish a second source for their engines across the Atlantic:
On May 28, while British forces at Dunkirk were being evacuated, he telephoned Arthur Sidgreaves, the head of Rolls-Royce, with instructions to pack up a complete set of blueprints and specifications for the Merlin 61 engine and await a special train, whose crew would pick them up. Beaverbrook would not give further details, saying only that the blueprints were going to the United States. He had decided that the entire engine, not just its parts, was going to be built there, without even a production license from Rolls-Royce. Other company executives were justifiably concerned at the one-sidedness of the deal with the Americans, but Sidgreaves brushed them off. “If their having the drawings would enable us to win the war, we would willingly give them without any claim. If we lose the war, it certainly won’t matter about the drawings.” (p. 104)
The book is logically structured into chapters and sections with varying focus: partly chronological; and partly on the domains and locations of conflict—air and sea, beaches and cities. Through these stories, Ferreiro argues how much of the wartime success came from combining what Bennett Archambault, head of the London branch of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, called British science and American engineering. Fairly, there was lots of American science too, particularly in the Manhattan Project. The evidence weaved into the recounting shows a broad use of secondary sources, and impressive attention to primary records and personal accounts from the war.
All this makes for an intriguing “history of the middle”, as Paul Kennedy described his own book, Engineers of Victory: the Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (Penguin Random House, 2013). Overlapping in some content but hardly redundant, Ferreiro’s book offers another such look at the work of scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, and business managers—pivotal players in the middle of the industrial and technical networks and hierarchies that made for military success. We need more such histories, and more such people. This book is of great value to strategists and policymakers, both technical and industrial, and most notably those concerned with wartime, transnational armaments development. It will be useful to academics as a reference. While it breaks little new ground, it provides some excellent reminders. De Gaulle’s line immediately after Pearl Harbor—“well, the war is finished”—should serve as a warning to tyrants today that “nothing can stand up to the power of American industry’ (p. 70).
I could complain that this is a book about history and engineering, and that some of the analyses do not thoroughly consider the economics of the problems, on either a macro- or micro-scale. Then again, already exceeding 400 pages with its notes, the book could not be all things to all readers (especially political economists). I might also complain that Churchill’s American Arsenal sometimes made for slow-going reading. I had some trouble keeping track of which impressive scientific volunteers, with names like Vannever Bush and Henry Tizard, discussed which technology at which fancy club in Washington DC on which day in 1940. On reflection, those details were enlightening, and a little inspiring. Upon reading about such a meeting at the Cosmos Club (page 62), one can imagine oneself dealing with a future crisis in a future meeting at the Cosmos Club.
The problems, solutions, and venues are all still there: I was indeed satisfied to remember that my first lunch at Cosmos Club, in 2018, was to discuss industrial mobilization. And that shows why this book is timely. As Ukraine defends all of Europe against Russia, many of its problems are just old problems new again. Iranian Shaheds fly much slower than did German V-1s, and impact with much less blast, though much greater accuracy. By the end of the launchings in 1945, RAF Fighter Command and Army Anti-Aircraft Command were downing over 90 percent of the German missiles (pages 266–269). That is comparable to Ukrainian performance today, though on considerably lesser resources.
This begs an intriguing question: can we do this again? What Ukrainians design, from battlefield experience and technical excellence, can Americans build? In some circumstances today, can Americans best build what others design? Maybe—if American bureaucracy can avoid mucking it up. Moreover, some industrial limitations have persisted for almost a century. Ferreiro reminds us that at the beginning of the war, American cargo ships cost three times what comparable British ships cost (p. 159). American shipbuilding is still about that cost-effective, but other sectors are world-leading.
That term VT would stick past the Cold War. Ferreiro’s book is a reminder that more trenchant parts of the wartime experience should as well. In his closing line, he extols a liberal internationalist virtue as practical reality: “what makes America exceptional today is what helped it win World War Two: its ability to adopt and adapt the best ideas from its allies across the world, and make them its own” (p. 317).
— James Hasik