Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II [Paperback]

Geoffrey Perret (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 10, 1993

A behind-the-scenes look at the heroism of American fighter pilots during World War II chronicles the drama of the great aerial campaigns. By the author of A Country Made by War. 12,500 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With verve and elan, Perret ( There's a War to Be Won ) presents the epic narrative of American air power in the Second World War. On one level, he chronicles the work of energetic, single-minded military men--Henry "Hap" Arnold, Carl Spaatz, George Kenney and Curtis LeMay--with powerful civilians such as Robert Lovett (clarifying his role in linking the aviation industry with the Army Air Corps) and industrialist Donald Douglas, manufacturer of some of the warplanes that made up the great U.S. air armada. The book also covers wartime research & development: the evolution of engines, armament, armor plating, fuel tanks, gun sights, bomb sights and, above all, the testing and operational deployment of American warplanes. These planes included the P-38, P-39, P-40, P-47 and P-51 fighters and the B-17, B-24, B-25 and B-29 bombers. Each plane was distinctive in capability and characteristics, and Perret defines the differences in detail. Finally, his book offers vivid personal accounts by former pilots, bombadiers and turret gunners that convey the exhilaration and terror of aerial combat. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Perret's There's a War to be Won, to be Won (1991) examined the role of US Army ground troops in WW II. Here, the author focuses on the part played by the Army Air Forces in the same conflict, and also covers how WW I's fledgling Army Signal Corps air service evolved into the world's mightiest air force. But despite its exultant title, Perret's chronicle is one not only of a hard-won triumph but also of errors and terrors; of political battles for turf between and within the military services; of leaders with heads in the clouds and feet of clay; of American aircraft often inferior than that flown by our enemies; and of the heroism of--and sometimes horrifying price paid by--the bomber and fighter crews who had to fly through hell and back in order to attack their targets. Both a valuable military history, then, as well as a notable contribution to the long-running debate over the ability of air power alone to achieve national objectives. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 95 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (August 10, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679404643
• ISBN-13: 978-0679404644
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,493,032 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing after "There's a War to be Won", August 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II (Paperback)

Geoffery Perret has given us some near classical one volume histories on US military history in the past {War to be won...A Country made by War}. Yet here he stumbles, not fatally but certainly critically. His previous works have shown a novelists smooth touch with the unsparing eye of a serious evidence driven historian. But here, the tale of the nurturing, birth and colossal growth of the USAAF in WW2 fails to evolve on his canvas as crisply as his previous works. The overriding obsession with Hap Arnold shown here should have left me with a clearer idea of who the man was and what made him tick. Yet I am still largely in the dark about the man, and in spite of his passion, I am still not quite sure how to frame his herculean efforts on the part of the AAF. Also, the brisk but detailed style of "There's a war to be won" is missing here. In that book we were able to effortlessly leap between the development of equipment, doctrines and training programs to the battlefields where all the above were tested by blood and fire, and often had to be improvised over. In "Winged Victory" however, I found myself bogged down in top heavy dissertations on personality conflicts and technical aero-babble that ill suits a one volume history. All in all, the book has some chapters useful for quick referencing and tidy summations, but as a one volume history, falls well short of what Perret has given us in the past.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyed it, but not quite there., December 9, 1999

By 

Fred Waltman - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II (Paperback)

I've just finished re-reading Winged Victory. I enjoyed it, but I would have liked it better if had more focus. It had some technology, (not enough for me -- I'm a gadget person) but probably too much for people who aren't looking for that. As for the people side, I didn't really feel I came away knowing the players (as I have with Perrett's other books). Some coverage of the politcal goings on, but I wanted more. At times the book seemed to drag with recitations of 'so many sorties, so many shot down one day, more sorties, more planes lost the next.'

But I don't mean to be so negative -- I did enjoy the book (and am re-reading it) and can recommend the paperback version to anybody with an interest in the subject. Mr Perrett does write very well.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Going about it wrong and winning anyway, March 16, 2009

By 

Harry Eagar (Maui) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II (Paperback)

It's an ambitious project to tell the history of the Army Air Forces in World War II in one volume, but Geoffrey Perret goes beyond that, and he`s up to it.

He begins with a capsule history of Army aviation from the start. If you're looking for shoot-'em-up whoop-de-do, go elsewhere. Perret is primarily an institutional historian and nearly half the book is done before a shot is fired.

Something has to give, and it's logistics. Within the compass of fewer than 500 pages, Perret does a fine job on leaders, tactics, planes (but not other types of equipment, such as weapons, communications and navigation); and a reasonable job on politics (home and foreign), recruitment and training. Strategy is another matter, which I'll get to later. I would not have thought you could write a history of the AAF without mentioning Takoradi, but Perret has done it.

To a great but not overwhelming degree, this is the story of Hap Arnold's Army Air Forces. Arnold had many flaws, such as limiting his pool of commanders to a few, sometimes not very good mates from his younger days, but overall Perret is an admirer.

He says he cannot imagine anyone else commanding the air force, no one else standing up to George Marshall of the ground forces or Ernest King of the navy. Well, as the French say, the graveyards are full of indispensable men. But Perret is probably right that Tooey Spaatz, the most likely replacement, would not have done well. Spaatz had a good deal of the idiot in him, claiming as late as 1943 that by maintaining 36 sorties per day by heavy bombers he could control enemy shipping in the Mediterranean.

(Perret acknowledges that some people at the time thought Frank Andrews would have excelled Arnold, but Andrews was killed in a crash. Indispensable men again.)

Spaatz and his fantasies about heavy bombing is as good an example as any of the hidebound, stupid, blinkered ideology that cost so many Americans their lives -- Germans, Japanese and assorted would-be bystanders as well, of course. There are many such.

Arnold was as guilty of this incompetence as anyone. Since the first heavier-than-air plane went up, the flyers have been promising that strategic bombing would win wars quickly and cheaply. The idiocy of this as ideology ought to be transparent, but apparently it isn't: If each side has a strategic bomber force, who wins?

These promises have never been fulfilled, although they continue to be made in 2009.

Perret is, with one important exception, clear about this. "The tenor of this book is a skeptical one," he writes on the last page, "questioning the official Air Force view of the success of strategic bombing, criticizing the Air Force's highest leadership, and casting doubt on the official history of the AAF."

The key point that Perret is insufficiently skeptical about is the ur-sin, the mistake that begat most of the other mistakes: Billy Mitchell. Perret does not have a profound understanding of sea power, and while he is somewhat disparaging of Mitchell's performance in the famous trials of bombing obsolete battleships, he never clearly states what was nearly obvious then and was proven by events: Bombing of the kind that Mitchell preached (dropping bombs from heights at high speeds on moving ships) is useless. In the entire history of warfare, such bombing has never sunk, damaged or even inconvenienced a battleship steaming in open waters on a war footing. (The qualifiers are necessary because radio-guided bombing sank, for example, the Italian battleship Roma, but she was not on a war footing and was undefended.)

Other kinds of aerial attack can succeed, but Mitchell was wrong from start to finish. Yet it was Mitchellism that prevailed and caused the United States to devote the vast majority of its air efforts to strategic bombers.

These not only could not win the war, there is some question whether they didn't cost the Americans more than they cost the enemy -- until, in a profound irony, at the very end strategic bombing of a sort never imagined before did end the war.

Without strategic bombers, the A-bombs could not have been dropped. The two A-bombs saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. The mistakes up to then had cost hundreds of thousands of casualties. (Astonishingly, there is not a chart or table in the book, and no summary of casualties.) It would be a nice calculation to figure out the net advantage. It's been done for the Marine casualties at Iwo Jima vs. the Air Force casualties avoided by having Iwo as a base (the Marines come up on the short end of the balance), but not, so far as I know, for strategic bombing as a whole.

Despite the gaps and a few errors (such as having the Doolittle Raiders fly off the Enterprise instead of the Hornet -- goofs that ought to have been corrected by the time of the paperback edition, except that American publishers don't bother to correct their books any more), "Winged Victory" is about as good a short history of a long war as we are likely to get.