Customer Reviews

Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

After reading some of the reviews of this book, I would have assumed it wasn't really that good. However, I have read it from cover-to-cover, and very familiar with the air battles of WWII, and have NOT read any of his other books.

First of all, I'll deal with the last item. I have not read any of the author's previous works. I don't know what subjects he covered with those books, but for the topic at hand, the behind-the-scenes look at the USAAC/USAAF before and during WWII, he does a brilliant job. More on that in a minute.

If you are looking for a book that covers the details of every major air combat in WWII, this is not your book. If you want a book that gives the details of each mission and how it was fought...not your book. If you want a book that ties the details of how the generals fought the war, what they decided to do, how it impacted the overall battles and conflict...this is your book. This book ties together all the details that you never hear when you read the other books...why was Ploesti bombed multiple times at a heavy cost, and what did it really gain us? Why did none of our fighters have the range of our bombers at the start of the war (they could have)? Why did we change from daylight "precision" bombing in Europe to night-time mass attack in Japan (which we disagreed with in Europe)? Why did the Navy control the bombs that the USAAF dropped?

This book covers all that, and does it very well. Given that it doesn't talk about the battles so much as the reasons behind them, it is still very engrossing. Understanding why we did what we did was very enlightening to be able to tie with the knowledge of the specific air battles we fought. Knowing what Arnold, Spaatz and the other generals (and our allies) thought put all the pieces in place. If you want a book that does that, this book is for you.

I also don't agree with the reviewer who claimed that the author "had it in" for specific people. The author covered each person who majorly influenced US air power in WWII pretty well. I feel he respected most of them, but if they had a flaw, he didn't cut them any slack and gloss it over. You get to see what lead each one of them into a position of leadership over the USAAF when WWII kicked off.

Several other reviewers commented that it seemed there was too much general reciting of attacks later in the book (such as when the bombing campaign of Germany began). I didn't find that at all, and if they think this book is bad, they should read some other books where the recitation of each mission becomes very droll after a bit.

If there is a flaw to this book (besides a few very minor items), it is perhaps that he uses generalizations a bit more, but this is a book about the overall impact of the USAAF in WWII, not specific units, people or battles.

At any rate, enjoyed it greatly. Makes a good volume to add to my collection.

We all know the important role of the AAF in WWII, but most books and movies focus on the ground war. The battles in the sky, often involving thousands of aircraft, are hard to imagine in the day of precision bombing that requires but a tiny fraction of aircraft of the campaigns in WWII. From the creation of the AAF, to the horrors of air battles, to the targets destroyed, this book will fill in student of WWII and aviation with an important chapter of history that is unlikely ever to be repeated. Strategic bombing alone didn't win the war, but without it, the cost to the Allies would have been far greater.

It is very difficult to reach a conclusion about the real quality ot this book. Intended to be a general picture of USAAF in WW II, it lacks appendices, a place where much of the lack of information in the book could be informed. It talks very little about the pilots, only about generals, and in some parts it is really a boring reading. On the other side, we must consider the author had only one book to show his point, and he did the best possible.

Thw writer has done a marvellous job, writing the history of USAAF in one volume only, in a modern and acesible language. But there are two serious flaws: 1)there are no apendix, which could include the number of planes built, destroyed in combat, the number of enemy plane shot down, number of enlisted men at end of war, etc, etc.. 2)The photo session is so small, so ridiculous, that it should have been better to have no photos at all.

One of the best books you will find on the Army Air Force prior to and during World War II. This is one of the few authors that doesn't impose his opinions on the reader. He goes out of his way to give both sides of an issue or a personality. Even such controversial figures as Britain's Bernard Montgomery or our own Douglas MacArthur are treated with an even-handedness that is all too rare. Very entertaining and very informative.

Four stars or three stars?? The book is a readable narative that the author doeasn't claim to be definitive. To use military lingo it's written in the "tactical" rather than the "strategic". Not subject matter but writing approach. I would have preferred more policy and less execution. The high level decision making process and those who made them are too quickly skimmed over for my taste. The book tends to bog down in statistics too often. But to cover the entire WW11 air war from the army's standpoint in one book is a daunting task! The book ends up more of a "battle" book and lacks the depth that an exhaustive study would produce. Let's say three and a half stars.

I picked up this book because I was researching my grandfather, who was a B-17 pilot shot down over Switzerland. I looked this up in the book, and immediately found inaccurate information. The author claims that only 10 crews made it to Switzerland in March of 1944, yet when my grandfather was shot down on 18 March 15 other crews were interned by the Swiss on the same day, the highest number in the entire war. The author also claims that many of the bombers landed with little or no damage, insinuating that they were intentionally getting out of the war. This is also false- the AAF conducted an extensive investigation during the war, and found that almost every bomber that landed in Switzerland had extensive damage. I'm not sure where the information in the book came from, but it is incorrect. Any crewman interned in Swizerland could have set the record straight in that regard, and there are plenty of them around who belong to the Swiss Internees Association.