The Nerds Who Won World War II

Published February 7, 2013 | By Iowadawg

In 1943 the war looked unwinnable for the Allies. Marc Wortman on historian Paul Kennedy’s story of how unsung innovators turned the tide.

“A sniper shooting at you is not science,” a scientist acquaintance who fought for Israel in several wars once said to me. He was, however, a mine remover, à la The Hurt Locker. “A mine is a task. It plays into the scientific mind.”

A big French seaplane flying above a destroyer division preceding a convoy, France’s part in the ceaseless vigilance necessary to defeat the U-boats in France on Nov. 16, 1939. (AP)

Amid the violence, chaos, and terror of war, some people must apply their rational minds to sorting and solving dangerous stumbling blocks like mines. On a larger scale, smart, inventive and diligent engineers behind the lines must draw on data from the battlefield to come up with solutions to myriad problems, many of them completely novel.

In Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, historian, international security authority, and Yale professor Paul Kennedy turns on their heads many standard notions about how the Allies won. He lays out what he deems the five great battlefield challenges the Allies faced in 1943 and early 1944. These were the U-boats lurking along the shipping routes through the North Atlantic, the Nazi fighters waiting for the Allied heavy bombers flying over Europe, the blitzkrieg tactics that had overwhelmed Western Europe and threatened the Soviet Union, the fortified shores of Europe that stood in the way of amphibious invasions, and the ocean separating the American forces’ home base from Japan. He then explains how the behind-the-scenes engineers solved those problems through experiment, ingenuity, and resourcefulness.

Historians have long argued over what wins wars. Economic power to build overwhelming military might is the standard deterministic answer. Exiled French resistance leader Charles de Gaulle said immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into the World War, “Well then, this war is over. Of course, there are more operations, battles and struggles ahead; but … the outcome is no longer in doubt. In this industrial war, nothing can resist the power of American industry.” Tell that to the veterans who came back from Vietnam or to the seemingly unbeatable German Army that massed the greatest land force in human history on the Eastern Front, expecting to welcome Hitler into the Kremlin within six weeks.

Victory, though, obscures just how complicated winning a war is. Nothing remotely like the Allied strategic program in World War II, on such a scale against such powerful foes, had ever been undertaken before in human history. And at the beginning of 1943, things did not look very promising at all for the Allies.

Beyond the danger of imminent Soviet collapse, German U-boats were sinking Allied ships at a horrifying rate—more than 1,600 ships, 7.8 million tons worth of them, in the past year alone. How would the Allies ever retake Europe if they could not even get food, fuel, and weapons to Great Britain?

Read it all at the Daily Beast.

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Can you imagine reading in one of these during a rainstorm?

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Match-Fixing Scandal: How International Football Has Failed

The results of the ongoing international investigation into the fixing of football matches reveal a far-reaching system that has affected hundreds of games. They also show that efforts by UEFA and FIFA to combat match-fixing have been a failure, as have attempts to arrest the scandal’s primary suspect.

Wilson Raj Perumal landed his biggest coup in February of 2011. It was the product of weeks of planning, according to documents from the Finnish public prosecutor’s office. A native of Singapore, Perumal had traveled widely, meeting with soccer officials and arranging a site to stage two international friendlies. According to court documents, he then bribed six referees in order to guarantee the results he wanted.

The two matches, with the Bolivian national team beating Latvia 2:1, the other a 2:2 draw between Estonia and Bulgaria, were played one after the other in the Turkish coastal town of Antalya. And they ended just as Perumal had planned. Of particular note on that day: Every single one of the goals was the result of a penalty.

Read on HERE.

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What Would Leslie Neilson Do? – Gun Control

So Hussein Obama sends out his lackeys in an attempt to disarm Americans –

What would Leslie Nielsen Do? This is Frank Drebin, Police Squad. Throw down your guns, and come on out with your hands up. Or come on out, then throw down your guns, whichever way you wanna do it. Just remember the two key elements here: one, guns to be thrown down; two, come on out!

What would Jack Bauer do? “I have killed two people since midnight, I haven’t slept in over 24 hours. So maybe… maybe you should be a little more afraid of me than you are right

now.”

That was fun, but now back to our regularly broadcast s……… Several articles for your consideration. Each worth the read or I wouldn’t put them here and they lead to my final “what would” question.

Finish reading at the Conservative Blogs Central.

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