The Winning Edge: Naval Technology in Action, 1939-1945

This book is an interesting one, drawing together as it does the course of technological change and its interplay with weapons and tactics. It provides a long overdue look at specific naval technology, though many other books have covered the same general area with an emphasis on strategy and tactics.

Written by a British historian and former naval officer (1943–46) on escort service, The Winning Edge is interesting for its emphasis on European naval technology and evolution, normally less emphasized than the American technology that won the war. In Europe the Germans mastered the art of building the new advanced submarines as a way of interdicting the flow of life-giving commerce to Great Britain from her colonies and the United States, though similarly advanced surface craft such as the Bismarck and the Graf von Spee had less impact because they could not become invisible like the submarine.

Kenneth Poolman ties the war in the Pacific to the initial air power struggles in the European theater as well. The advanced Kate torpedo bomber was ironically the product of lessons learned by Japan from Britain’s Blackburn 2 bomber of the 1920s and the torpedo tactics shown them by the British in 1922 (pp. 147–48). Similarly, the British aerial torpedo attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto in September 1940 was carefully reported to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto by none other than aviator Minoru Genda, leader of the Pearl Harbor raid, then assistant air attaché in London (p. 102).

Poolman’s discussion of similar events, such as Britain’s lack of carrier success in Europe and the British overconfidence about ASDIC submarine detection, enhanced my appreciation of the European operations. He also attributes many of the American carrier losses in the Pacific to design flaws that were avoided in the British carriers. However, he is certainly not alone in pointing to other early weaknesses of the American naval operations in the Pacific—flawed torpedoes and igniters, slow, underpowered, if rugged aircraft, and vulnerable torpedo and dive bombers.

Poolman misses or slights at least some American technologies—notably the proximity fuse, which helped to blunt the Japanese assault by kamikazes as American naval forces approached the home islands. Nor does he mention the intelligence gained from the capture of an almost-intact Japanese Zero fighter, found upside down after a crash landing in the Aleutians. Similarly, I missed any emphasis on the development of operations research or the scientific use of technology, such as the advanced theoretical analyses of search tactics by American patrol and attack aircraft during the Battle of the Atlantic.

The Winning Edge contains too little discussion of the interaction between the scientists and engineers who designed weapons and the sailors or aviators who used them. Weapons or technologies seem to emerge in this narrative without much real interaction with engineers or scientists. Yet in actuality it was the report of what sailors lacked that led to significant weapon upgrades. Poolman also mentions many individual users of the weapons, but these names contribute little to our understanding of their use, though they do help to give personal and human dimensions to the enormous conflict.

I also felt that the organization of the book could have been better; technologies were picked up, then dropped, then picked up again in the narrative, making it difficult to follow even the heavily covered Battle of the Atlantic from start to finish, for example. A more unified focus on either describing all the weapons used in a particular campaign or all the campaigns depending on a single weapon would have worked better than the composite approach used. But the insights gained on use of technology more than outweighed any organization problems, and I would add this book to my library unreservedly.