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  • Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War by David Edgerton
  • Andrew Nahum (bio)
Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War. By David Edgerton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii+445. $34.95.

The endpapers of Britain's War Machine (though sadly only in the UK edition) reproduce an intriguing British wartime chart plotting merchant ship sinkings against the phases of the moon. It is a subtle reminder of the scientific assets that Britain was able to deploy in the Second World War, in this case, those of the new science of operational research, which informed tactics for both U-boat hunting and convoy operations. Operational research was to a great extent the brainchild of the notable physicist P. M. S. Blackett, who also was the primary designer of the Royal Air Force's Mark XIV Computing Bomb Sight (manufactured in the United States as the Sperry T-1).While Blackett had a rare talent, in David Edgerton's account such scientific contributions were not unusual. Countless others emanated from a vast array of specialists spread through Britain's factories, defense laboratories, and armed forces, innovating and deploying weapons at an impressive rate.

The assets at Britain's disposal were not just scientific and technical. While conventional myth depicts Britain standing alone before Pearl Harbor, Edgerton instead describes a rich, aggressive, powerful empire with vast economic resources and access to global supplies, one that commanded huge flows of food and equipment through its unmatched merchant navy and the ships of its allies. (Even the famous American Liberty ships, he reminds us, were originally a British concept, designed in Sunderland to have welds rather than rivets.) As a result, Britain was far better fed than its opponents, and, he argues, better armed.

These arguments might have been uncontentious if they had been put forward in the 1950s or early 1960s—the heyday of "new Elizabethanism" when Britain's scientists and technologists were explicitly painted as new adventurers, expanding the bounds of the nation's power and knowledge. But since then, a steady drip-feed of "declinism" has helped erode Britain's belief in its capacity to innovate and has even obscured the continued existence of an accomplished manufacturing sector today. Perhaps the most significant sally in this campaign was Martin Wiener's 1981 English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 which seemed to suggest an almost moral as well as attitudinal failure in an industrial elite bent on transforming itself into a quasi-aristocratic landowner class. But while there were cases of German technical superiority, there were, as Edgerton shows, many cases of British technical and scientific superiority as well—the Spitfire, photoreconnaissance, and the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park, just to name a few. [End Page 209]

So why did the myth (if so it be) of German wartime technical superiority take root? Edgerton has an ingenious and complementary explanation for the widespread belief in Britain's weakness in science and in arms. Britain, he asserts,"was a land of experts who, as part of their lobbying, had produced self-serving accounts which suggested appalling systemic weaknesses and glamorized their own Cassandra-like status, whereas in fact Britain had vast resources with these experts standing in their midst." Their special pleading, he contends, has bequeathed us a misleading "anti-history" of British militarism and technology.

Alongside the internal squabbles about guns, tanks, and jets, Edgerton argues for the deep and, at the time, uncontentious penetration of scientific and technical expertise throughout government, civilian ministries, and the special wartime agencies like the Ministry of Aircraft Production. This analysis, intriguingly, throws Fredrick Lindemann—Lord Cherwell—into new focus. The influence of Lindemann (often described as "the scientific lobe of Churchill's brain") has tended to baffle many analysts, but Edgerton reveals him as much more than a scientific adviser—he was in fact a "super-planner" with a powerful capacity for visualizing production flows, shipping volumes, and statistical information. Moreover, he headed a "private" group of statisticians and economists in the direct service of the prime minister's office. Churchill and Cherwell...

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