Engineers of Victory by Paul Kennedy: review In November 1942 an Allied, but mainly American, army came ashore on the beaches of French-occupied North Africa. Their arrival sealed the fate of Rommel's Afrika Korps, which surrendered in Tunisia five months later, and signalled the advent of American power in Europe and the ultimate defeat of the German-Japanese-Italian Axis. Explaining how this was achieved is Paul Kennedy's aim in this lucid and original book. The landings in Algeria paved the way for the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, at which Churchill and Roosevelt and their top military chiefs mapped out their strategy for achieving victory. Kennedy identifies the decisions taken amid the white villas and blue skies of the Moroccan city as the turning point which made the growing probability of Allied triumph a certainty. Kennedy shows how the Casablanca top brass identified five areas where the Allies currently lacked the upper hand. The five "must do" tasks were: finding practical ways to counter the Nazi tactics of Blitzkrieg - the mobile warfare with which they had conquered Europe in 1940; eliminating the U-boat menace to Allied shipping in the Atlantic; gaining total command in the air and knocking out the Luftwaffe; finding a means to land an army on a hostile and heavily defended European shore; and, finally, destroying the apparently invincible power - then at its height - of imperial Japan. Within 18 months - an astonishingly short time, writes Kennedy - all these had either been accomplished or were about to be. The real heroes of his book, however, are not the great warlords who decreed the goals at Casablanca, but the often obscure and humble lieutenants who gave them the means to achieve their grand designs. Men like the bespectacled and unsoldierly looking Major-General Percy Hobart who, derided and demoted for his "eccentric" ideas, such as "funny" tanks that swam and crossed minefields safely, made the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Europe possible; or the convoys of Captain "Johnny" Walker, whose own experience of the maritime mayhem wreaked by German submarines led him to work out how to defeat the U-boats with a coordinated, creeping barrage. By focusing on ideas and inventions like the Superfortress bombers which pounded first Germany and then Japan into defeat, or the Mustang fighters that protected them, Kennedy has produced a fresh perspective on the war, giving us not just another history of an overfamiliar conflict, but a manual of technical problem-solving, written in the clearest and most compelling style, that could still prove useful to modern management today.