GI Ingenuity: Improvisation, Technology, and Winning World War II

by James Jay Carafano

World War II saw the first generation of young men that had grown up comfortable with modern industrial technology go into combat. As kids, the GIs had built jalopies in their garage and poured over glossy, full-color issues of Popular Mechanics ; they had read Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century comic books, listened to his adventures on the radio, and watched him pilot rocket ships in the Saturday morning serials at the Bijou. Tinkerers, problem-solvers, risk-takers, and day-dreamers, they were curious and outspoken―a generation well prepared to improvise, innovate, and adapt technology on the battlefield. Since they were also a generation which had unprecedented technology available to them, their ability to innovate with technology proved an immeasurable edge on the field of combat. This book tells their story through the experience of the battle of Normandy, bringing together three disparate brands of (1) military history; (2) the history of science and technology; and (3) social, economic, cultural, and intellectual history. All three historical narratives combine to tell the tale of GI genius and the process by which GI ingenuity became an enduring feature of the American citizen-soldier.

GI Ingenuity is in large part an old-fashioned combat history, with mayhem and mass slaughter at center stage. It tells the story of death and destruction on the killing fields of Normandy, as well as the battlegrounds that provide the prologue and postscript to the transformation of war that occurred in France in 1944. This story of GI ingenuity, moreover, puts the battles in the context of the immense social, economic, scientific, and technological changes that accompanied the evolution of combat in the twentieth century. GI Ingenuity illustrates the great transition of the American genius in battle from an industrial-age army to a postmodern military. And it does it by looking at the place where the transition happened―on the battlefield.

Genres: World War II

288 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2006

Reviews

[TS Allen]

This book is clever and thought-provoking, but its thesis and use of evidence are strange. Rather than providing a theory of military innovation or improvisation, Carafano argues that American GI's in WWII were innovative in a way that is analogous to Clausewitzian "genius" in war. I did not find the argument compelling, and it fails to engage other arguments, especially by political scientists, about how military innovation functions. Carafano also spends far too much time providing a history of the US Army in WWII, and not nearly enough discussing the innovations themselves. He clearly knows the cases, but simply does not provide enough details to interest a serious student of military history. I also found his tendency to 1960s and '70s use war movies as a reference point for the war tedious. In Carafano's writing, if an event was portrayed in a movie, the reference to the movie scene comes first, rather than the historical event. It's odd and distracting.

[M. I.]

When I purchased this book I was expecting a good deal of discussion of battlefield improvisation in World War II. Instead, the book focused primarily on the Normandy Campaign of 1944 and, while there are some great accounts of how the lowly dog face did more to win the war than anything else, much of the discussion seems geared toward doctrinal ingenuity. Not to worry though, I've learned that one can choose a book based on one interest and find that they actually enjoyed the book for some other reason and such is the case here.

I don't believe I've ever read an account of the Normandy Campaign written from this perspective before and the only real thing that I found to be lacking was the fact that the book has no maps. Of special interest to me was the extensive discussion of the pre-war U.S. army and the evolution of its training and doctrine from the peacetime 1930s to the war fighting years of World War II.

If you're a student of the Normandy Campaign, you should read this one. If you're a student of how our army evolved from the 16th ranked military in the world in about 1933 to become the greatest fighting force on the planet by 1945, then you'll find this book to be valuable as well. I'm planning to keep my copy as a reference book.

One brief footnote regarding the Stackpole Military History Series in general: The two or three books from this publisher that I have read have been poorly edited to one degree or another. This book, GI Ingenuity wasn't too bad, however Backwater War, about the campaign in Italy, was quite poorly edited; predominantly with misspellings that appear to have been the result of a poor scanning system that replaced like sounding words for the correct words. I presume that the Stackpole series are mostly reprints of previously published works and whatever system they are using to reprint the Stackpole edition is in need of improvement. In any case one can hardly blame the author for this problem but it is a point that should be made.