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Improvisation, Technology, and Winning World War II
Praeger Publishers
August 2006
On Sale: July 30, 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0275986985
EAN: 9780275986988
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
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 history: (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.
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