“There’s a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II”, by Geoffrey Perret

623 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0394578316

There’s a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II was one fun book to read; author Geoffrey Perret’s wit shines throughout and makes his work entertaining as well as informative. Perret’s purpose is to give a broad overview of the development and growth of the United States Army during the 30’s and 40’s, as well as its remarkable combat performance during the war. It is an amazing story, considering that in the late 1930’s the army consisted of 100,000 poorly equipped soldiers led by superannuated generals and junior officers who had little hope of promotion past the rank of captain during a normal army career. As well as entertaining and informative, it is also well-written. The structure is conceptual, although this works out to being accidently chronological. The parts of the book that are not stories of the battles but instead tell the behind-the-scenes of Army practice are the best: in these we get to see the Army develop under the watchful farsighted eye of Marshall, the book’s true hero. Perret does the best job I have ever read on how the Army stepped back and looked at war as a whole, and when you see just how much innovation took place in the inter-war period, you see how easily we could have lost WWII without it.

The book is run on biography, like all good history. We get to see the personalities behind the events and, in spite of himself, Perret surely has his favorites: Marshall, Truscott, Frederick, Bradley and Ridgway can do no wrong, while MacArthur, Montgomery and Brooke can do no right, and Eisenhower, Patton, Churchill and Roosevelt come in the middle (can’t say as I disagree with his pronouncements, though). The biographies are the first inkling of the big flaw in this book, as Perret is too much a cheerleader for the Army. Compare how he writes about the replacement depot and how Stephen Ambrose writes about them in Citizen Soldiers. The difference is night and day: Perret glosses over flaws, Ambrose is honest about them. It is so blatantly obvious that Perret wants to say that the Army did most everything right, and only when it’s impossible to hide the flaws will he grudgingly admit to them. For all of that, There’s a War to Be Won has instantly become one of my favorite works of history: it takes a fresh approach to the American history history and, instead of repeating the same tired old facts over and over again, explores new areas of behind-the-scenes history and the key decision-making that made the American Army the war-winning machine it eventually became. This work is more about how to design and build a winning army than the war itself, and fills many previous gaps in my knowledge of the war, which is all you can ask for in a history.