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America and the second world war
美國和第二次世界戰爭
The workshop heroes
車間里的英雄
A tribute to the unsung workers
致敬無名工作者
MacArthur had help engineering victory
麥克阿瑟將軍曾對工程師的勝利作過貢獻
Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers who Turned the Tide in the Second World War.By Paul Kennedy.
工程師的勝利：問題解決者曾扭轉了二戰的局勢
NEARLY 70 years after the second world war and with most of the combatants now dead, a leading historian can praise the Wehrmacht. Not, of course, its evil racism but its military prowess. On the battlefields, writes Paul Kennedy of Yale University, Germany's soldiers earned universal respect for their “capacity to react swiftly and fiercely to an assault on any front”. His superlatives continue to flow. The Wehrmacht possessed a fabulous capacity to recover and strike back; Germany's paratroopers were ultra- competent; the Reich fought with astounding tenacity.
二戰結束近70年后，大部分的參戰者已與世長辭。也許主流的歷史學家會贊揚納粹德國，當然是它英勇的軍隊，而非那邪惡的種族主義。耶魯大學教授保羅肯尼迪寫到，德國士兵因戰場上敏捷的反應能力及勇猛地向前方發起攻勢而贏得普遍尊重。保羅肯尼迪的巔峰之作繼續流傳。納粹德國擁有極好的反應和反擊能力，空降兵相當出色，整個帝國持久作戰的能力也十分驚人。
How then did Germany come to lose the war? The British-born historian strives to avoid reductionism. Unlike others, he says, he does not claim that the Allies' victory can be explained solely by brute force or by a wonder weapon or by some magical decrypting system. There were multiple factors. Some have been exaggerated. Bletchley Park was “certainly far less important” than most of the popular literature about the codebreakers suggests. Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris's determination not to target the enemy's oil, transport and electricity grids but to blast cities instead was, he writes, a “weird panacea”.
德國是如何輸掉這次戰爭的呢？一位英國的歷史學家極力避免還原真相。他說，他不像其他人那樣斷言盟軍的勝利只因為強大的軍事力量或一件神奇的武器或某些神秘的解密系統。盟軍的勝利有多種原因。一些事實被夸大。布萊切利園 （Bletchley Park）當然遠不比關于破譯者自述的那些大量流行著作重要。他寫道，“轟炸機”阿瑟哈里斯的決心不是把目標放在敵人的石油、交通和電網上，而是要炸毀整座城市，“怪異的靈丹妙藥”。
Against this, Mr Kennedy argues, some reasons for the Allies' success deserve much greater emphasis. One of them, the stupendous might of America's military-industrial complex, was recognised at last in Arthur Herman's “Freedom's Forge”, reviewed here last year. Mr Kennedy celebrates another crucial component: the role of engineers. What they invented, improvised and improved had, by 1943, begun to turn the tide against Germany and Japan.
肯尼迪反對道：盟軍勝利有一些更值得強調的原因。其中，美國軍工鐵三角驚人的勢力最終在亞瑟赫爾曼《鑄就自由》一書中被證實，去年本雜志也評論過此事。肯尼迪贊美盟軍勝利的另一個重要因素是：工程師的角色。到1943年，他們的發明、創造和改進開始扭轉抗衡德國和日本的局勢。
By then long-range B-24 Liberator bombers protected convoys of merchant ships crossing the Atlantic; Hedgehog grenades destroyed Grand Admiral Karl D?nitz's U-boats; B-17 Flying Fortress bombers flew from airfields in England deep into Germany and drove the Japanese back in the Pacific; T-34 tanks led the blood-soaked Soviet counter-attack on the Eastern Front; Mustang fighter planes decimated Germany's flying aces.
那時超遠程的B-24“解放者”轟炸機保護商船的護航隊穿過大西洋；“刺猬”手榴彈摧毀德國大海軍上將 Karl Dnitz's的潛艇；B-17空中堡壘轟炸機在英國機場起飛，深入德國內部，穿過日本返回太平洋；蘇聯的血腥武器T-34坦克東線進行反擊；野馬戰斗機摧毀了德國頂尖飛行員。
Mr Kennedy also rescues the engineers of the US Navy Construction Battalions from relative obscurity. Popularly known as the “Seabees”, these were the units that built the bases, the installations, the assembly points and the roads that carried the Allied fight forward. Their achievements more than justify Mr Kennedy's assertion that engineers are essential to military victory. Yet, as he rightly complains, historians of grand campaigns all too often take their work for granted and assume that troops, fleets and air squadrons can be moved long distances by the stroke of a pen on a large map.
肯尼迪還救助過默默無聞的美國海軍建設營的工程師，也就是人們俗稱的“海軍工程營人員”。他們負責建設基地，設備，集散地點和盟軍向前進攻的道路。這些人的成就遠遠足以證明肯尼迪的說法，工程師是軍事勝利的重要部分。然而，正如他抱怨地那樣，研究大事記的歷史學家往往把他們的工作看成是理所當然的，他們認為軍隊、艦隊和空軍中隊可以很容易地移動像在地圖上隨筆一揮那樣長的距離。
Seabee statistics are still amazing. In the Pacific alone they built, in the midst of war, 111 major airstrips and 441 piers, tanks for the storage of 100m gallons of fuel, housing for 1.5m men and hospitals for 70,000 patients. The famous photograph of General Douglas MacArthur fulfilling his “I shall return” promise to the Philippines was possible only after skilful Seabees had managed the pontoon bridges and causeway units that brought the army ashore—along with the photographers, of course.
海軍修建營人員所作成就的數據仍令人驚訝。戰爭年代他們在太平洋孤島上修建了111個主要簡易機場和441個碼頭，存放100加侖燃料的坦克，容納150萬人的住房和容納70,000例病人的醫院。麥克阿瑟將軍對菲律賓承諾“我還要回來”，這張著名的照片可能只有在技術嫻熟的海軍修建營成員成功管理浮筒橋梁和銅鑼單位之后才可能實現。當然是銅鑼單位把軍隊和攝影師一起帶上岸。
Mr Kennedy's best-known book is “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers”and his knowledge of earlier conflicts adds depth and colour to his history of the middle years of the war. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Duke of Marlborough, Napoleon, William Tecumseh Sherman and others march across the pages as Mr Kennedy compares and contrasts their actions with those of their counterparts in 1943-44. And he is able to cite several instances of British-American-Soviet bickering to sustain the Duke of Wellington's grumble that having enemies is nothing like as bad as having allies.
保羅肯尼迪的著作是《大國的興衰》，他早年的斗爭經歷增加了中年戰爭歷史的深度和色彩。此書對亞歷山大大帝、凱撒大帝、馬爾伯勒公爵、拿破侖、威廉特庫姆塞謝爾曼和肯尼迪等人進行了整篇幅的描述，并將他們與同處1943-44年代的對手們進行了對比。威靈頓公爵曾怨言：有敵人一點也不像有盟友那樣糟糕，保羅肯尼迪就此能舉出英、美、蘇聯驗證這句話的幾個實例。
