America and the second world war
美国和第二次世界战争
The workshop heroes
车间里的英雄
A tribute to the unsung workers
致敬无名工作者
MacArthur had help engineering victory
麦克阿瑟将军曾对工程师的胜利作过贡献
Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers who Turned the Tide in the Second World War.By Paul Kennedy.
工程师的胜利：问题解决者曾扭转了二战的局势
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.
二战结束近70年后，大部分的参战者已与世长辞。也许主流的历史学家会赞扬纳粹德国，当然是它英勇的军队，而非那邪恶的种族主义。耶鲁大学教授保罗肯尼迪写到，德国士兵因战场上敏捷的反应能力及勇猛地向前方发起攻势而赢得普遍尊重。保罗肯尼迪的巅峰之作继续流传。纳粹德国拥有极好的反应和反击能力，空降兵相当出色，整个帝国持久作战的能力也十分惊人。
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”.
德国是如何输掉这次战争的呢？一位英国的历史学家极力避免还原真相。他说，他不像其他人那样断言盟军的胜利只因为强大的军事力量或一件神奇的武器或某些神秘的解密系统。盟军的胜利有多种原因。一些事实被夸大。布莱切利园 （Bletchley Park）当然远不比关于破译者自述的那些大量流行著作重要。他写道，“轰炸机”阿瑟哈里斯的决心不是把目标放在敌人的石油、交通和电网上，而是要炸毁整座城市，“怪异的灵丹妙药”。
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.
肯尼迪反对道：盟军胜利有一些更值得强调的原因。其中，美国军工铁三角惊人的势力最终在亚瑟赫尔曼《铸就自由》一书中被证实，去年本杂志也评论过此事。肯尼迪赞美盟军胜利的另一个重要因素是：工程师的角色。到1943年，他们的发明、创造和改进开始扭转抗衡德国和日本的局势。
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.
那时超远程的B-24“解放者”轰炸机保护商船的护航队穿过大西洋；“刺猬”手榴弹摧毁德国大海军上将 Karl Dnitz's的潜艇；B-17空中堡垒轰炸机在英国机场起飞，深入德国内部，穿过日本返回太平洋；苏联的血腥武器T-34坦克东线进行反击；野马战斗机摧毁了德国顶尖飞行员。
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.
肯尼迪还救助过默默无闻的美国海军建设营的工程师，也就是人们俗称的“海军工程营人员”。他们负责建设基地，设备，集散地点和盟军向前进攻的道路。这些人的成就远远足以证明肯尼迪的说法，工程师是军事胜利的重要部分。然而，正如他抱怨地那样，研究大事记的历史学家往往把他们的工作看成是理所当然的，他们认为军队、舰队和空军中队可以很容易地移动像在地图上随笔一挥那样长的距离。
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.
海军修建营人员所作成就的数据仍令人惊讶。战争年代他们在太平洋孤岛上修建了111个主要简易机场和441个码头，存放100加仑燃料的坦克，容纳150万人的住房和容纳70,000例病人的医院。麦克阿瑟将军对菲律宾承诺“我还要回来”，这张著名的照片可能只有在技术娴熟的海军修建营成员成功管理浮筒桥梁和铜锣单位之后才可能实现。当然是铜锣单位把军队和摄影师一起带上岸。
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.
保罗肯尼迪的著作是《大国的兴衰》，他早年的斗争经历增加了中年战争历史的深度和色彩。此书对亚历山大大帝、凯撒大帝、马尔伯勒公爵、拿破仑、威廉特库姆塞谢尔曼和肯尼迪等人进行了整篇幅的描述，并将他们与同处1943-44年代的对手们进行了对比。威灵顿公爵曾怨言：有敌人一点也不像有盟友那样糟糕，保罗肯尼迪就此能举出英、美、苏联验证这句话的几个实例。 |