Victory designed by committee

摘要

One of the many virtues of Andrew Roberts's new history of grand strategy during the second world war is to vindicate that much maligned British way of doing things: the committee. The author employs a vast range of contemporary dia-ries-as well as newly discovered verbatim accounts of cabinet meetings which reveal what was not in the official minutes-to reconstruct the marathon meetings which, no less than the allies' prodigious resources, ultimately determined the difference between victory and defeat.rnHistorians of Germany will be struck that there was no equivalent process in Hitler's headquarters, where every bad idea went unchallenged by generals who knew better but were cowed by a splenetic maniac. Perhaps that bureaucratic deficit explains why Germany's otherwise superior fighting men (a point Winston Churchill repeatedly acknowledged in private) were defeated by an enemy that was slow to acquire equivalent ferocity and tenacity?