GI Ingenuity: Improvisation, Technology, and Winning World War II Book

When I purchased this book I was expecting a good deal of discussion of battlefield improvisation in World War II. Instead, the book focused primarily on the Normandy Campaign of 1944 and, while there are some great accounts of how the lowly dog face did more to win the war than anything else, much of the discussion seems geared toward doctrinal ingenuity. Not to worry though, I've learned that one can choose a book based on one interest and find that they actually enjoyed the book for some other reason and such is the case here.

I don't believe I've ever read an account of the Normandy Campaign written from this perspective before and the only real thing that I found to be lacking was the fact that the book has no maps. Of special interest to me was the extensive discussion of the pre-war U.S. army and the evolution of its training and doctrine from the peacetime 1930s to the war fighting years of World War II.

If you're a student of the Normandy Campaign, you should read this one. If you're a student of how our army evolved from the 16th ranked military in the world in about 1933 to become the greatest fighting force on the planet by 1945, then you'll find this book to be valuable as well. I'm planning to keep my copy as a reference book.

One brief footnote regarding the Stackpole Military History Series in general: The two or three books from this publisher that I have read have been poorly edited to one degree or another. This book, GI Ingenuity wasn't too bad, however Backwater War, about the campaign in Italy, was quite poorly edited; predominantly with misspellings that appear to have been the result of a poor scanning system that replaced like sounding words for the correct words. I presume that the Stackpole series are mostly reprints of previously published works and whatever system they are using to reprint the Stackpole edition is in need of improvement. In any case one can hardly blame the author for this problem but it is a point that should be made.