Reviews for GI Ingenuity: Improvisation, Technology, and Winning World War II

The average rating for GI Ingenuity: Improvisation, Technology, and Winning World War II based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-01-19 00:00:00 Jason Mcbride This book is clever and thought-provoking, but its thesis and use of evidence are strange. Rather than providing a theory of military innovation or improvisation, Carafano argues that American GI's in WWII were innovative in a way that is analogous to Clausewitzian "genius" in war. I did not find the argument compelling, and it fails to engage other arguments, especially by political scientists, about how military innovation functions. Carafano also spends far too much time providing a history of the US Army in WWII, and not nearly enough discussing the innovations themselves. He clearly knows the cases, but simply does not provide enough details to interest a serious student of military history. I also found his tendency to 1960s and '70s use war movies as a reference point for the war tedious. In Carafano's writing, if an event was portrayed in a movie, the reference to the movie scene comes first, rather than the historical event. It's odd and distracting.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-16 00:00:00 Amanda Harmes 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.