-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Kenneth P Werrell, Churchill's American Arsenal: The Partnership behind the Innovations That Won World War Two, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 607–608, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae229
- Share Icon Share
Extract
This is an ambitious book for its scope and depth, as it covers the most important Anglo-American land, sea, and air military technologies of World War II in Europe. Larrie D. Ferreiro examines approximately fifteen varied examples that range from radar to landing craft, broken codes to Liberty ships, penicillin to the atomic bomb. Some of these have already been well covered; others have not. Bringing them together is useful and an accomplishment.
Ferreiro provides the background by summarizing American isolationist foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s. He describes how it gradually changed toward the end of the 1930s with America repealing its neutrality laws, selling munitions and equipment to the rearming Europeans, escorting convoys carrying these exports, and engaging German submarines in the so-called undeclared naval war. The author essentially ends his coverage with the subject's entrance into combat as appropriate, with a brief mention of combat and postwar service, if applicable. The emphasis is on the cooperative development of key Anglo-American technologies in the European war.