By Chris McNab.
Philadelphia: Casemate, 2023.
ISBN 978-1-63624-386-3. Photographs, Diagrams. Sources.
Pp. xiv, 194. $29.95.
The exploits of U.S. Army engineers during World War II are certainly worthy of serious examination and praise. Chris McNab’s Clearing the Way: U.S. Army Engineers in World War II is an admirable volume, but it does not add much to what has already been published. It mostly consists of very generous (approximately 163 pages) verbatim extracts from five Army engineer field manuals (FMs), and both War Department Pamphlet 21-23, Mines and Booby Traps (1944), and Engineer Field Manual, Engineer Troops, Vol. I (1932). All of these are available online with easy and rapid Google searches, e.g., FM 5-5, Engineer Field Manual: Engineer Troops (1943); FM 21-105, Basic Field Manual: Engineer Soldier’s Handbook (1943); FM 5-10, Engineer Field Manual: Communications, Construction, and Utilities (1940); FM 5-15, Corps of Engineers: Field Fortifications (1944); and FM 5-6, Engineer Field Manual: Operations of Engineer Field Units (1943). In essence, the book is one big engineer field manual sourced from those written in the 1940s. Interestingly, though only occasionally, these passages are interspersed with summarized practices and procedures of German (War Department Intelligence Bulletin, 1942 & 1943) and Japanese engineers (Handbook on Japanese Military Forces, 1944).
McNab informs readers that FM 21-105 details “basic military engineering” to include “constructing field fortifications, applying camouflage, handling explosives, hunting and destroying enemy tanks, assaulting a fortified position, using boats and rafts, handling an engineering truck, and building an airdrome” (p. 29). Further, McNab explains that FM 5-10 sets forth that one “specialist engineer duty” involves “the construction, maintenance, and operation of military railways” (p. 49). Logistics post-D-Day would have been constrained if engineers had not been proficient at “repairing and optimizing the existing road network and…seizing intact or repairing or replacing those blown up” (p. 61).
From time to time, McNab inserts his remarks, which are concise and helpful, particularly the introduction, which provides an overview of Army engineers throughout history. He distinguishes between the engineers’ civil and military roles. He notes that General George Washington appointed the first engineer officers in 1775 (p. viii). Readers learn that the Corps of Engineers was set up as a separate branch of the armed forces in 1802 (p. viii). During the Civil War and the Battle of Fredericksburg, Union engineers constructed a pontoon bridge across the Rappahannock River while under fire, and that this was “the first example in U.S. military history of American troops making a combat water crossing and establishing a beachhead on the other side” (p. x). One of the engineers’ greatest accomplishments was their “central involvement in the construction of the Panama Canal between 1904-1914…Hewing the 50-mile canal, which included building two dams, six sets of locks, two artificial lakes, a regulating works, a telephone and telegraph system, a hydroelectric station, and a railroad, remains one of the greatest civil engineering projects in history” (pp. x-xi).
McNab tells us that 240,000 engineers served in Europe during World War I and produced “200 million feet of lumber, [laid] down 950 miles of standard-gauge rail lines…built 20 million square-feet of storage space, and [erected] barracks sufficient to hold 742,000 men” (p. xi). During World War II, roughly 750,000 troops served with the engineers, approximately twenty percent of whom were African Americans, and, as a whole, suffered 29,000 casualties during the war. McNab also explains that the Manhattan Project would not have been possible without the engineers. By the conflict’s end, the Corps of Engineers had organized itself into eleven divisions: Procurement, Supply, International, Engineering and Development, Military Intelligence, War Plans, Civil Works, Military Construction, Real Estate, Maintenance, and Readjustment (p. 1-2).
Ultimately, McNab’s book is a disappointment. The title leads readers to believe that it would cover specific engineer units and their World War II histories, topics that many readers would be more interested in reading about, rather than a rehash of Army field manuals.
Lieutenant Colonel M. Wesley Clark, JA, USAR-Ret.
Fairfax, Virginia