It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious landings in June 1944: Normandy was one, Saipan the other. Saipan was about a thousand miles from the nearest Allied forward base, and >3000 miles from Pearl Harbor! All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.
Well they did have radios, telephones and radar as well. The fire control systems of battleships and anti-aircraft guns led to massive advances in distributed analogue computing that provided early insights into human/machine interactions as well as the beginnings of system-level architecting. The Brits during the Battle of Britain exploited telephone networks and switchboards in innovative ways to create a highly fault (bomb) tolerant decentralised command and control system that formed an early version of the sensor-to-shooter kill chains we see today.
Another great (although very dry) book is 'Between Human and Machine - Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics' by David A. Mindell. This goes into the fire control stuff that I mentioned, and describes how one effect of the war was to force together the different groups that were working on analogue computation.
Most Secret War is R V Jones' memoir of his personal involvement in radar, aerial navigation, aerial surveillance etc. in British military intelligence. I read it a long time ago but I don't remember it as a dry read at all - dramatic times after all.
Brian Johnson was involved in writing and producing the BBC documentary and a book. So it's not an earlier version of the same thing. The documentary is on youtube I think - a good watch, but I'd recommend reading Jones' original book.
Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.
[my book with the reference is currently unavailable, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg suggests it might have been Groener, Das Testament des Grafen Schlieffen: Operativ Studien über den Weltkrieg (1929)]
This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could be far better than one that goes to 100%.
https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-bu...